The Economist this week has two articles on Italian champions. The first is on Italian firms dominating the world of eyewear, describing:
"A cluster of family-controlled firms in the area, such as Safilo, Marcolin, Marchon, and De Rigo, produce the vast majority of the world's sunglasses. Although many Italian firms are struggling to cope with cheap competition from Asia, compounded by the strength of the euro, these eyewear-makers are doing well. The biggest of them, Luxottica, had sales of €4.7 billion ($5.9 billion) last year.....
“Ten years ago, sunglasses were a functional device,” says Andrea Guerra, chief executive of Luxottica, which is more than four times bigger than its nearest rival, Safilo. Nowadays, fashion takes precedence.......
But Mr Guerra attributes Luxottica's success both to the strength of its in-house brands, and to its control of the retailers where they are sold.....
In June Luxottica announced the purchase of another portfolio of brands with the $2.1 billion takeover of Oakley, a California-based maker of sunglasses."
Now the interesting thing about Oakley is that thay have a very simple philosophy
Make wicked cool products
Have fun making wicked, cool products
A maker of ice-cream churns takes a rocky road to world domination
WHETHER cone or cup, soft-serve or gelato, the odds are good that the ice-creams bought by sweltering sight-seers and beach-goers across the northern hemisphere this summer came from machines made by Carpigiani, a private Italian firm....... The firm has won around half of the global market for ice-cream makers, according to Gino Cocchi, its managing director.....operating profits exceeded 20% of its revenues of €130 million ($163m) last year.....
But Carpigiani's success has not always been assured. It stagnated for much of the decade after the death in 1982 of Poerio Carpigiani, a smart marketing man and one of two brothers behind the firm. ...
Mr Cocchi, who was brought in from a sister firm that year, resorted to the sort of overhaul that many struggling Italian companies now face. “We had to relearn the importance of customer-service, of quality and of being ahead of competitors with new products,” he says. He cut costs and simplified the Carpigiani's structure by cutting its 1,000-strong workforce by half. He scrapped television advertising, always an extravagance for a machinery manufacturer. Carpigiani also resorted to outsourcing. Its four factories (two in Italy, one in Spain and one in America), which produced about 40,000 machines last year, are essentially assembly lines, as few parts are made in-house anymore.
The introduction of a system for quality control also helped get Carpigiani back on track. It was the first firm in the business to win ISO9001 certification. A renewed emphasis on research and development was especially important, since poor materials caused many of the firm's problems. Carpigiani's technical department had 10 employees in 1990 when the payroll at its factory and headquarters in Anzola Emilia was 300; it now has 50 out of a payroll of 250. Its Gelato University teaches the nuances of ice-cream making, and collaboration with traditional universities reinforces its internal research. The university in nearby Bologna, for example, is helping it to develop special steels, composites and plastics.....
Cost-cutting, quality control and technical innovation, in turn, have helped Carpigiani fend off cheaper Chinese rivals, many of which have copied its designs. It is even building a new factory in China, to make machines for the local market. Globalisation may have subjected Carpigiani to stiffer competition, but it is also helping to propagate a taste for genuine Italian ice-cream among China's swelling middle class.
What is the theme that runs through both articles? Roberto Verganti has studied Italian producers and writes in HBR:
The products’ originality, aura, and prestige are the outcome of a process that is based in Milan but embraces participants and notions far beyond it. Indeed, the process transcends the discipline of design. What Alessi and its local brethren have devised is nothing less than an engine of innovation. What’s more, although Milan is famous as a center of fashion and high style, the maestros of this process are executives, not artists or artisans. Thus any kind of consumer-goods company, located almost anywhere in the world, could adopt the process.
The theme is that Italian companies are driven by a different philosophy ... neither a "technology push" or "market driven" approach but a design-led one. The companies are orchestrating networks of specialist groups and individuals, orchestrating a process that ensures high quality, unique consumer-value and longer competitive advantage. But they are open with each other, having conversations about "where the word is going" so that they can take what they know, research what they don't know, combine and recombine to create winning products and services that satisfy our material and social needs and our desire for personal growth.
To paraphrase Verganti: we start by thinking about forming new meaning and use our design, technology skills and networks to produce artefacts that catalyse that formation. That Design Journey will take us into unfamiliar territory so our existing tools and techniques might not be the best for traversing the terrain.
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