SIF

The Société industrielle de ferblanterie (SIF) was established in 1899 through the grouping of French tinsmithing businesses. It made household metalware and toys. A surviving SIF-marked miniature washing machine, accompanied by a 1936 catalogue reference, illustrates its line of tin domestic toys. These products reflected the household equipment of the period in reduced form.

In 1909, after a fire destroyed the Montreuil factory of the separate Jouets de Paris company, SIF acquired that business. Jouets de Paris continued to use its own identity under SIF ownership: the marks developed from J de P to JEP around 1928–30. Its Montreuil works produced tinplate toys by cutting, pressing or folding sheet metal, then soldering and hand-painting them. The catalogue range included figures, trains, cars, buses, aircraft, beach toys, toy stoves and domestic sets.

From 1918, lithography increasingly replaced hand painting and stapling replaced soldering. After the First World War, the JEP range concentrated on mechanical and electric trains, model cars and aircraft. In the postwar period, SIF’s toy operation experimented with plastics and die-cast zamac as it faced material shortages, labor costs and competition from plastic toys. The Montreuil factory closed in 1964, and JEP was liquidated in 1968.