New beginning
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Having become a cooperative society and a political object during the summer, the glassmaker who has gone through many difficulties wants to relaunch and move away from its nostalgic image with new ranges.
And now, it all begins for them. Now owners of their factory, the 228 employees of Duralex and their CEO, François Marciano, are launching in earnest, this Monday, September 2, the industrial project that should lead the almost octogenarian French glassmaker towards prosperous horizons, after several decades of financial shocks – the last of which, at the start of summer, almost broke it for good. The press was invited to visit the factory on this back-to-school day, which was not chosen at random: the Duralex know that their greatest wealth, recalled as a must-see by any report and article that focuses on them, lies in the canteen memories that a Gigogne glass and its number printed on the bottom summon up – not to signify an age, but to identify the mold that gave birth to it.
However, this nostalgia also constitutes a weakness: “Since 1997, there has not been a single new product at Duralex,” notes François Marciano, who has already been managing the factory since 2021. Suffice to say, like CFDT union delegate Suliman El Moussaoui, that the cooperative “starts from a blank page”, after a turbulent summer. On July 26, a few hours before the entire country was plunged into the deep end of the Olympic Games, the Orléans commercial court decided to place the fate of Duralex, abandoned by its parent company, Maison française du verre,
