The Duralex reinvention: employee ownership, industrial resilience and the future of French heritage

March 25, 2026

We would like to begin by warmly thanking Duralex and the Arts et Métiers Alumni Association for the invitation and for the initiative of last week’s Journées Usines Ouvertes. Opening the doors of the Duralex factory on rue du Petit-Bois in La Chapelle-Saint-Mesmin, just outside Orléans, is more than a symbolic gesture. Stepping inside, you feel the intensity immediately: furnaces glowing at over a thousand degrees, the sharp smell of heated silica, stacks of freshly tempered glasses still warm to the touch. It is a place where time compresses, where decades of industrial know-how are embedded in gestures that look almost instinctive. Making this visible to the public is not just educational, it is essential.

Today, industrial sovereignty is no longer an abstract policy objective. It has become a lived reality. Over the past few years, Europe has experienced supply chain breakdowns, energy shocks and strategic dependencies that have exposed the fragility of its industrial base. Entire sectors, from chemicals to semiconductors, have had to confront the risks of outsourcing critical production. In France alone, waves of deindustrialisation over the past decades have left scars in entire regions. Preserving and rebuilding industrial capacity is now understood as a matter of economic resilience and political autonomy.

And yet, when you stand inside a factory like Duralex, it becomes clear that sovereignty is not just about infrastructure or capital. It is about people. The employees on the shop floor, many of whom have spent decades in the same plant, carry knowledge that cannot be easily transferred or replicated. In glassmaking, as in many industrial crafts, expertise is partly invisible. It is in the way a furnace is adjusted, in the timing of a process, in the intuition developed over years. These individuals are not interchangeable. They are the company.

This is precisely what was at stake in 2024. After years of mounting pressure, Duralex entered judicial reorganisation in April, weakened by rising energy costs and structural fragilities. What followed was a sequence that now reads almost like a case study in collective mobilisation.

In late spring, as uncertainty grew, employees, unions, management and local stakeholders began working together on an alternative to liquidation. By July 26, 2024, the commercial court of Orléans validated a proposal that few would have considered likely just months earlier: the transformation of Duralex into a SCOP, a société coopérative et participative. This model, still relatively rare at this scale in industry, places employees at the centre of ownership and governance. Each employee-shareholder has a vote, regardless of capital invested, and strategic decisions are taken collectively.

The momentum did not stop there. On August 1, 2024, the new entity was officially created, with approximately 60 percent of employees becoming co-owners of the company. In the months that followed, the turnaround took on a momentum that surprised even observers. Sales surged by more than 300 percent immediately after the announcement of the SCOP, driven by a wave of public support and renewed brand visibility. By autumn, the company launched a citizen investment campaign. Within 48 hours, expressions of interest reached 20 million euros, four times the initial target. By late 2025, several million euros had been raised in just hours, confirming the depth of attachment to the brand, according to L’Express.

Inside the factory, the transformation was just as tangible. Workers who had previously focused solely on production began attending governance meetings, reviewing financial plans and debating strategic priorities. One employee, with over twenty years in the company, described the moment of the court decision as “a shock, then a responsibility.” Another recalled how discussions that once took place behind closed doors were now shared openly, sometimes imperfectly, but always collectively.

The numbers tell part of the story. Around 228 jobs were preserved directly, with hundreds more indirectly linked to the site, according to Le Monde. Revenue, which stood at around 26 million euros in 2024, is expected to rise to over 30 million, even as the company cautiously rebuilds its production capacity, according to CGT data. But the deeper shift is cultural. Governance has moved closer to the ground. Decision making has slowed in some respects, but gained in alignment.

This is where the Duralex story connects to broader European and global trends. In Spain, the Mondragon cooperative has shown that employee ownership can scale across industries, from manufacturing to finance. In Italy, the “workers’ buyout” movement has saved hundreds of small and medium-sized enterprises over the past decades. In the United States, employee stock ownership plans now cover millions of workers, often used as succession tools for retiring founders. Across these different contexts, a common idea emerges: resilience is stronger when ownership is shared.

What makes Duralex particularly powerful is that it sits at the intersection of these trends and a renewed urgency around industrial policy. It is not a startup experimenting with governance. It is an 80-year-old industrial brand, founded in 1945, deeply embedded in everyday life and global markets. Its survival was not guaranteed. Its transformation was not inevitable. It was the result of a deliberate choice to place employees at the centre of the solution.

At VIVACE, this is a conviction we have explored extensively, notably in our work on worker buyouts as a solution for companies in crisis. The lesson we draw is clear. Employee participation should not be a last resort activated under pressure, but a foundational step in how companies are structured and financed. Before turning to financial markets or private investors, there is an opportunity to mobilise the most committed stakeholders any company already has: its employees.

Duralex offers a vivid demonstration of what this can look like in practice. It shows that industrial heritage can be preserved without freezing it, that governance can evolve without losing efficiency and that collective ownership can be a source of strength rather than compromise.

Standing in the factory today, watching molten glass flow into moulds that have shaped generations of everyday objects, the story feels both fragile and solid at once. Fragile, because it came close to disappearing. Solid, because it has been rebuilt on something more enduring than capital alone. Something shared.

And perhaps that is the most important lesson for Europe’s industrial future.

CPM