Frédéric Timbert presents RUBIS, the Origine France Garantie certified industrial scale that he manufactures in Seine-et-Marne. Credit: Frédéric Timbert.
Frédéric Timbert has an effective way of defusing grandiosity: he calls himself a “scale merchant.” The phrase sounds modest. Yet it opens onto a profession that leaves little room for approximation. The baker weighs dough, the fishmonger his goods, the lab its components, the industrial manufacturer its cargo. Before becoming a price, a recipe, or compliance, all value here passes through a measurement.
From Esmans, in Seine-et-Marne, the entrepreneur runs a company he founded with his father in 1990 with eight employees. Timber Productions manufactures, assembles, and distributes weighing equipment. It also imports a large share of its catalog. Timbert does not sidestep this: out of roughly two thousand references, only 15 to 20% are genuinely made in France. The whole point of the man lies in this limitation. For him, Made in France is credible only if it starts by saying what is not.
“ A country that does not know how to measure what it produces loses value,” he sums up. The sentence goes beyond the product without stripping it of its material reality. A scale sets the weight of a batch, the dosage of a mixture, the fairness of a transaction. It does not decide value; it establishes the ground on which it can finally be discussed. Timbert sees in it a form of quiet authority, that of shared proof.
His industrial message therefore rests on a line more demanding than a flag on a package: import without hiding it, manufacture in France when he controls the value chain, then certify what can be certified. RUBIS, the professional scale marketed by La Balance Française, brings this strategy together. The product carries an Origine France Garantie certification. But an industrial SME does not live on symbols or slogans. It lives on customers, subcontractors, trade-offs, and proof. It is on this rougher, more interesting ground that Frédéric Timbert defends his company.
Made in France Starts With An Inventory
Frédéric Timbert’s background does not follow the usual path of an industrial executive. Trained by technical work and the shop floor, he completed his experience in 2006 with INSEAD’s Advanced Management Programme. From this dual culture, he draws no academic turf war. He says he learned the language of technicians on the ground, then at INSEAD the legitimacy and perspective that small businesses sometimes lack when facing large groups.
The Direct Pesage model embodies this hybrid approach. The company presents itself as both a French manufacturer, a distributor, and an importer of selected products. It makes small runs or near-custom products with French partners in electronics, stainless steel, paint, and plastic injection molding. It rounds out the catalog in Europe and Asia when customer demand exceeds its production capacity. This boundary, often blurred in sales communication, Timbert chooses to make visible.
This model rules out flattering shortcuts. Timber Productions is neither an integrated factory that makes every one of its parts on its own, nor a mere trader dressing foreign-made products in a national narrative. Its activity sits between manufacturing, integration, distribution, and service. That complexity could dilute its identity. Timbert, on the contrary, turns it into a rule of conduct: reserve the French promise for the product lines whose design and suppliers he can trace. The honesty of this boundary does not eliminate dependence on imports; it prevents it from becoming a cover-up.
RUBIS gives concrete form to that conviction. La Balance Française states that this model has an Origine France Garantie certification issued by Bureau Veritas under number 6313245. The Origine France Garantie organization indicates that the certification is based on an independent audit, renewed every year, and requires that at least 50% of manufacturing costs be of French origin. Timbert says RUBIS reached 86%. The figure is his; the threshold and the process are documented. That distinction matters: it turns a branding argument into a verifiable claim.
The entrepreneur also knows certification from the inside. He says he served for three years as vice president of the association behind Origine France Garantie, visiting SMEs and advocating with public authorities for a demanding interpretation of “produced in France.” That commitment does not make his speech impartial: Timbert is judge of his own industrial wager and seller of the product that embodies it. But it gives him concrete knowledge of audits, costs, and the trade-offs needed to stay above the threshold. His case is therefore worth reading for what it is: self-interested, yes, but informed by practice.
Institutional recognition gave this work a stage. In January 2020, RUBIS was selected for the first Grande Exposition du Fabriqué en France at the Élysée Palace, where it represented Seine-et-Marne. The photo provided by the entrepreneur shows him talking with Emmanuel Macron around the scale. The image naturally flatters the executive. More than anything, it tells of a small company’s effort to bring a professional object, often seen as ordinary, into the national industrial story.
That story comes into focus in a deeply deindustrialized economy. In a report published in 2020, France Stratégie estimated that French industrial sectors had lost 2.2 million jobs since 1980. Industry’s share of GDP stood at 13.4% in 2018, compared with 25.5% in Germany. The institution also noted the weight of production taxes in location decisions. These figures do not prove all of Timbert’s criticisms. They do show that his shop-floor experience is part of a long-standing, measurable decline.
Obviously, a scale maker alone will not reverse that trajectory. But it does show what reindustrialization means when brought down to the level of an SME: preserving a technical core, splitting production among several subcontractors, absorbing the cost of certification, finding outlets, then passing on skills and professional language. That is where Timbert’s importance lies. He does not propose a grand plan for French industry; he shows the ordinary, sometimes thankless conditions that still make it possible to produce part of its value on home soil.
The entrepreneur does not stop at advocacy. Since our interview, METRIO has taken a visible commercial form: a location in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, a regulatory verification service aimed notably at food businesses, and planned trips by electric scooter. The project he described as an urban adaptation of the trade is now presented as a service brand of Timber Productions. The shift from talk to execution remains the strongest part of his case.
Origine France Garantie, La French Fab, APM, and several business circles round out this journey. They give him connections, but they are not the heart of the portrait. That rests on a more concrete continuity: learning through the shop floor, having craftsmanship recognized, then bringing measurement closer to those who need it. At this scale, Timbert appears less as the abstract spokesperson for reindustrialization than as the stubborn go-between of an industrial know-how.
Interview With Frédéric Timbert
Measuring Means Establishing Common Ground
Pierre-Antoine Tsady: You say a country can also be read through how it measures. What does a scale reveal about a country’s level of organization?
Frédéric Timbert: First, it shows the need for reassurance. Today, we quantify everything, more than yesterday and probably less than tomorrow. An athlete wants to check their weight, an industrial company wants to ship the right volume, a lab wants to get a very precise dosage right. The scale provides a common baseline. Of course, it does not make society speak on its own, but it says something about a country’s level of organization. When you see electronic, connected, precise scales, you also see a computerized country, structured, rigorous in its exchanges.
P.-A.T.: You talk about “metrological authority.” What is lost when that authority is no longer reliable?
F.T.: Commerce starts there: weighing, measuring, making sure you’re not mistaken and that you’re not misleading the other person. If you sell a liter of water without a reliable standard, the whole discussion is already skewed. A fair measurement means you no longer have to fight over the basics. Only then can you talk about price, value, quality. A society that measures badly therefore loses value. The loser is not only the state: it is also the producer, because they no longer know exactly what they are making or what they are earning. The buyer, too, is left in uncertainty.
Making In France Without Masking The Origin
P.-A.T.: Out of two thousand references, only 15 to 20% are actually made in France. Does that proportion weaken your message?
F.T.: No, as long as you’re very clear. That 15 to 20% corresponds to small runs, near-custom work, products we control from A to Z. For those, design, development, and subcontractors are French: electronics, stainless steel, paint, plastic injection molding. The rest, what I can’t do properly here, I buy elsewhere, in Europe or Asia, and I say so. The problem is not importing. The problem is making the customer believe something else.
P.-A.T.: Is Made in France for you an industrial act or a branding language?
F.T.: If you use it only as a marketing angle, you won’t last long. For us, it’s a culture. At the start, I worked with nearby subcontractors because it was simpler, faster, more efficient. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to do Made in France to be in step with the times. It was part of how we produced. Today, of course, it’s also a brand image. But a 100% Made in France company hardly exists, and it would not always make sense. The real question is: how much value do you actually control?
P.-A.T.: What does a certification prove that your word as a manufacturer does not?
F.T.: It removes part of the suspicion. When I presented our products, some buyers would say to me, “You’re just putting a sticker on it.” With certification, you prove it. You do not ask the customer to believe a sales pitch; you show them an audit. For Origine France Garantie, at least 50% of the cost price must be made in France. We were at 86%. That’s clear information for the customer and discipline for the company. It also forces you to be more precise when faced with phrases like “designed in France,” “imagined in France,” or just the blue-white-red flag. If you display an origin, it has to match reality.
P.-A.T.: A professional scale can cost from 30 to 10,000 euros. What explains such a gap?
F.T.: The term covers very broad realities. A bakery scale, for weighing bread, might cost around 300 euros. Mobile weighing, for a pallet jack or forklift, can be around 5,000 euros. A stainless steel, explosion-proof scale for a nuclear site can go up to 10,000 euros. What drives the price is the use, precision, safety, and the environment where the scale will work.
The Shop Floor As A School Of Management
P.-A.T.: What does a leader who came up through the shop floor understand that no management dashboard can teach them?
F.T.: The shop floor mainly gives you a common language with technicians. When you walk in there, even if it’s not yours, you understand what they’re telling you. They’re not feeding you nonsense, because you’ve been through it. I’m not saying the shop floor is better than a top school. Both bring something. But when you develop products, file patents, actually manufacture, that concrete understanding becomes very important.
P.-A.T.: What did INSEAD give you that the field alone would not have taught you?
F.T.: A broader view of the company. The field had taught me the trade. INSEAD taught me to manage differently and to communicate. There I understood that our know-how had its place alongside larger structures. When you run a small company, you can quickly tell yourself you’re less legitimate than the others. You have to learn to position yourself without fear.
P.-A.T.: Why keep a core of eight direct employees?
F.T.: It became a choice. Not all skills need to be in-house. We keep a hard core and we look outside for electronics, drafting, development, and certain expertise. The model built itself over time. I also run my company like a family business: I try to bring everyone along, the way I would have liked to be brought along. In a small structure, you can’t let someone disappear into the org chart.
P.-A.T.: Technical trades remain essential. Why have they nevertheless lost so much prestige?
F.T.: Because for too long they were presented as a path for those who had been left behind. In my day, the technical track was often for the kid who was considered bad at school. That was absurd. A young person passionate about cabinetmaking, welding, or mechanics could be very good, but they weren’t valued. Today, we’re looking for welders and can’t find any. Yet we will always need plumbers, electricians, and people who make things. These jobs use both hands and brain. I take young people as interns every year to show them what a workshop is and how a company lives.
Reindustrializing Without Telling Ourselves Stories
P.-A.T.: What most concretely blocks French reindustrialization?
F.T.: First, we have to keep what we already have. Know-how that leaves doesn’t come back easily, at least not within a generation. Then timing matters enormously. Building a factory in France can take three or four years, with the town hall, architects, permits. Elsewhere, sometimes not far away, it can go much faster. An entrepreneur who wants to invest can’t always wait. There’s also administrative pressure, direct and indirect taxes, regulations piled on top of European regulations. We’ve become a service country. That’s not inevitable, but we need to look at it honestly.
P.-A.T.: Two thousand references: is that industrial strength or the commercial need to cover every use?
F.T.: Almost both, but more the second if we want to be honest. A baker, a lab, and someone weighing semi-trailers are not looking for the same product. That breadth came over time. It makes us useful, but it only makes sense if the strategy stays clear. We have to make what we control, distribute what complements the offer, and say where each product comes from.
P.-A.T.: With METRIO, are you changing professions or adapting weighing to the constraints of the city?
F.T.: It’s an adaptation. The goal remains the same: checking instruments. A price-computing scale, at a butcher shop, deli, or fish market, has to be checked regularly by an approved body. In Paris, transporting standard weights of around 30 kilos by car becomes very complicated: traffic, parking, fines. So the idea is to be closer to customers, based in Paris, and travel by electric scooter. That’s not changing professions. It’s adapting the service to the city.
P.-A.T.: Why does pastry come up so often when you talk about the usefulness of a scale?
F.T.: Because a chef can sometimes work with some instinct, whereas a pastry chef weighs everything. Without a scale, they can’t even properly test a recipe. A few grams change the result. That’s also why young people are interested: they see a product taking shape before their eyes. The scale will remain a tool of the future because precision will always be needed. After that, the question will be where those scales come from and who makes them.
Networks, Transmission, And The Element Of Illusion
P.-A.T.: Do your business networks generate economic action or only peer recognition?
F.T.: First of all, they generate meetings, so they save time. That’s not immediate business. You have to show up, reassure people, know them. After a year or two, it can become very concrete. But you have to stay realistic: if you go to a network twice, you don’t do business by magic. And you also have to know when to move on. When a circle becomes just a club of friends, it no longer pushes you enough.
P.-A.T.: Which entrepreneurs, in your view, have turned their words into action?
F.T.: Arnaud Montebourg made an impression on me. I knew him in the Origine France Garantie environment. You can think whatever you want about politics, but I saw him sell his products and defend his honey, almonds, and olives. I saw him working a booth with his teams. He put his words into action. In a more recent generation, I also think of Frédéric Mazzella or Guillaume Gibault. They are entrepreneurs who fully commit to their idea, in very different sectors, sometimes very difficult ones.
P.-A.T.: Your daughter launched her own brand. What do you pass on from your experience?
F.T.: My daughter Justine launched a golf brand alongside her job. I didn’t give her a ready-made method. I mainly told her: go all the way with your idea. You may be wrong, that’s okay, but don’t stop too soon. That’s entrepreneurship too: move forward, adjust, learn. We don’t just pass on a company or a trade; we pass on a way of seeing things through.
P.-A.T.: What is the blind spot in your own industrial message?
F.T.: I’m not going to contradict what I believe is sincere. But an entrepreneur always moves forward with some degree of illusion. If you don’t have that illusion, you don’t move forward. You know very well that not everything is possible, but aiming high already makes you advance. An entrepreneur is a dreamer, in the best sense of the word. They will sometimes go less far than they imagined, but they will have built something. The blind spot may be believing that everything is possible. But without that belief, you don’t build much.