Billions will be watching as Olympic medallists weep on the winners’ podium next year. But Luc Doublet’s eyes won’t be on the athletes – they’ll be on the flags his company made.

“All kinds of things can go wrong,” he fusses. “A flag mustn’t drag on the ground. It’s supposed to catch the sun when it turns. The colours have to be right, or you have a political incident. There are lots of details, but they all add up.”

The chairman of Doublet SA will be monitoring more than podium flags, however; his firm is sole purveyor of all banners, streamers and buntings, plus the flagpoles and systems that anchor them to the ground, on all 34 Olympic sites, for the 205 nations that will participate. It’s too early to say exactly how many flags that entails, but it’ll be somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000.

The plum contract, signed last December, was the latest in a series of golds for the French firm, which has carried every Olympic bid it has entered, beginning with Grenoble in 1964. Since then, it has decorated Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Turin and Vancouver.

It is the official supplier of the Tour de France and has festooned events such as the World Cup, the Rugby World Cup and the World Athletic Championships. The showpiece, however, remains the Olympics – and with good reason. Until you see the 35,000 items in Doublet SA’s catalogue, you have no idea how many forms a flag can take: there are hoisting flags, car flags, country flags, swallowtail flags, angled flags, hand-waving flags, flags hung on rods, caravanning flags and customised flags. All will fly at the games.

Founded in 1832 as a provider of church ornaments, Doublet SA was bought by Luc Doublet’s grandmother a century later. He bought the firm from his grandparents in 1992, and only recently passed it on to his children. In the interim, he hoisted it to the top of the pole in Europe, via diversification. Today Doublet also produces made-to-measure crowd barriers, stands, stages, podiums, easels, panels and ad banners, even material for polling (as in voting) stations. This range of services, developed down the years, allowed the 65-year-old, who began working at the family concern at 23, to leave his offspring a commercial legacy that covers every aspect of events-based visual communication.

Through it all, he has preserved a unique corporate culture, or counter-culture. For Luc Doublet is a child of the 60s, part of a generation of philosopher-executives marked by a social earthquake and still in search of a different drummer. “We established a special brand of management with special values for the company,” he declares, “more easygoing, more humanist. And these have not changed in 30 years.”

Science-fiction novels helped open his eyes to a changing world. “They convinced me that we had to find ways to use less water and fewer resources, new ways of management, new ways to be humans.” Which is why, he explains, he designed his headquarters in a pyramid shape. “The pyramid represents a finite universe where roof and walls are one,” he says. It’s constructed on three levels, like the company’s organisation. “The inside is open and communicative. In front of the pyramid is a totem, which for me means that technology is nothing more than human beings.”

Counting on transparency to motivate his teams, he opened the company’s computers to everyone, providing access to all information. The New Age focus on human resources successfully crossed generations. The staff of 130 at Avelin, outside Lille – average age 32 – believe that their firm’s participative management style is the muscle behind its success.

For Gaëlle Colaert, communications and marketing director, Doublet SA is “humano- centric; a place where people are the hub of all concerns”. Accessibility to others, as to information, is easy. Departments are not segmented; a free flow of people constantly mingles accounting, production, sales and marketing. “This makes for regular exchange and creativity inside the pyramid,” she adds.

It’s a slightly nonconformist executive ethos that helped lift Doublet SA’s turnover to €35m last year. Roughly half came from exports manufactured in France and the US (originally in San Francisco and then, since 2001, in Denver). After 11 September 2001, the company received an avalanche of orders from a hyper-patriotic America – 100,000 units were sent from France and twice that many from Denver. The group also keeps offices in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Poland and the UK. The last of these opened two years ago in the London suburb of Richmond, and its presence helped capture the Olympics. With an eye on Rio’s 2016 games, Doublet SA is considering the same strategy for Brazil.

Doublet also feels he prevailed in London because of his lifelong interest in ecology as, for the first time, his company was asked to make all products 100% recyclable. Condemning the pollution- intensive constructions at Beijing’s 2008 games, Lord Coe, president of London’s Olympic Committee, called for a cutback of 100,000 tons of CO2 emissions and ordered the 80,000- seat Olympic stadium to be built of recyclable polymers. This example was to be followed, right down to the flags.

Following the dictate was not easy. Flags normally have reinforced eyelets and handles, but such an amalgam was out of the question because, to be recyclable, they had to be made of only one material. The firm experimented for a year before devising its grommet- free Olympic article with no iron, copper or plastic. A single fabric – polyester – also makes them lighter, so they flap more picturesquely.

Luc Doublet told London of his water-based inks, how he uses no solvents, then assured them he could recycle everything at his eco-friendly pyramid after the games, and Lord Coe was sold.

Years earlier, Doublet SA had devised the world’s first digital database for flag colours. Its first version of the Stars and Stripes was sent back by the Americans, who claimed the tones were wrong. It sounds incredible, but at the time there were no universal colour standards. Doublet SA created them. Today it crafts a fresh database for each Olympiad, then suggests tints to every participating country. It proposes ways to hang them, too. Flags in the pool are displayed differently in the stadium, and countries must specify horizontal or vertical presentation. It’s a long process, because each nation must approve.

Of its Olympic triumphs, the company cites the 1996 Atlanta games as a watershed. The firm signed to manage all flags. Then came the bombing in the Centennial Olympic Park, which killed one and injured 111. Atlanta called Chairman Doublet in France, ordering all flags – 800 in 10 venues – at half- mast in two hours. “I answered, ‘We’re in France; how can we do that?’ Being Americans, they said, ‘We don’t care. You signed a contract, do it.’”Overnight the company concocted a way to half-mast the insignias from across the Atlantic.

Doublet SA has been thinking on its feet ever since. “Atlanta taught us to have teams able to react rapidly,” observes Gaëlle Colaerts. Bombs, fortunately, don’t go off every day, but flags routinely get stolen. “It’s important to anticipate the needs of people you work for, so we learned how to remake them quickly.”

Next summer, while Luc Doublet watches his flags, he’ll be crying along with the medallists. “I always do,” he says, “because I’m proud of what we do. And because we’re the planet. We’re a factory with a human part, built on the same Olympic values.”

His generation and the Olympics have this in common at least: sheer size makes each a force to be reckoned with. In 1964, when Doublet SA won its first Olympics, it was known as a local flagpole producer, and the games were hardly the overyhyped mega- happening they are today. Flagmaking – “the world’s first media,” as Doublet calls it – and the planet’s most keenly watched media event have grown up, side by side. It’s an apt match.