Duralex

Duralex began with an experiment in the late 1930s: a steel ball dropped from 1.5 metres onto two glass plates. The first, ordinary glass, shattered. The second, heat-treated at Saint-Gobain's factory in La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin near Orléans, held. That heat-treatment process — heating moulded glass to around 620°C, then cooling it rapidly with cold air — became industrial tempered glass, and the Duralex brand was registered in 1945 to commercialise it as everyday tableware.

Le Gigogne came first, in 1946 — a simple stackable tumbler that became the standard glass in French school canteens. The numbers stamped on the bottom (01 to 50) are mould identifiers, but generations of French schoolchildren used them to guess each other's age at lunch. Le Picardie followed in 1954 with its nine-facet bevelled silhouette, and now sits in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent design collection. Both ranges are still made today, in the same factory, by the same process.

The factory has not had an easy century. Saint-Gobain sold to Bormioli Rocco in 1997, after which Duralex passed through several owners and two periods of receivership, including a near-extinction event in April 2024 when the company entered bankruptcy proceedings for the second time in two decades.

In August 2024, 144 of the factory's workers — 60% of the workforce — formed a Société Coopérative et Participative (SCOP) and collectively bought the business. Duralex is now employee-owned, still operating from the original La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin facility, still using the same tempering process invented there in the 1930s. The glassware is no longer a brand the workers make for someone else; it's a brand the workers own.