Onet Brand Guidelines: Marseille’s Maison Format of 1860 & the Reinier Family

A handling business on the port of Marseille.

Onet traces its history to 1860 and the port of Marseille. The company and French Wikipedia both date its origin to the “Maison Format,” a one-man business founded that year by Alexandre Marius Format to handle goods on the docks; the company says sacks of cargo moving through the port were its first known work, and that it soon also cleaned the city’s wheat mills. La Provence, writing in September 2018, gave the same 1860 starting point on the port.

In 1924 a descendant of the founder, Hippolyte Reinier, took over, and the business became Maison Format H. Reinier, the company says. Working for the railways, it expanded beyond Marseille into Savoie, Languedoc-Roussillon, Lyon and Nice; the company dates its first crane to 1934 and its first forklift trucks to 1944, by which time cleaning had become its main activity. The sources used for this guide do not say how the company operated during the occupation of 1940–1944.

The name came later. The company says Louis Reinier, Hippolyte’s son, joined in 1949 and that in 1950 the cleaning department took the trade name ONET, for “Office Nouveau du Nettoyage”, the new cleaning office, with the slogan “la technique moderne appliquée à la propreté,” modern technique applied to cleanliness. The company dates the creation of Onet SA to 1959, while French Wikipedia gives 1950 for the cleaning department.

A family group with outside partners.

Onet has stayed with the Reinier family while opening its capital at times. The company says a reorganisation in 1986 led to a listing on the Paris Second Marché in June 1987, when a little over 10% of the capital was floated and the family kept more than 87%. On 23 October 2007, by its account, the Reinier family took majority control by buying the shares of Holding Fabre, linked to Paul Fabre, who had led the group with Louis Reinier from 1978, according to French Wikipedia; the investment company FFP and Onet’s managers took minority stakes in the family holding company, Holding Reinier.

The outside partner changed in 2017. The Marseille business site Gomet’ reported on 1 June 2017 that Onet had announced a new minority shareholder, EMZ, which took a seat on the supervisory board of Holding Reinier, replacing FFP, the Peugeot family’s investment company, which had been a shareholder for ten years and had announced in July 2015 that it wished to leave. In September 2018 Emilie de Lombarès, a member of the Reinier family who joined Onet in 2008, became chair of the management board, La Provence reported; the company calls her the seventh generation of the founding family.

Onet grew in trades and countries. The company dates its first foreign subsidiary to Switzerland in 1968, Luxembourg to 1977 and Spain to 1995, and lists purchases of the electronic-security firm TELEM in 1996 and of Comex Nucléaire in 1999; in 1973, under Louis Reinier, it set up Formation Services, a training and job-placement consultancy. In Brazil, the company says, it bought SM21, a Rio de Janeiro multiservice firm, at the end of 2016, then Centro Serviços and Transviva in São Paulo in 2017. In 1999 it formed the European grouping Euroliance with the British group OCS and Germany’s Gegenbauer, the company and French Wikipedia say; the company adds that the grouping became Euroliance Ltd in 2007. French Wikipedia records the sale of its temporary-staffing arm to the GI group in 2021 and of its Swiss facility-management business to Honegger in 2022.

The largest step came in 2024. Gomet’ reported on 10 April 2024 that Onet had completed its purchase of the cleaning, logistics and facility-management activities of ISS in France, after signing a put option in December 2023 and receiving clearance from the French competition authority on 27 March; about 14,000 staff joined, taking the group to about 80,000. The company says it now has an active presence in 10 countries and works in more than 20.

Design and documentation.

Facility-services companies sell work that happens inside other people’s buildings, and the two in this guide describe it in short lists. In a July 2022 release, Atalian grouped its work under five headings: cleaning, security, maintenance and energy management, reception, and catering. EMCOR, a contractor that also maintains buildings, summed up its work in late 2025 with four verbs, saying it would serve customers that “build, power, service and protect facilities and critical infrastructure.”

The people who do the work are the service itself, and staff numbers are among the figures given for both companies. Atalian gave more than 123,000 employees in 35 countries in 2022, and La Tribune de l’Hôtellerie put it at about 63,000 in 15 countries in 2024; English Wikipedia gives EMCOR 40,400 employees in 2024. The photographs of staff at work, the uniforms and the workplace scenes that such companies publish belong to them, and this guide reproduces none of them.

Names matter because a name can tie a company to one service. TFN, the French cleaning firm founded in 1944, renamed itself Atalian in 2009 because, its chief executive told Le Figaro, the old name was too closely associated with cleaning. When Atalian and the British firm Servest formed a joint venture in 2016, it took both names, and Servest’s chief executive told the European Cleaning Journal that a customer should find the same look and feel in an office in London or Frankfurt as in Madrid or Paris.

Ownership can change quickly, as both companies here show, which makes corporate pages on owners and countries, and the annual and sustainability reports that sit beside them, part of how these firms present themselves. EMCOR sold its British business to OCS in December 2025, BIC Magazine reported, and Atalian agreed a recapitalisation with its creditors in June 2026. This guide sets each company’s own account beside dated press and marks what rests on the company’s word.

“Plus proches… plus forts.”

Onet’s identity is built on its age and its city. The company calls itself a family business of more than 150 years that has stayed “fidèle à Marseille,” loyal to Marseille, the cradle of the family, and its group website describes Onet as an engineering and services brand majority-owned by the Reinier family. It writes the name with a registered-trademark sign, Onet®, in its own pages.

Its signature line is “Plus proches… plus forts” — closer, stronger — which the company explains as closeness to clients, often working inside their sites, and the strength that comes from working together. It lists three values, Écoute, Respect and Audace, or listening, respect and daring. The group website separates its trades into named divisions such as Onet Propreté et Services, Onet Sécurité, Onet Logistique and Onet Technologies, the last for nuclear and industrial engineering and services, alongside reception, airport services, training and, since 2026, Onet Facility Management, French Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Onet shows how a long family history and a plain acronym can hold together a group of very different trades. Compare Samsic, the Breton family group in the same French market, and ISS, whose French business Onet bought in 2024. For this guide we use a harbour blue, an ink blue and a limestone with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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