Imbert & Cie of Grasse (a French spa town near Nice, famed for its production of aromatic essences and perfume) was already active as a printer of books and other paper items in the early 1890s. The perfume industry requires the quality printing of labels and this may have been Imbert's door to this field of the business.

On the other side, the hotel business was experiencing a boom at the Cote d'Azur in the late XIX century and the demand for hotel labels boomed with it.

The date of the earliest labels by Imbert & Cie is not known, but the oldest I have in my collection show a design characteristic of the earliest years of the XX century and it is indeed likely that the production may have started around 1900.

There is not a "Imbert Style" as there are Richter or Boutillier styles, but all the early Imbert labels, eclectic as they are, share the same high quality of graphic design and wonderful lithographic rendition.

After WW I, Imbert's production of hotel labels dwindled. The label at right, from 1920, shows the coming of art-deco particularly in the lettering, which may be compared with the art nouveau type in the Richter-inspired label above for the Hotel de l'Europe in Aix. By this time, most of the printer's production was for hotels in Grasse with two noteworthy exceptions, one of which is a series of generic non-lithographic labels done for the hotellerie of Menton, which are the only Imbert labels that are common today.

The second exception is, of course, the fabled bellboy-calling-the-name-of-the-hotel label for the Victoria in Cannes, possibly the most beloved hotel luggage label ever designed. The original Imbert version (at left) is quite rare and probably dates from the mid 1920s. The label was later reprinted by an unknown printer but this more recent and rather common version (with the hotel owner's name "Walsdorff" coming out of the boy's shout) is much inferior in lithographic quality.

Imbert & Cie was still active as a printer during WW II, employing a gifted Swiss lithographer, but no hotel labels of its production are undeniably datable to after the 1920s. Practically all of its lithographic labels are rare and most are desirable collector's items. It goes down in history as the one great printer that could, on quality of design and workmanship, have challenged the supremacy of Richter and Trüb... but never cared to do so!