A day spent with Franco Ceccotti as he narrates his family company is a mixture of strong emotions, halfway between freediving and flight. The path through the factory is not a ‘normal’ visit, but a true lesson in cabinetmaking, on how the human hand adapts to machinery and vice versa, on how to choose wood, where to purchase it and why. On how to train the new (cheerful) generations of workers, to guarantee continuity of style and peerless quality. All without breaks. The detail, hundreds of details, seamlessly narrated. Franco Ceccotti produces a flood of words, to paint an overall picture of this company founded in 1956.
In 2018 something happened that could have steered the story of Ceccotti Collezioni in a different direction with respect to the one that was taken: the firm was acquired by Poltrona Frau and became part of the Haworth group, with over 2 billion dollars in sales and over 8000 employees, enormous and plausibly frightening numbers. Industrial logic? Group identity? David and Goliath? Have no fear. Just the opposite.
The strategy of Poltrona Frau – a company focused not by change on the “intelligence of the hands” – moves in the direction of enhancement of the expertise of Ceccotti, a restrained revamping of a reputation gained over the years. The leather of Frau and the fine wood of Ceccotti join forces in a situation of synergy that has immediately met with consensus on the retail scene.
Ceccotti welcomed Massimo Agostini, a manager of the group with experience inside Poltrona Frau and Cappellini, not a commander who watches the time pass from the comfort of an armchair, but someone – as he has stated after 4 years of life in Cascina – who understands that “inside Ceccotti, making is the everyday attitude, and making means entering all the corners of the company in greater depth, to understand the system in order to transform a characteristic into a business opportunity. To know the company and to work within it has meant the gentle insertion, in of a very independent system run by a man who has always ‘called his own shots’ – Franco Ceccotti – of the logics that govern a large Italian corporation, which in turn is part of an American giant.” All without altering the nature of Ceccotti in the slightest.
The numbers produced by this synergy have come rapidly: twice as much production space, doubling of sales and growth in the area of contract, and flagship stores that have passed from 7 to 10 in number. Archimedes might turn over in his grave, but Ceccotti immersed in Poltrona Frau has received an upward thrust. And a very strong one indeed.
