GAZZOTTI's first 100 years
- Written by Staff
No mere allusion to nostalgia but rather a point of departure for new challenges, this was the spirit in which Gazzotti commemorated its first century of selling wood floors last June 22. The birthday was celebrated along with all the Bologna company’s employees (each and every one!), who were offered a truly special “family lunch”: you certainly don’t get the chance to blow out 100 candles every day. What’s more, not just everyone has passed through two world wars and two economic depressions unscathed, especially when you’ve opted for the path of virtue (where the gate is narrow indeed), transparency, and correctness.
Today, vaunting 120 employees and total sales that have more than tripled in 20 years, the latest gauntlet has been thrown: selling parquet floors to those who - like the Chinese - have become giants thanks to mass standardization.
«We’ve just opened a showroom in Shanghai, and in the next few years we’ll be opening another 14 sales outlets” explains Carlo Comani, the Bologna company’s Managing Director.
“The most widely-copied product in China today is one of our parquet floors, but we’ll be offering a personalized and ecological object of design, and above all, high quality ». On the strength of the results of its Trebbo productive unit, Gazzotti is also betting on the handcrafted production of a small subsidiary in Tuscany, Idee & Parquet. The formula appears to be working, given that after a 14% drop in sales in 2009, the worst year of the crisis, the first 3 months of the company’s 100th year of business have seen a 30% leap in orders. «We’re developing new weapons against the crisis, and proudly celebrating our 100th anniversary in the meantime”, Comani concludes, with two sons now ready to keep the company tradition going, “and if we’ve made it this far, it’s thanks to the experience of the previous four generations before them».