Enrico Bracalente In the pages of the weekly newspaper supplement El País Semanal
In the pages of the weekly newspaper supplement El País Semanal, Enrico Bracalente tells of the NeroGiardini production model and of his intention to develop its presence outside Italy, where the brand is known and is the industry leader. The translation is as follows:
NeroGiardini – king of Italian footwear
At the helm of this business enterprise is Enrico Bracalente, a self-made man who promotes the “made in Italy” concept and his production model.
by VIRGINIA COLLERA
photo FEDE SERRA
The past, present and future of the NeroGiardini business enterprise all follow on from one another at Monte San Pietrangeli, a small town located in the hills. Since the post war period the Marche region has developed into the hub of the footwear industry in Italy, and Enrico Bracalente understood straight away that his future would not lie in the fields where his parents worked with such dedication. At the age of fifteen he decided not to continue with his studies to become a cutter and by the time he was 18 years old, by working overtime, he had already saved 3 million lire in the old currency, which he invested in the machinery needed to open, with his brother, a modest workshop in the cellar of the town church. The present NeroGiardini headquarters is located just a few minutes by car from the parish church of Ss. Lorenzo e Biagio – where it all started. The previous site, having become too small, is now an Outlet. “Forty years on we are the leading mid-range footwear brand on the Italian market and a well-known company at European level” sums up 58-year-old Bracalente. Business prospered, new partners joined the company, more and more brands requested the footwear manufactured. “But the first period of difficulty arrived, at the end of the eighties” remembers Bracalente. “An American group that we worked for stopped paying us, without giving any reason. Its orders accounted for20% of our turnover. We were on the brink of bankruptcy”. Self-taught, without any chance of obtaining credit from the banks and no work, Bracalente then took one of the most important decisions in his long entrepreneurial career. “I made my partners a proposal: launch ourselves on the market under our own brand and create a commercial structure to gradually move away from customers who sold our footwear under their own brands”. Season after season, NeroGiardini was finding its way onto the Italian market. “Everything was going smoothly, and so I asked the other two partners to invest in marketing to create a leading brand, to compete in a globalised market and to lead the final consumer into the sales outlet. But no agreement was forthcoming: the partners saw it as a cost rather than an investment”. He was going against the tide and time has proven him right. “Before, there were 4000 manufacturers in the Marche, now only half of these have survived”. The biggest problem in the industry is that the need to invest in marketing has not been understood. In May 1998, Bracalente acquired all the shares of Batam, and since then has had total control of NeroGiardini. The 20 shoe factories throughout the province that work exclusively for the brand produce 3.5 million pairs of women’s, men’s and kid’s shoes, 120,000 belts and 50,000 bags. A new addition for 2008 was the launch of a clothing range, now managed by his son Alessandro. His aim, he emphasises, has always been simple: to buy raw materials, transform them into products and sell them to create employment, real economy, wealth and wellbeing for the country as a whole. This Italian entrepreneur and self-made-man is often quoted in interviews as saying - in conversation with business school students that study the NeroGiardini method – that it is the entrepreneur’s ethical duty to look after the territory where he works. In the nineties, when all the talk was about relocation and China was put forward as the factory of the world, Bracalente took the decision not to move from his native region. “In Italy we are highly specialised, we have veteran workers of great worth and I didn’t want to help to destroy this value that has contributed towards the prosperity of the area. While everyone else decided to relocate, I preferred to reorganise”. An industrial zone near the company headquarters is where the jewels of NeroGiardini can be found: a modern logistic hub of 12,000 square metres. “Inditex is an example for us. It offers a real time service and we, in our own operations, do the same. If an item is successful we can produce it continuously and deliver it to our proprietary shops, to franchises and to multi-brand shops throughout the entire season. This has allowed us to command a greater share of the market.” Bracalente’s ambitious expansion projects were put into perspective by the economic depression of 2008. Until 2011 the company maintained growth – in actual fact that was its best year, with a turnover of 229 million euros – but only a short while later a downturn started being felt. The company had to reorganise itself again. “we changed strategy and decided only to continue working with solvent customers and at the end of 2014 we returned to a 6% growth.” This change of direction also included globalisation. “In 2012 we set ourselves the goal of achieving in future a 50% balance of sales between Italy and, mainly, Europe.” This is the process which the company is involved in at this present time. “We are already well known in Italy. We are a leader. The next step is to strengthen our brand in Europe. We are present in Belgium, Germany, France, UK, Holland and Russia, an important market for us, where we launched our products around ten years ago. We are growing in Spain where we have just opened a shop in Girona and, if all goes well, in the forthcoming years we plan to open more shops in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.” At the Professional Artisan Training School in Fermo, the students, aged between 16 and 18 years old, are proud of their work. They are learning to be shoe production operators on the training courses launched and funded by NeroGiardini. “We plan to double our production output, but in this area we come up against two problems: a generation of professional artisans that was retiring and a generation of youngsters that has only been absorbed by businesses in the industry in recent years because there weren’t any professional schools that could offer training.” But this is history, emphasises Bracalente. “22 young people have just graduated and they all work with us”.
