Vetropack Brand Guidelines: A 1911 Saint-Prex Glassworks, the Bülach Jar & Rezon

A glassworks in Saint-Prex, 1911.

Vetropack’s roots are in Saint-Prex, in the canton of Vaud, rather than in the Zurich-area town that now holds its head office. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, whose entry is reproduced in English Wikipedia, and German Wikipedia both say Henri Cornaz opened a glassworks there in 1911 under the name Verrerie S.A. He took over the Semsales glassworks in 1912, which was later folded into Saint-Prex, and in 1917 Verrerie S.A. acquired a majority of the older Glashütte Bülach, founded in 1891, German Wikipedia says.

Bülach gave the group one of its familiar objects. According to German Wikipedia, a preserving jar made there from 1920 carried the Bülach name into villages across Switzerland; the federal government had encouraged its production after a shortage of preserving jars during the First World War. In 1959 Verrerie S.A. bought the Zurich trading house Müller + Krempel, owner of the Wauwil glassworks, and with it, German Wikipedia says, the leading position in Swiss packaging glass.

The name Vetropack arrived in 1966. German Wikipedia says that in that year the three works at Saint-Prex, Bülach and Wauwil, which until then had sold on their own, were given a central sales and management company, Vetropack AG, based in Bülach, and at the same time a shared Vetropack logo was introduced as their trademark. In 1969 the group adopted a holding structure as Vetropack Holding. German Wikipedia now describes it as a Swiss family company listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange, with its administrative head office in Bülach and its legal seat in Saint-Prex, and with the trading firm Müller + Krempel still part of the group.

From three Swiss works to plants across Europe.

The 1970s brought a second job. As single-use glass packaging spread, Vetropack organised the collection of used glass across Switzerland to feed its own furnaces, German Wikipedia says, setting up Vetro-Recycling for the purpose; it was merged into the Swiss operating company in 2009 and continues as a department. A detour into plastics, with film and PET-bottle businesses bought or started in the 1980s, was wound down between 1993 and 1996 so that the group could return to glass.

Growth then came from outside Switzerland. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland lists glassworks bought in Austria in 1986 and 1993, the Czech Republic in 1991, Croatia in 1996, Slovakia in 2002 and Ukraine in 2006. German Wikipedia names the places: Kyjov in southern Moravia, Pöchlarn and Kremsmünster in Austria, Hum na Sutli in Croatia, Nemšová in Slovakia and Hostomel in Ukraine. It adds a works at Trezzano sul Naviglio in Italy, bought in July 2015, and Glass Container Company in Moldova, part of the group since December 2020.

At home the map shrank. Glass-making at Bülach ended in February 2002 after 111 years, German Wikipedia says, and Wauwil had already stopped in the early 1990s. In late March 2024 the group opened a consultation on the future of Saint-Prex, its last Swiss plant; on 14 May 2024 it announced the closure of the works, which employed 182 people, keeping about a dozen recycling jobs, the Swiss broadcaster RSI reported. Production stopped on 26 June 2024, earlier than the planned end of August, Keystone-SDA reported via blue News, with the company citing the condition of the melting furnace and a reduced workforce, and moving production to other group plants.

What those plants make is ordinary packaging in many shapes, colours and sizes. German Wikipedia lists bottles for beer, wine, spirits and soft drinks, along with wide-mouthed jars for the food industry, from preserves and spreads to dairy products.

Design and documentation.

Glass makers sell mainly to builders, carmakers and bottlers rather than to shoppers, and their brand pages are written for those buyers. The material does much of the visual work. Many of the large producers fill their websites and annual reports with photographs of their own float lines, furnaces and forming machines, shot and published the way each company chooses, next to close-ups of finished sheets, windscreens and bottles.

Product pages tend to follow the three big markets. Architectural ranges cover clear and tinted float glass, coated glass for solar control and insulation, laminated glass and mirrors, each usually with a range name and a technical data sheet. Automotive pages describe windscreens, side and roof glass, and glass with heating, acoustic layers or head-up-display areas. Container makers show bottles and jars by capacity, colour and finish, often with catalogue pages of standard shapes for wine, beer, spirits and food.

Colour belongs to the catalogue as much as to the logo. Flat-glass makers publish swatches for body tints and reflective coatings, and packaging makers name their glass colours, such as flint, amber and green, and show the same bottle shape in each. Corporate pages carry a second kind of identity: maps of plants, lists of countries, ownership histories and stock-market listings, which matter in an industry where many groups have grown by buying or merging with other glassworks.

The guides in this group read those public materials: founding records, owners, plants and product families, as the companies and independent sources describe them. The colours and type samples shown here are our own interpretation, not official brand assets, and no product or mark is reproduced.

A shared mark since 1966.

The newest plants show where the group has moved its weight. In October 2023 Vetropack inaugurated a plant at Boffalora sopra Ticino, in the province of Milan, on a disused industrial site; Largo Consumo reported that it is the company’s only production plant in Italy and, by the company’s figure, raises output by 70 percent over the previous glassworks. German Wikipedia says production began moving there from Trezzano in May 2023.

Its signature product of recent years is a lighter bottle. Packaging Journal reported in 2023 that a reusable bottle of thermally tempered lightweight glass, made with the Vetropack Group’s Echovai process, had won the Swiss Packaging Award in the Technology category, together with a special award, after a pilot with the Austrian brewery Mohrenbrauerei; the bottles, it said, were about 30 percent lighter than standard ones. Glass International now reports the thermally strengthened bottle under the name Rezon: on 10 November 2026 it said Rezon had moved from pilot to industrial series production at Pöchlarn in Austria, where it has been made since late summer 2026, and that more than 35 million of the bottles had reached the market. In Austria, it added, a 0.33-litre reusable bottle based on Rezon has been a standard option for brewers since early 2024.

For a design guide, Vetropack shows how a packaging maker can carry a long Swiss glass tradition, from the Bülach preserving jar to a lightweight reusable bottle, under one name and one shared mark introduced in 1966. Compare Glas Trösch, another Swiss glass maker, and Verallia, a container-glass group. For this guide we use an Alpine bottle green, a lake blue and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Vetropack’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.