Potain Brand Guidelines: Faustin Potain’s 1928 La Clayette Workshop and the Tower Crane

A cycle shop, a scaffold link and a workshop in Burgundy.

Potain began in 1928 in La Clayette, a small town in Saône-et-Loire, in southern Burgundy. French Wikipedia’s article on its founder, Faustin Potain, says he grew up in a farming family in nearby Vareilles, left school at twelve, trained as a mason and learned to work metal at the forges of La Clayette after the First World War. In 1926 he opened a cycle shop in the town, and in 1928 he turned it into a company: a workshop making equipment for builders.

The first products were for scaffolding rather than lifting. Around 1929 and 1930, the same article says, Faustin Potain patented a chain link for scaffolds that he called “l’indécrochable,” then launched a mechanical hoist, a hand-cranked winch fixed to the foot of a scaffold. The firm moved to larger premises in the town in 1931 and 1932 and sold its first crane; in 1936 it launched a range of cranes under the name Record.

During the Second World War, French Wikipedia says, Potain worked as a subcontractor for Schneider et Cie, the steel and engineering group at Le Creusot. After the Liberation the business was relaunched on the back of France’s reconstruction, and in 1946 the engineer Jean Noly was brought in to improve the Record cranes.

A vertical mast and a horizontal jib.

The decisive decade was the 1950s. Between 1950 and 1960, French Wikipedia says, a series of inventions led Potain to the tower crane as it is now understood, a vertical mast carrying a horizontal jib, and abroad that layout came to be associated with the Potain name. The company celebrated its 10,000th crane in 1961. New factories followed in the region: Charlieu in 1955, Moulins in 1958, Montceau-les-Mines in 1966, Saint-Nizier-sous-Charlieu in 1967, and Jassans and Villefranche-sur-Saône in 1968. By then the company employed more than 2,000 people. French Wikipedia puts Potain’s share at that time at 60 percent of the French market, 25 percent of the West German market and 30 percent of the British one, and says a cluster of subcontractors making building equipment grew up around its plants.

The company stayed rooted in the countryside where it began. Faustin Potain chose to keep the main factory and the head office in a rural area, French Wikipedia says, and in the 1970s La Clayette, a town of fewer than 3,000 people, counted up to 800 Potain staff across the factory, design offices and administration. Two of the town’s mayors between 1971 and 1989 worked for the company.

By 2001 the range had widened. Cranes Today reported that April that Potain made top-slewing, luffing-jib, flat-top and self-erecting tower cranes, plus special models for dams and other large building projects. It employed about 2,200 people, had sold more than 88,000 cranes, and ran eight factories in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and China; in 2004 the magazine mentioned its plant at Zhangjiagang in China.

Today the cranes are sold through Manitowoc. The company says Potain builds more than 60 types of tower crane: high-capacity top-slewing cranes for infrastructure, luffing-jib cranes for very tall towers, “topless” cranes for crowded city sites, and self-erecting cranes in ranges including Igo, Hup and Evy, which it describes as suited to small construction sites. It pitches the Hup range at residential building.

How crane makers present themselves.

Crane makers present very large machines largely through pictures. Their catalogues and websites lean on a small set of pictures: a tower crane standing over an unfinished skyline, a mobile crane with its telescopic boom fully extended, a crawler crane lifting a turbine section on a wind farm, or a loader crane folded neatly behind a truck cab. The machine itself becomes the logo at a distance, so the paint matters as much as the nameplate.

That is why colour does so much work in this category. Booms and jibs are painted in strong, flat tones, often yellow, red or white, with the maker’s name lettered large along the steel so it can be read from the street. Some makers go as far as naming their colours and applying them across a whole fleet, so that a crane on a distant site can be placed before its lettering can be read.

Closer in, the presentation shifts to the operator. Cab interiors, joysticks, load-moment displays and remote controls appear in brochures alongside outrigger layouts and load charts, with lettering that has to work on a decal, in a manual and on a small screen.

Trade fairs are the other stage. bauma in Munich, ConExpo-Con/Agg in Las Vegas, bauma CONEXPO INDIA and national shows in China and Japan are where new cranes are unveiled, often fully rigged on outdoor stands, and where companies announce acquisitions and new models. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and where its cranes are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family firm, a French group, an American owner.

Potain stayed independent for almost six decades. In 1987 it was bought by the French group Legris Industries, French Wikipedia says. In March 2001 Legris’s board agreed to a binding offer from the American crane maker Manitowoc, Cranes Today reported, and the purchase completed later that year: the International Directory of Company Histories dates it to May 2001, while Potain’s then chief executive, Jean-Yves Bouffault, told Cranes Today in 2004 that it was September 2001. Potain has been part of Manitowoc ever since.

Bouffault, who had joined Potain in 1995, told Cranes Today in May 2001 that Potain had first approached Manitowoc about cooperation two years earlier, that the two product lines did not overlap, and that Manitowoc sold mostly in North America while Potain sold mostly outside it. The magazine added that Terex had pitched for Potain several times, and that Potain’s German factory had once been BKT. Potain then had about 250 dealers worldwide.

The name was kept on purpose. Cranes Today reported in May 2001 that Potain would remain the brand for tower cranes, and quoted Bouffault: “The name is stronger than the turnover.” In 2004 he told the magazine that Potain was “every bit a French company” inside an American group. The historic factory at La Clayette closed in 2010 and the crane-operator training centre there in 2013, French Wikipedia says. In 2018 Manitowoc marked Potain’s 90th anniversary at the Intermat trade fair in Paris, and the Musée du Bâtiment in Moulins held an exhibition on the company’s history.

For a design guide, Potain shows how a founder’s surname can become attached to a type of machine and outlast the founding family’s ownership. Compare Manitowoc, the American group that owns it, and Comansa, another European maker of tower cranes. For this guide we use a dark slate, a stone white and a muted ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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