Slowly please, I'm in a hurry

People on the Move

Marco Boglione and Adriano Moraglio

Slowly please, I’m in a hurry Entrepreneur is cool!

Basic Edizioni

All rights reserved © 2009 Marco Boglione and Adriano Moraglio, Torino Original title «Piano piano che ho fretta» Printed in Torino, Italy Release 1.1.1 English translation by Daniel Monti isbn 978-88-905499-1-5

To our children

FOREWORD A corrispondence

A friendship

Marco and I have known each other for some time. I started to take an interest in him as a journalist when he was filling institutional posts, to be precise from the time he became president of Film Commission and later took up the same post for itp (Investment in Turin and Piedmont), the Agency devoted at the time to attracting foreign investors to Piedmont. When I met him I liked him immediately. Moreover it was clear that he had decided to offer his experience as an entrepreneur to a public body for a set period without seeking any profit whatsoever, profit being the purpose of any entrepreneurial venture.

In spring 2008 I fancied a chat with him again so I set up a meeting. I did not have to interview him for my newspaper or gather information on his group, BasicNet, owner of the famous Kappa, Robe di Kappa, Jesus Jeans, Superga, K-Way brands. The last time I had seen him it had been at a jazz evening I had organized: he attended with his “wife” Stella (I’ll explain the meaning of the inverted commas later). I told him I loved pizza and he invited me to that extraordinary pizzeria known as Fratelli La Cozza, behind BasicNet’s headquarters in Torino, under the very roof that saw the dawn of local industrial activity in 1916, when Abramo Vitale – a second name that will play a fundamental part in Marco Boglione’s existence – established Società Anonima Calzificio Torinese.

We sat at a table on the balcony in the pizzeria’s huge open space, dined and talked at length.

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After a time I felt the need to resume that conversation. No need to say that we did so in front of a pizza at Fratelli La Cozza’s. It was there that Marco told me that at the next board meeting he would put forward an unusual proposition that I thought was extraordinary.

He said things were going well and that to mark BasicNet’s 25 years in business, although it started as Football Sport Merchandise, he would have liked to give all the group’s employees a bonus, a month’s extra pay and added he would put forward approximately one million euros. After careful evaluation of the significance of that decision I realized the man facing me had a completely new, or rather quite revolutionary concept of his activity as an entrepreneur. He said: «We went through difficult years, also as far as the mood went, everyone grinned and bore it and nobody complained; now things are going much better and it looks like the worst is over; the top management and shareholders are a lot more comfortable. It would be a real shame if BasicNet was a company where when it is time to cry everyone cries and when it is time to laugh only a few do so».

As we dined I pitched the idea of writing his story. He did not say yes but said he liked me and that he would consider it. So here I am now, waiting for him in his boardroom, a strange but elegant room, with microphones screwed into the ceiling instead of resting on the table top. Resting on other tables along the walls are picture books, bottles of mineral water, military statues from China, three-colour Superga plimsolls (from toddler to adult sizes). On a wall there are three huge photographs: the beautiful woman’s bottom in denim hot pants that caused a scandal in the 70s making the Jesus Jeans brand famous; Moreno Torricelli wearing a tracksuit sporting the Kappa logo; between these two the third shows a man and a woman locked in a sensual embrace, an image from a 70s Kappa campaign.

The room opens on the inner yard of the BasicNet village with its outlet, gigaStore, supermarket, a bar with its walls covered in old photographs of Maglificio Calzificio Torinese’s factory, a Superga outlet, a Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena branch, a laundrette, a travel agent’s, a multistore car park and, of course, Fratelli La Cozza’s pizzeria. The yard also leads to the main entrance to this

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mini mall with an old sentry box on corso Regio Parco. I wait: I entered the building from the main entrance on a square named after Boglione’s great master Maurizio Vitale.

Marco opens the door from his office and after greeting me with his usual warmth he sits at the table and starts telling me about himself.

This happened repeatedly over a period of time. I wrote down pages and pages taking notes, mostly without talking, putting everything together later but keeping faithful to what I had heard. That’s what a reporter does: the chosen character should do the talking, not the reporter‌ Marco later went over the story, adding to it, correcting and rewriting it with the precious help of his irreplaceable secretary Roberta.

Finally I went over the story again, including my own words. So here is the result of our meetings and of all this work. With friendship.

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PART I What we care about

The trail

When I was a child for a while I dreamed about becoming the President of the u.s. I was five or six years old and was besotted by John Fitzgerald Kennedy and all his family. I told myself: «That’s what I’ll do when I grow up». But when I was around ten I heard on the news that Henry Kissinger (who was at the time National Security Advisor and among the most powerful politicians in the world) would never be President of the usa because he had been born in Germany. Thus, I realized I had to abandon my plan: there was nothing for it, not a chance in the world. I immediately changed aspiration and went for Formula 1 pilot, but had to abandon this project too. In those days pilots were often victims of fatal accidents and it was exactly at that time that I lost two of my heroes – Jim Clark and Lorenzo Bandini –, but that was not the reason why I had to give up.

The fact is I soon realized you could be successful only if you had a sponsor or your family was already in the trade.

That was not my case, but for a long time I continued in secret to pretend I was a Formula 1 pilot, especially when driving.

Soon I came to think I could become an entrepreneur.

But the idea came and went. My family was sympathetic towards my projects; but obviously I was not taken seriously.

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For a while I focused on another great passion of mine exciting my imagination, photography; at the same time I was busy getting through my education, and not without problems, thanks to my creativity and lust for life, to the point that half way through college I asked to be put into boarding school.

At the Istituto Filippin in Paderno del Grappa, far from home, I met one of those good teachers who make a difference in life. The suggestion, clear cut and without appeal was: «Do your duty here so you may in later life do all the things you believe in». But this is a tale that deserves to be told properly.

In the meantime I have to say that at one stage, after college, I was about to give up. That’s right, Adriano, I almost did. That is, I was about to ignore my dreams. I followed my family’s advice and enrolled in University to study the subject which least reflected my aptitude and expectations: Engineering. So I would never be a photographer nor a doctor, my latest ruse to avoid studying to be a naval engineer, my father’s ambition. Luckily I soon managed to escape that daunting nightmare that drove me to feeling I was no use to anyone, including myself, a state of mind I hate.

That was maybe the saddest year and a half of my life.

Fortunately it was then that I met Maurizio Vitale. From that moment on I would live ten extraordinary years, full of enthusiasm, passion and cheer in the company the a marvellous person and entrepreneur like Maurizio was.

Now, after ups and downs, like the captain of a ship stopping in a harbour just long enough for maintenance and supplies, sailing from one shore to the next, here I am. Maybe just half way through my first trip around the world. Hoping and wishing I may travel many more miles, my spirit inside me urging me to get out there and travel more, facing further uncertainty. With a statistically high chance of being, in the end, swallowed by the waves, sud-

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denly losing everything I have earned in my first fifty years and that, like many people keep reminding me, I have every right of enjoying by taking less risks.

I want to understand what has happened up to now. And while I try to understand it I’m going to tell you about it too, Adriano. Why do I not want to keep safe in the harbour? Why have I travelled all those miles? Why do I want to carry on challenging myself risking an injury when my needs are few and I have enough money to satisfy them?

Because as a child I wanted to be a good boy. I wanted to grow up, respected and satisfied, I wanted a family, I wanted to be useful and carry out this extraordinary experience we call life with honour. Because nothing is worse than realizing you did something poorly and being unable to go back. Because I want to avoid at all costs having to say to myself «I’m sorry». This was the drive behind my decisions and my attitude. And I believe that in the end all boys want what I have lived up to now. All children dream of being good boys. That is, good men.

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To the young

Dear Adriano, before I get down to the business of telling the story of my life I have to explain why I have decided to satisfy your curiosity. What my intentions are. What I want is to make the young want to become entrepreneurs.

Let it be clear from the start: I have no intention of being self-referential. I do not wish to celebrate anniversaries or successes: I just want to try to convince my readers that my job is amazing. For some time now I have felt the growing need to dispute the platitudes used to present entrepreneurs through a kaleidoscope of political, moral and media-related interests of every kind. The end result is that from childhood the majority of our youth dreams of becoming football players or models and very few, too few, dream of opening companies, making them grow and becoming leaders in the world of business. And I believe that all this has catastrophic consequences for the economy and the social progress of our country.

I have been told many times that I am a “different� entrepreneur and this is one of the few things I find a little irritating. I think entrepreneurs as such are all the same: they are all people pursuing a dream or, in what appears to be a completely irresponsible fashion, face incredible risks with the enthusiasm of children dreaming they will

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one day play for a great football team, win a golden football and the Champions League. Sadly in our neck of the woods entrepreneurs are not seen through these eyes at the moment. Rather, if you ask people what they think of the “category”, the result is disheartening. Entrepreneurs are seen as people living off their position, who would do anything for money, and exploit others. And if that was not enough they are always dreary and only think about their own interest. Incredible…

Yet that is what the vast majority thinks and, as I was saying, this profession is virtually absent from the list of ambitions of the young although it should be at the top, also in the interest of all western societies.

Undoubtedly this is a problem concerning everyone: schools, churches, political parties, the media, but above all, families. Children start to dream at home, when they are very small, and that’s where a process should occur that is the exact opposite of what is happening in most cases today: their imagination should be supported, their natural inclination towards dreaming of a successful life should be encouraged, obviously highlighting the risks that have to be faced to achieve it. The entrepreneur should be included among the noble and deserving prospects children are made to consider.

I was lucky because that is exactly what happened to me and in this respect I consider myself to have been privileged. Of course to become what I am I had to work hard and luck also played a part, but getting here has not been a stroll in the park. If I had grown up in the same social, school, and family environment of many of my friends – dreaming of a job for life, avoiding being exploited, never taking any risks, and exposed to temptation by alternative social models to the free market economy and capitalism – I would have probably never even tried to become an entrepreneur.

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So this is what I am most interested in: convincing the young that dreams can also become true. Having stated that, let’s immediately deal with an alibi I often hear among the young and the not so young: «It is better not to dream to avoid risking the bitter disappointment of failure». Such an unnatural and absurd alibi may even drive people to apathy. Of course, I do understand: thinking that dreams can become true means accepting the risk that they might not, because embarking on a venture – whether it be in life or in business – always implies a multiplicity of factors some of which do not depend from us. What is more, when someone tries to do something no one else has done before, more often than not a chorus of voices starts warning him that his idea is wrong and it will not lead him anywhere. And because you are not an alien or a madman you listen to advice but still want to act. I have been in this situation quite often. Many times I wondered what to do when it was not my own intelligence telling me that what I wanted to do might not happen.

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The risk of endeavour

The main problem lies on the majority of people who thinks of undertaking a venture only when they see great probabilities of success. On the other hand, I have always done things which at first, at least according to others, had very little chance of getting anywhere. But if this is the starting point, because the risk factor is high, it is necessary to act with maximum motivation and energy. So this much is obvious: under these conditions the onset is always rather dubious.

Uncertainty derives from the fact that you start off and you are almost sure you will not get any results. But let it be crystal clear: almost sure. If I think about it this is the point of view from which I approached reality in my life as an entrepreneur. This is my experience: to act differently would mean to exclude from a business venture that element of destiny which is independent of you and that, on the contrary, really must be considered as added value.

As an example: if someone buys a lottery ticket, why does he do it? Because he thinks he has at least a possibility in a billion of winning. He knows that he will almost certainly lose, but he cannot exclude a priori that the dream of winning could come true. It is at this level that the mechanism we call discerning capacity comes into play: discerning be-

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tween battles that can be won, even if there are very few possibilities, and battles that will surely end in defeat. The moment you are evaluating this issue is the moment when you are alone. But if you get used to doing things for their own sake, because you believe they can become a reality, that is good, you are on the right track. It is a bit like challenging fate by provoking it and almost playing against it.

There is a statement the writer Marguerite Yourcenar, in her Memoirs of Hadrian, ascribes to the great Roman emperor who was also a philosopher: «I wanted to find the joint where our will is coupled to destiny». That is it, I can fully identify with that.

Some will say I talk like this because things went well.

They will think about BasicNet’s great and small achievements and of its brands (Kappa, Robe di Kappa, Jesus Jeans, K-Way, Superga); to past successes on the Stock Exchange; to the conversion of an old factory covering 20.000 square meters – that everyone wanted to knock down to build apartments – and that instead has been made into a poly-functional, modern, fun and profitable Village. They will think of the wealth and harmony in my family. But trust me Adriano, every entrepreneur can vouch for the fact that some days everything is hunky dory and other days are simply a disaster. There are moments when you are almost overwhelmed by setbacks, when certainties are shaken, when you seriously start thinking how to save your “passengers”, while reason is telling you that just one more wave will sink the ship. This has happened to me many times: you can also tell the situation is critical by the faces of those you pass in a corridor, looking at you like you’re a dead man walking.

This is when the world falls into three categories. Those that shaking their heads pretend to be sad but let you understand that they had warned you («I did tell you…»).

Those who are sincerely sorry, do not really understand

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what is happening to you but still try to cheer you up; how lovely! And finally those who know you well, love you and really encourage you, reminding you that since you believed in everything you did, failure will not be that much of a tragedy. Like it is, deep down, for a loyal and brave soldier who does not make it back from the frontlines. I received a great teaching along these lines when I was seventeen and my grandfather on my mother’s side died; my mother read us the different wills he had written during his life. He had fought in both world wars (as a volunteer in ww2 as he had been seriously wounded in ww1). My mother was born in 1927 so when he was at the front she was an adolescent.

I was especially struck by a passage dedicated to his only daughter: «If I don’t return do not cry for me. I am happy because I died for something I believed in with all my heart, exactly like I love you. Italy». As if to say: a ship is safe in a harbour but that is not what it was built for.

What then? Then we have to do things with all the drive and will possible, even if reason tells us that particular enterprise will succeed only thanks to an extraordinary stroke of luck. The fact remains, that one must always act as if the objective has to be achieved at all costs. This is a virtue you cannot buy and that cannot be achieved through study. It is something innate you have inside but that can be much improved by observing others.

I am more and more convinced that the best teachers are those you learn from without them ever teaching you anything. In this sense I have had some extraordinary ones in my life. I will list them immediately: my nanny, «la signorina»; my mother; Brother Roberto Sitia; later my friend Maurizio Vitale and Gianluigi Gabetti. These are the people from whom I have learned what I have stated up to now: knowing how to do things in ways different to what is the common understanding; the value of reasoning autonomously.

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Until something stays inside the mind that grasped or conceived it, it will just remain pure fantasy and as time goes by it will slowly turn into what is commonly known as «mental masturbation». But if it takes on form, then…

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PART II Where an entrepreneur is born

The origins

I was born on 9 May 1956, the third of three sons in a bourgeois, upper middle-class family from Torino. I soon felt the consequences of the economic boom of the 60s.

And I also vividly remember the end of that decade, when things started getting complicated.

I had the luck of living in a perfect family, and I say that without any fear of exaggerating. It was perfect in the sense that it was that much different from the stereotypes of the time thanks, above all, to my mother’s character and personality. If I now think of our mother (I say this because it was the same for my brothers, respectively four and eight years older than me), I have to acknowledge that she was the link between that world and the future; this made a difference to the education we received, and this in turn was crucial in a context which, for obvious reasons, was prone to conservatism.

To be more precise, our family was not at all unconventional, but our mother’s character, personality and experience gave us that extra push and in the end all three of us brothers ended up doing the same job, the entrepreneur, although in different fields, with a very different approach, but with similar results. And that is because our starting point was the same, that jolt of adrenaline our mother

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knew how to convey telling us we had to make a position for ourselves, rely on ourselves, never waste time crying over things gone wrong, see life as a climb towards something beautiful, serious, to be undertaken with care and not to be taken superficially. It is by no chance that my first years were rather difficult. I discovered I was dyslexic very late.

That is right, Adriano, reading is for me an excruciating chore. I can make an amazing number of spelling mistakes no matter how many times I check what I have just written. In school essays were my worst nightmare; however great my reasoning was, it was studded with trivial spelling mistakes, inverted or substituted letters, the «h» after the «a» instead of before and so on. I have no problem admitting that in my work I have been saved by automatic spellcheck functions.

In those days the school system gave zero attention to that kind of problem. Children suffering from this disorder ended up being classed as “bad” because they were not very good in school, they were restless, and they inverted letters when reading. The Brothers of the Istituto San Giuseppe in Torino suggested I retired from my first year in primary school and so it was. I could have failed and I might as well be spared the humiliation. I was saved by a marvellous suburban state school a few hundred yards from where we lived. My teacher taught a class with pupils of different ages; two of them were her own children and it even happened that there were just five of us.

I spent five wonderful years in this new school. The schoolmate I was closest to was called Walter and we are still friends today.

At the time the other most important person in my life was my grandfather on my mother’s side. I loved spending time with him: he was a passionate model maker and his standards stemmed from the workshop and the mountains.

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For everything else he patiently let himself be managed by his wife and daughter. He was a model train enthusiast and he could fix anything. His gifts for Christmas and birthdays consisted in drills, electric saws and toolboxes. I still have and use many of those tools. Among the people close to me in those years I also remember my nanny, a girl from Tremoli. After the war she had been sent to a convent for financial reasons, but since she did not have the calling she left to work as a nanny. She kept telling me that when I grew up I would be made Pope because I was beautiful and bright. But the prospect did not enthuse me at all because I already knew then that priests are not allowed to marry, so I told myself that it was much better to be the President of the u.s.

There were also my two grandmothers, very much present and immensely different one from the other. Unfortunately my mother was sick; she had been diagnosed with a cancer she did not have and had undergone surgery. The operation went horribly wrong and the doctors – unbelievably – hoped she would die so her death could be put down to her illness and not to a terrible story of malpractice that would deserve its own book written about it. The prospect of losing her made my father desperate and pushed him to a very brave but risky course of action, which was unusual for him. Against the advice of all the top medical brass in Torino, all siding with the doctor responsible for that disaster, he had my mother transferred to Genoa under his own responsibility, after she was given just a few hours to live. Here Edmondo Malan, a great man, a gentleman, and a world-famous cardiovascular surgeon who had no ties with the medical establishment in Torino, successfully attempted a very complex operation to repair the havoc carried out on my mother by cutting through her femoral artery and femoral nerve during a mundane, and moreover needless, operation to remove her uterus.

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Mother returned home after a few months, but despite her grit it took her years to be able to lead an almost normal life. This is the first time of my life I can recall clearly. Many episodes come back to mind with extreme ease: my days in school, time spent with my grandparents, long chats with my nanny, talking while pretending we were grown-ups with my friend Walter. I am always surprised how lucid and focused my memories are starting from the time of my mother’s sickness.

There are two particular snapshots of my early childhood which have stuck in my mind. The first has to be the first milestone of my conscious memory because it all starts there. I was very little, just under two years old, I believe. It was springtime. We lived in San Vito, Torino, in a beautiful villa Mum and Dad had built in the year I was born.

The house stood on a plot of land owned by my mother’s family, and she had quite a few cousins. Some lived inside old Villa Nina, an 18th century building bought by my mother’s grandfather in the early 1900s, thus named in honour of his wife. Others had built houses on the villa’s grounds. So we lived in a sort of community with cousins of all ages.

At the time I was the youngest. Well, one day, as was customary, it was decided to take a group walk to the fountain. There were many council fountains providing excellent service to the hills – elegant cast iron pillars painted green with a bull’s head at the top, horns and all, constantly spouting fresh water from its mouth. I was in a pram held

by Francesco, my older brother who was about ten, under the vigilant gaze of «la signorina».

The road was downhill and I can clearly picture many happy children all talking at the same time. When we were approaching the fountain Francesco as a prank let go of the pram and obviously it accelerated. I experienced a sense of void before someone stopped it. Those few mo-

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ments of terror are impressed in my memory and are the first conscious moment of my presence on Earth. Luckily the horror of those moments soon vanished thanks to the children’s delighted squeals and the sound of our nanny’s voice telling Francesco off.

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A tantrum, a fish, and my first contract

The other snapshot of my childhood engraved into my memory is from the time of my mother’s sickness. She was convinced she would not survive for long and maybe because of this she became very present and indulgent with me. In April 1962 we spent two weeks together at the Eden boarding house in Alassio. She was going to undergo her operation on our return so she wanted to spend some time alone with me, fearing that with me being so little I might not remember anything about her if things did not go well.

One day I asked her to take me fishing at the harbour. She immediately bought me a fishing rod and since the same shop sold small cameras she also bought me one of those.

We went to the harbour where she managed to convince a sailor to help her take the back seat out of her fiat 600 and soon enough the “young master” was comfortably seated on the quay waiting for the fish that naturally never came. At the end of the morning I firmly refused to give up. I wanted a photograph with a catch and it also had to be taken with my new camera. On that occasion my capricious behaviour knew no limits and it only ended after we bought a nice fish at the fishmongers and took a snap of it hanging from my fishing rod with my new camera.

For years I was tormented by guilt for my behaviour but

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I’ll never forget the feeling of satisfaction still quite clear from the smile on my face in the photograph.

In spring 1966, during my fourth year in Primary School, something occurred which is relevant to my story: my first entrepreneurial whimper. One Sunday afternoon while I was playing in the street with my friend Walter and some other kids I did something quite foolish which could have cost me dearly. While improperly handling a not very toylike blank-firing hand gun – in those days the issue of toy safety had hardly been raised – I fired a shot and the resulting flare ended up straight into my eyes causing severe injury. It was a serious accident and I had to spend a month at the Ophthalmic Hospital – two weeks completely blindfolded – and undergo three or four operations to remove all traces of gun powder. To help me pass all the time I had to spend in the dark, Mimma, that is how we called Grandma Angelica, Mum‘s mother, taught me crochet. In very little time I learned chain stitch and started making hot pads and selling them to the relatives and friends who came to see me. The price was 500 lire each. In the end I was making a dozen a day. In those days 5 or 6.000 lire a day was a fortune, and not only for a child; a fiat 500 cost 500.000 lire and in a month I almost made 150.000!

There were so many of those hot pads that some can still be found in family homes. Working helped me a lot and maybe that was when I got a taste for it.

After Primary School I tried my academic fortune once more enrolling for High School at Istituto San Giuseppe.

It was then that I became aware of a problem I had not, up to then, considered as such, rather it had been for me a kind of privilege. I knew I suffered from congenital heart murmur but I was very proud about it because everyone talked about it, and it also dispensed me from carrying out any kind of chore for my parents involving going up and down the stairs because I could not tire myself out. My

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brothers were rather less thrilled because, lacking an alibi, they had to cover for me too, despite themselves. I could not afford getting as tired as my peers either (this included games), a restriction compensated by other advantages such as receiving a moped very early instead of a bicycle.

Since we lived in the hills my mother was terrified at the thought I might ride a bike uphill and push my body beyond the limits it could, in theory, endure. Realistically it was very difficult to observe absolute bans: it was virtually impossible not to follow my friends on my bicycle. Some kind of extra motivation was needed so one evening Mum played her last card: «If you promise not to ride a bicycle anymore I’ll buy you a moped in spring». The offer was so tempting my first concern was that she could change her mind. I remember I immediately went to my room, took a sheet of paper and wrote as a heading «Contract». They were just a few lines but very clear: «If Marco Boglione will not touch a bicycle until his next birthday on 9 May 1967, Anna Boglione will buy him a moped». So I took that “document” to my mother and asked her to sign it, which she did with an amused smile. I put my bicycle in the garage and did not touch one all winter. On 25 April, my name day, before what was stated in the contract’s terms, I got my first steel horse, a Giulietta Peripoli model, engine by Franco Morini, single speed, with auxiliary pedals, bright red. Beautiful. The first contract of my life had gone through successfully.

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Tales of grandfathers and children

As I have already told you, Adriano, I attended High School at Istituto San Giuseppe: three linear, orderly, and happy years. I really had a great time. I felt more grownup, I was no longer a child. I used to dash around the hills on my moped with my friends, studied a little and played lots of golf.

Dad always was the true sporty type – and he still is now that he is over eighty: he skied, played tennis very well and at one stage, between thirty-five and forty, he started playing golf. My brothers had been introduced to skiing and tennis respectively so as the last child it was my turn for golf, which also perfectly suited my heart condition as it did not require sudden, intense effort. Dad also had good company for each discipline. I must admit: it really was a good life.

Every day after lunch a University student would come and help me do my homework, and once I had finished I could catch up with my friends. In the meantime, also thanks to my grandmothers, I managed to get a new multispeed moped. My beloved ÂŤsignorinaÂť had left us to join another family as my mother thought I was old enough to get on by myself. I was very fond of her and have to admit that I suffered quite a lot for a long time. After a few

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months at Christmas I was bought my first dog to comfort me, Mirko, a lovely Cocker Spaniel.

My grandparents were also very present at the time. I spent a lot of time with them; all three of them were quite different. Grandpa Edo, Mimma and awesome Grandma Maria (unfortunately my grandfather on my father’s side, Francesco, died when my father was ten). I was so fond of the latter that one day when I was eight and was daydreaming of being grown-up and already a parent, I realized a serious problem might arise, forcing me to change my plans and give up something I was very keen on: being able to carry on daydreaming that one day I would have a daughter called Maria Boglione. For a while I was tormented by this issue because I believed my brothers would be tempted to use the name and realistically they would be having children before I did. A little while later I faced facts, determined to solve this problem which was gnawing at me from inside.

One day while we were all having lunch and all interested parties were present, parents and brothers, I got my courage up and solemnly stated that I loved grandma so much that when I grew up I wanted to have a daughter and call her Maria. This statement was obviously welcomed with the mockery and contempt of those who being older, for this reason only, feel so much cooler: «You’ve still got milk on your mouth!». Mum and Dad just smiled, secretly pleased of the affection I was showing for my grandma, but did not think it very important. As a matter of fact nobody knew how important that statement was for me.

It was only the first step along a path that would bring me to succeed in the endeavour I so much treasured only forty years later.

That time sitting at the table no one said yes or no, but from then on I was careful to repeat my intention on every suitable occasion; my mother thought it was funny and un-

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wittingly helped me a lot because she often told her friends about the episode and joked about it with my grandmother.

Every time the subject came up I confirmed my intentions with force, keeping a very serious attitude, and given my age that made it all the more curious and amusing. Soon this project was well known to all those we mixed with.

Anyway many years later Francesco had his first daughter and called her Lara; then it was Chicco’s turn, and he called her Francesca. When it was my turn something weird happened: thanks to a sensational oversight my first wife Daniela’s ultrasound told us it was a girl. There were celebrations all around and everyone congratulated me as if I had won the Tour de France. They told me: «You did it! Well done, you’ll call her Maria!». Daniela and I were very happy. She was because her beloved grandmother was also called Maria and because she saw me so happy and proud. Everybody was ready with presents, pink lace and bibs embroidered with initials, but around 4 am on 25 July 1986 in the delivery room of Bidone Clinic everyone was flabbergasted: a boy, a healthy boy of just under four Kilograms. The first boy in the family! Daniela was still very happy, she preferred having a boy really. During the phone call immediately following the birth my mother anticipated me: «Well then, has Maria been born?».

«No – I replied – but to make up for it there is a little Lorenzo, beautiful and healthy!»

We were all happy again. How lucky! Not only did I have an option on the name Maria, I had also won a son carrying my father’s name. Then Francesco had Anna, after our mother, followed by Harry and by a girl, named Ruby.

Chicco had two boys, Filippo and Edoardo, after Grandpa Edo. Two years later, on 25 March 1988, me and Daniela had Alessandro whose other names are Davide Maria, like Lorenzo’s. Four children Francesco, three Chicco, and two for me. It seemed that the party was over. Chance had it

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that the name «Maria Boglione» was to skip a generation, and it was my fault.

I admit I often felt guilty about it. Almost twenty years later, in spring 2003, during one of the first ultrasound scans my second wife Stella’s gynaecologist asked me if I wanted to know the sex of the baby. After I told him I did but only on condition she was one hundred percent sure she told me it was a girl. That was an amazing moment and I could not hide my emotion so I looked rather weird to a future mother and a doctor who were both a lot younger than me. On 9 October 2003, around 8 am, my forty year old project had finally come true with the arrival of a little Maria. Fantastic!

My three grandparents were all very different. Mimma was born in Alessandria in 1905, was still fascinated by the aristocracy, and was very proud of having attended court as a young woman. There was a photo in our house of her greeting Prince Umberto visiting Bardonecchia, where he is admiring her with the eyes of Bill Clinton in front of Monica Lewinsky. She really was a delightful woman. She was not interested in politics and was for us brothers the most loving and comforting figure in the family. She liked to tell wartime stories and anecdotes from my mother’s childhood. My greatest tantrums were soothed by her patient cuddles.

I also received from her a great teaching. She had a house in via Cibrario 12 that could have been an antiquarian, maybe now it could even be a small museum. She especially liked antique porcelain and collected Copenhagen plates which she carefully hung on a wall; all but one, the first of her collection, on show on a small, round wooden table with one leg resting on a base with three feet (the most unstable structure in the world), expertly placed on an 18th century carpet.

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tales of grandfathers and children

One day Mimma was worried that my exuberance might cause some damage, so she asked me with heartfelt concern not to run about in the living room as I could knock over her ornaments. Of course I felt very clever so I started running around keeping at a safety distance from the furniture, but on the second lap, as I faced a turn to go through a door, I slipped on the carpet which literally took off knocking over the table housing plate «number one».

I was so shocked I still remember it; I was so desperate about my stupidity that I literally turned to stone. Having heard a bang and the sound of shattering she ran in and after she had made sure I was not hurt, picked me up, dumbstruck and terrified, put my head on her shoulder and started whispering in my ear: «Do you want to know a secret I have never told anyone before?». I was a bit hesitant and surprised by her attitude – my mother would have skinned me – so I just nodded. «I hated that plate! I have been wondering how to get rid of it for a long time. You have done me a great favour.»

I was still a bit upset but I soon recovered from the great pain I felt. It was only many years later that I realized it had been a true act of compassion. Mimma adored that damned plate.

Grandpa Edo on the other hand was a socialist, a socialdemocrat, like Saragat. He was very sceptical and critical of the Communists and of the role it was said partisans had at the end of the war. He considered democratic institutions to be “sacred”; until his death he felt he was an Alpine Corps Training Officer.

Of course he could not talk politics at home because he was generally seen as too much of a left-winger, as well as because he blessed the day the Savoy family had to leave space for democracy (while Mimma still kept that signed photograph with Umberto). My political ideas started then, in the 60s, and they started to form as I watched

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with amusement and curiousity discussions which flared up suddenly between him and Grandma Maria who was a passionate Mussolini supporter. As soon as that subject was touched sparks flew but they were always immediately separated. Yes, Grandpa Edo and Grandma Maria were not madly in love, they respected each other but addressed each other formally throughout their life.

After quarrelling they both felt they had to explain their point of view and since I spent a lot of time with them I received a rather radical but totally bipartisan education.

Yes, they really saw things quite differently.

At the end of the 60s Mum started feeling a little better.

Francesco, with a little drama, had got through his college exams while Italian squares were becoming political hotspots thanks to the demo rallies conducted by students, workers and intellectuals. It was 1968. The special bond I share with Francesco was formed in those years, seeing him do strange things which I did not understand but I instinctively admired because of the courage they required.

After obtaining as a gift a classic Volkswagen camper van for his successful exams my brother told everyone he was leaving for a cultural trip to northern Europe with a friend. In those days travelling was not as easy as it is now so everyone in the house was a bit nervous about that adventure.

But the secret plan Francesco and his friend Valerio Pascotto had cooked up was quite different. When they arrived in Trieste they boarded a cargo ship with their van and started a secret, wild and epic journey all the way to, can you believe it, Kabul in Afghanistan; one of the cult destinations of the time where all the good guys of the world sought refuge, those who did not want to fight, whatever their political ideas were. My older brother had become a hippy. At home a surreal atmosphere reigned: everyone was lost for words and very scared. I vividly re-

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member a few fiery arguments between my mother and father who blamed each other for Francesco’s behaviour; I also remember the general gloom after we heard of catastrophic floods in what was then Western Pakistan, with hundreds of thousands dead and approximately ten million refugees in India at a time when we had no news of Francesco and we did not know exactly where he was. So Christmas 1969 was very sad: no one wanted to celebrate because we had not received any news for quite a while.

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Entrepreneurial roots

As far as I know my family’s entrepreneurial spirit is rooted in the tale of an enterprising young farmer called Domenica Boglione.

In the mid-1800s on a farm in Bra, in the province of Cuneo, the girl realized that cattle merchants purchasing cows reared by her husband’s family were making a good profit not only selling their meat, but also by selling their hides – which were in growing demand by the local budding tanning industry – but without raising the price they paid to the breeders. Legend has it that Domenica convinced her elderly father-in-law to invest his savings to open, with other local breeders, a tannery. That is when our family’s first industrial venture took off.

A few years later in 1865 the Domenica Boglione & Sons Tannery was established.

The vision of a young farmer, who was probably barely literate, the courage and ambition of a large solid country family became, in a few decades, a huge industry with large production plants and thousands of workers. The Boglione family had become “rich”. The only grandparent I have never met, Grandma Maria’s husband Francesco, was the son of one of Domenica’s sons.

At the beginning of the 1900s Grandpa Francesco was

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the young offspring of a great self-made industrial family so he was provided with an education; it appears that shortly before the outbreak of the Great War he was sent to America to learn the most advanced tanning techniques and financial strategies. What is certain is that in 1921 Grandpa Francesco and his brother Bartolomeo acquired control of one the biggest Italian companies operating in the field: Concerie Gilardini di Torino, one of the first companies to be quoted on the Italian Stock Exchange already in 1902.

During Fascist rule, also thanks to the social and economic development of those years, the company supplied the army and the institutions enjoying massive growth and development. In sixty years the family went from breeding cattle to industry and from the country to the city. Torino’s branch of the Boglione family was born. Namely us.

Industry in general was expanding, military commissions were constantly growing, and so was the use of leather: from shoes to airplane components, military and industrial equipment and countless objects used in everyday life.

Plastic had not yet been invented and the things which are now made out of this extraordinary material were exclusively made of leather.

Grandpa Francesco was a handsome, dashing man, rightfully part of the jet set of the time. He married Grandma Maria, a girl from Santena from a family of building contractors whose founder had been friends with Cavour and had surely made his money with the great public works the famous Prime Minister commissioned. My father was born in 1926 so his childhood was spent at an affluent time, full of great prospects. Sadly in 1937, when he was just fortyseven years old, Grandpa Francesco suddenly died.

In 1939 ww2 broke out and Grandma Maria suddenly found herself alone with two young children and an aging brother-in-law, facing a complicated life full of uncertain-

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ties which ended in 1943 with an air-raid by the BritishAmerican forces that put an end to the industrial enterprises of the Boglione family’s Torino branch. After the war , with her children still young, Grandma did not feel up to rebuilding the factories so Gilardini was converted to a property company. The company remained on the Stock Exchange and put its assets up for investment, and consequently my father and his brother Giovanni were still quite well off. But it was «goodbye industry».

My father tried more than once to convince his brother to resume business as building contractors, exploiting the real estate they owned and the ability to gather funds that public companies were beginning to enjoy at the time, but they did not see eye to eye even if it was just to play a game of tennis, so in 1972 Gilardini was sold to Carlo De Benedetti who used it as a means to build his group dealing in components which he finally sold to fiat in 1976, during the four months he spent as its managing director.

Dad married very young: he was twenty-one and Mum was nineteen. To provide for his family he got a job at first with riv and then moved to sai insurance, while he graduated at university. He made a name for himself as a manager over twenty years until he became the managing director of an insurance company.

The great turning point came in the mid-70s. Francesco had finally come back from India – Mum went to get him back –, but he kept travelling around the world and managed a shop selling things he bought on his travels.

The shop was called American Disaster and during the two or three years it was open it was a point of reference for young people in Torino who were just discovering what informal and casual wear was all about.

My mother was co-owner wih her friend Franca Buffa of a nice little firm called La Goccia, selling gifts and dealing in furniture. At the time she earned more than my father and

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her contribution to the family budget was important, given that the books were balanced not without a few worries.

Actually we always enjoyed a high standard of living, although we could not rely on the earnings our own business had provided. Chicco started selling insurance policies while he attended university, which he never finished either, to afford the luxuries he most enjoyed; he liked travelling around Africa, flew a glider and always had very powerful motorbikes and stunning girlfriends. He soon convinced his sales manager at sai to resign and become partners and when he was just 25 he already co-owned his own sai agency.

Dad worked in Genoa and probably felt a little isolated from the liveliness of his family. Towards the end of the 70s he became partners with Chicco and his partner who had given back their agency mandate to sai and, starting from scratch, had opened a new brokerage firm, abc srl, Assicurazioni Boglione & Cerrina. No one was stunned by the imagination shown in choosing a name but a few years later they purchased a prestigious but ailing company operating in the field which they developed over the following twenty years and then sold to a large international corporation.

Uta (Uffici Tecnici Assicurativi SpA), that was the name of the company Chicco and Dad had bought, marked my family’s return to the business world after Grandpa Francesco’s death.

I remember that when I was asked what my father did for a living I was very proud to be able to finally answer that we had our own company operating in the insurance business.

At the time I was struggling to get through college at San Giuseppe. I had no one to give me a hand in the afternoon and soon realized I was heading for disaster. I got through the first year after spending the entire month of August in a boarding school in Courmayeur to attempt reparatory exams in three subjects in September. The second year went a

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little better, only two exams in September, so I took private lessons every day in Alassio and then I was unable to sit the exams because of a rather serious motorbike accident that kept me in hospital until mid-November 1972. I got through the exams during a special session but in January 1973 I asked my mother to send me to boarding school.

It was the usual verdict. He is not doing well in school so he is a bad boy. But it was just that I could not get it together, I had too many interests and distractions. And being dyslexic made it all even harder.

The first Sunday of February 1973, after almost five hours in the car with my mother and Grandma Mimma, at mid-afternoon and under the pouring rain I entered the gates of Istituto Filippin, in Paderno del Grappa, province of Treviso. My first impression was not great: the weather made it quite gloomy, there were no boys around and the light in the corridor of the building where I was to sleep was very dim. My room was absolutely tiny. On one side of the room there was a bed and a desk with some bookshelves above it; on the other a wardrobe and a sink. The room was little more than two meters wide. But I was not that worried: it was more or less how I imagined boarding school would be. Mum and Grandma Mimma were a bit more baffled at the idea of leaving me in that place, and before they left they more or less clearly hinted that if I did not like it there they would come to pick me up immediately. But my mind was set: I realized that I had wasted loads of time in Torino and I was beginning to fear I would fail my final exams. I did not like my image at all: those who did not know me thought of me as the stereotypical spoiled brat, too much of a loafer for my liking‌

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Far from home

Adriano, I have to admit that in the new school my academic performance immediately improved a lot. I did not study much but I was paying more attention during lessons and that helped a lot. The setting also played a part.

There were approximately one thousand pupils between sixteen and nineteen from more or less all over Italy and they certainly had not been selected for their good behaviour. The Brothers were numerous and managed the place with great expertise and skill.

Each one of them had a specific responsibility from treasurer to managing the sports grounds and many were also teachers. They were all good people. They did not bother us too much and always made it clear they were there to help us. They were quite close and very well informed on what went on in the school, and they very seldom got angry or raised their voice. They never did anything in a hurry, everything happened exactly on time. They did not like spies or sycophants and most of us got on well with them.

The same rules applied to everyone and almost everyobe followed them. We did a lot of sport and there was a pleasant atmosphere. I realized from the start that establishing a conflict with them would be the most stupid thing I could do.

The Brothers did their job, which was educating us, well

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and with enthusiasm, and each of us had to find his own place in the community but could do it without forsaking his own identity. They were also rather tolerant: if you did not want to go to Mass no one pestered you.

The only thing you had to avoid was fooling around with them. Now and again someone would literally disappear from the scene. Immediate and non-negotiable expulsions occurred, a bit like Lehman Brothers employees; not many to be honest, maybe four or five in three years. Legends about these sudden removals always brought to the same conclusion: the expelled was a moron.

Some issues had never been subject to discussion. We all knew the rules and they were quite reasonable: one of these was that marijuana and all that should not get through the gate and physical violence would not be tolerated. Those who got thrown out had either been smoking inside the school or had started a fight. If they got caught they were thrown out on the spot. After all they were both totally illegal actions and it was clear they could not be tolerated in the school.

I quickly settled in and on the whole I came out of that time quite satisfied, to the point that for many years I hoped my children would go through the same experience.

But when it came to it thirty years later neither Larry nor Ali wanted to even hear about it. And anyway things had changed a lot: in my days there were about forty priests at Filippin, with an average age of fifty, and now there are a dozen of them mostly in their seventies. The institution as I knew it does not exist anymore. That is a real shame.

I only understood the meaning of the saying «in the valley of the blind the one-eyed man is king» a lot later. When I heard it for the first time I realized I had instinctively and rigorously applied it in boarding school. I figured it out on my own. I followed an instinct I think we all have, especial-

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ly the young. I did something without realizing it because I had a plan, an objective. That time it was self-assigned; if I had given in and got back into trouble I knew I would have had a serious problem with myself and I would have had to rethink my dream of a useful and successful life once more, but I was not a child anymore. There were plenty of opportunities among a thousand of us for me to find my place, and I managed to become part of the higher end of “society” without too many problems. To be honest I did it without realizing. I believed my aim was to make up for my academic shortcomings and lack of discipline which projected an image of myself I did not like. But academic performance in boarding school was relatively unimportant; the important things were your personality and your instinctive ability to live in a group. My natural inclination for enterprise, stifled by different levels of insecurity, could only occasionally express itself in Torino as a lone voice; here it had finally found an ideal environment to move its first steps. I consider my enterprise in boarding school, after the initial whimper with my hospital hot pads, the real first milestone of my professional life and thanks to it I was awarded the best former pupil award thirty years later, in 2005, an award the Former Pupils of Filippin Institutes Association hands out with extreme care.

After just two years I had a driving licence and owned a brand new fiat 127, and I had already travelled from Paderno to Torino and back a couple of times with my friend and fellow “inmate” Marco Gatta, who did not have a car yet. During the following summer, the second without exams in September in a row, thus stress-free, cheerful and creative, I took Grandma Mimma for a tour of Italy.

I liked driving very much: it made me feel grown up and I was also responsible for my grandmother’s well-being. I took her to visit Florence, Assisi and the neighbouring region, and we passed through Termoli, where «la signorina»

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was born as well as my best friend in boarding school Francesco Cariello. We went to San Giovanni Rotondo and to see the «trulli» (typical buildings in Puglia, Southern Italy, translator’s note) and the caves of Castellana. Grandma Mimma really enjoyed our visit to the first safari zoo in Fasano.

On our way back we drove through Roma and then headed straight to Alassio. All this in just one week.

During those long hours on the motorway I did a lot of thinking so I fantasized of taking all my dark room equipment to Paderno with the car, as it had reclining backseats, which I had left in Torino two years before, and starting a photography course in school. I also kept track of fuel consumption and motorway costs to work out how much it would cost me to drive home from boarding school every weekend for a year. At the time petrol was cheap and so were the motorways yet travelling by car would cost about four times as much as the train. On Saturdays we finished at noon but we had to be back in school by 10 pm on Sunday. If the train was on time we managed to stay in Torino just 15 hours, from 9.30 pm to 2.30 pm on the following day. By car we had 24 hours of freedom, that is 60% more. I imagined that the money I could make from a photography course would allow me to drive back home every weekend.

Photography had been my passion ever since I was a child. I had taken photographs and developed and printed them since my days in high school. My mother had a little dark room set up for me and with time through birthday and Christmas presents I had accumulated a considerable amount of equipment. At first I used an old camera, a 1933 Leica III, which had been Grandpa Francesco’s. I took pictures of anything: children, the hills, insects and spent hours in the dark developing and printing.

Back in school I immediately talked about it with Brother Guglielmo and offered him a deal: «I will bring from To-

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rino all the necessary equipment for a good dark room.

If you let me use the closet next to the physics classroom during recess, I will organize a photography course for the school, set a price for it, hold the lessons and you can keep all the enrolment moneyÂť. I only asked for the right to sell the photos we took and keep the proceeds.

The idea went down well and soon the list of optional activities included my photography course with theory and practical lessons. Only three people enrolled: Alex Manenti and my close friends Francesco Cariello and Marco Gatta.

We used half of recess taking photos all over the school and the rest in the dark room. The Brothers mocked me a little: they said I would never manage to sell photos to the other students. But my real plan was different, and it was a winner. This thousand-strong bunch of strays and runaways had but one purpose in common: to have as much fun as possible during the holidays and weekends, and in order to achieve that they needed just one thing, money, but being that they were there as a sort of punishment most families were not exactly forthcoming in that sense.

The Brothers allowed me to use the notice board.

When we first exhibited shots of the school’s skiing competition we met with zero interest. It looked like the Brothers had been right: no interest and a lot of mockery and jokes. But I was certain it was just a communication problem. My peers had not yet realized the full strategic potential of my offer. What better way to raise a few bob than sending home every week some beautiful photos of themselves looking like conscientious young men and asking for double the amount paid?

As soon as people caught on sales skyrocketed. I sold 5x8 photos at 1.500 lire each and they would resell them to their families at 5.000, with a clean profit of 3.500 for each photo. Ten photos made 35.000 lire, which at the time was enough for a whole weekend. In all of this it was obvious

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that I was not selling photos but the possibility of making money. Which is exactly what I do now, to the point I can safely state that I do not sell t-shirts but the opportunity of dealing them to businessmen around the world. That way sales grow faster than they would if BasicNet had to directly take care of the entire production and distribution process around the world.

With the money I made selling photographs it was easy to enter into another business typical of boarding schools: the pawnbroker, obviously underground. To raise more money my schoolmates sold prestigious watches, lighters, Ray-Ban sunglasses, most of which had “disappeared” from their homes, for peanuts. The deal was they could redeem them at the same price before the end of the school year; otherwise they would become mine and I would have been able to sell them on at a much higher price.

During my last school year with the Brothers of Christian Schools I travelled to Torino every weekend to go and see my girlfriend. In the end me and Marco Gatta perfected a good format. We always travelled with our car full: I was the pilot, Marco the navigator, and three passengers, travelling at full throttle but nice and safe. We guaranteed our customers 24 hours at home and also provided a sandwich and a Coke which we bought at 11 o’clock recess in the food store in front of the school. All this for just 10.000 lire, the price of a train ticket. A quick fuel and toilet break in Novara around 3 pm and off we were again.

The trip took a little over 4 hours. Yes, that community was full of entrepreneurial opportunities. When I left the institute I had saved up 1.600.000 lire.

I got on well with all the Brothers, but became especially close to Brother Guglielmo and Brother Vittorio, respectively deputee Headmaster and the man in charge of my floor. Besides them I also managed to establish a

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relationof trust with a rather special character, Professor Candido Sitia, a.k.a. Brother Roberto. He was a respected mathematician and it was rumoured that he and Einstein had exchanged a number of letters concerning the calculation of some integrals related to research on relativity. In those days there were no computers and all those complicated calculations were carried out by mathematicians. He taught physics and took care of both of the school’s laboratories with his assistant, who was nicknamed Frankenstein, since his name was Franco, he was rather ugly and had a hump.

Brother Roberto was a scientist with all the trimmings; he lived in his own little world, walked without looking where he was going and always wore a polite smile that was actually meant to conceal his total lack of interest in his surroundings. If someone asked him a trivial question he would think for a moment then he would either answer in Latin or with a dry remark that left you feeling like an idiot.

But always wearing that smile…

I liked him a lot. In those labs I was taught my first elements of information technology, I saw my first computer and my first colour television, but above all I first realized how important imagination can be. We measured friction, inertia, gravity and many other things; Brother Roberto started to keep an eye on me and I was aware of it. One day I managed to astonish him and from then on it was love, undeclared but undying. I had managed to solve one of the maths problems he liked to put forward to us to try and verify whether there was «something» inside our heads «or just a void». This was the question: «One of the king’s ten tax collectors has re-minted the gold coins he is to hand over to the royal treasury, making them all lighter by one gram. The King has ten sacks of coins, one from each collector, each containing a different number of coins, and a set of scales; but he must find out who the disloyal collector is with one weighing. How can he

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do that?». I solved the problem in a couple of hours and Brother Roberto was over the moon.

It was in that rather fun environment that I got ready for my final exams. I cannot deny my maths paper was rather good. Then Brother Roberto questioned me about physics.

His smile that time betrayed true satisfaction. From where I had started three years earlier, having studied very little and being who I was, I only wanted to pass the exams and I would have been quite happy with 36/60 (the lowest pass).

I could hope for 42 or at most 44. After the exams were over and just before I left to go back home Brother Vittorio cracked a joke on Brother Roberto who, according to him, had started one of his usual hopeless battles trying to convince the committee to give me a much higher mark. I did not really understand what he meant until I received a call in Alassio from Guido, the school’s switchboard operator, telling me I had been awarded 58/60. Amazing!

No one would believe it: it was a very high and prestigious score. Many years later the Brothers, who I still occasionally visit, confessed that I was given such a mark just to appease Brother Roberto who would have otherwise never stopped going on about it. It appears he told the chairman of the exam committee that if they did not give me 60/60 they could not ever give that much to anyone else.

I can just imagine him saying that with the hat little smile he wore even when talking seriously. In the end he had his own way, although he could do nothing about my conduct score of 9/10 which effectively made it impossible to give me 60, so they settled for 58.

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The red bow

My success in maths paved the way for my choice of University. I enrolled in Engineering School: it proved to be my “grave” but also my fortune. I soon realized that kind of studies would have provided absolutely no chance of success.

I took some easy exams: drawing one and two, physics one and chemistry. I studied but understood nothing. I tried to daydream, to imagine myself as a great professional, maybe a designer but I just could not do it. I saw my parents’ friends who were entrepreneurs and saw they were wealthy, owned boats and maybe even a Ferrari, and I envied them. That is exactly as I imagined myself. As I pointlessly dragged myself to University I looked for some work: at Christmas I delivered parcels for Mum’s shop, I took photographs of the children of our family’s friends, did some wedding photography, and spent a few hours helping my photographic wholesaler during the holidays.

With the usual support from my mother and some help from my girlfriend – Valentina, the first true love of my life who had given me a female German Shepherd I called Tina in her honour – I turned myself into a breeder. Mum bought me Walker, a beautiful German Shepherd that was rather aggressive with strangers, and the first litter of thirteen puppies soon arrived!

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One afternoon I went with Valentina to enci, the Italian Kennel Club, and discovered that to register as a breeder you only needed two dogs with a pedigree, a little money and an official stamped application. It seemed too easy. I asked what kind of name I could use and they replied anything I liked as long as it was not too similar to an existing registered breeder. I asked if it had to be an Italian name.

«No, whatever you want!» said an annoyed secretary. So I registered as a breeder with the peculiar name of «Von Walktina. German Shepherds».

I had to get the news out that I was selling pedigree puppies. I had to grab some attention. I wrote a slightly ungrammatical ad for La Stampa (national newspaper based in Torino, translator’s note) hoping that readers might be fooled into thinking it was a real German breeder with real German dogs. It worked a treat.

I immediately received a number of phone calls followed by visits. The first question was always why we had a German name and I always gave the same answer: my mother had relatives in Germany and all prospective customers were satisfied with that. The first day following the ad a woman wearing a fur coat arrived with a chubby little girl who insisted she wanted a particularly small and ugly female puppy Valentina liked because it was the weakest and frailest of all. For this reason I had tied a red bow round its neck and told people it had already been sold. The girl threw a real tantrum because she wanted that dog and that dog only but I could not give it to her. Finally her mother was able to calm her and took the best-looking male puppy. I had noticed the girl had been attracted by the bow which made the animal cuter but I was also worried that the first customers would choose the fittest dogs and that it would then be difficult to sell the others.

Starting with the next customer I began to dress up the dog I wanted to sell with the bow. Children would get

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the red bow

there and almost invariably befriend the funny puppy with the red bow and insist to have him. After playing reluctant with the mother for a while I pretended to give in to please the child. I put the bow on another dog looking like I was doing something inappropriate and gave the chosen one to the spoilt child and his rather flattered mother. So everyone was happy and I got to keep the best specimens of the litter.

I was very proud of that little trick which kept on working perfectly throughout my three years as a breeder. More money. Few expenses. To be honest Mum covered most of the expenses: food, shelter and the vet. The profit afforded me a nice Honda 350 and equally nice evenings and holidays with my friends. In the meantime I attended the Polytechnic less and less, with immense effort and without any conviction.

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PART III On the path of destiny

Driven by desire

Dear Marco, listening to your tale is really quite entertaining, despite our different views.

For example I have never done anything “for money”. When I was a boy I never had much money. The same goes for my years at university. Even now that I am, like you, over fifty, when I do things outside of work (like organizing a concert, play music, write a book or do something for charity) all I am interested in is other people’s wellbeing or in expressing myself or the things I hold dear: financial gain is not part of my make-up…

Yet I enjoy listening to you and I am also attracted to this daring way you have of doing things for a profit. And I think: thanks to this mentality of yours a lot of people earn a salary and can support their families with dignity. And for this I hold you in great consideration.

And what about me? I am a journalist, I inform people and with my wife I support and feed our family, our daughters. It might be commendable, sure, but it seems to me that what you achieved is truly great…

Beyond what we have achieved and our different “missions” as young men we both acted driven by the desire to be ourselves. The same motivation is still behind what we do today!

When I was at university I too was seeking for my professional calling. And although I decided to enrol for a philosophy degree because of the interest one of my college teachers had aroused in me, my secret

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“dream” – to use your own words – was to become a journalist. I felt that was the job that would make me feel accomplished. And that I would have to do everything possible to bring my destiny into being…

What is more, at the time a dear friend, don Primo Soldi, had introduced me to the world of the printed word. And my desire had grown stronger! So while you were getting restless at the Polytechnic, a few years later I started feeling the same at Palazzo Nuovo, where Humanities are housed in Torino, because I did not see any openings to realize my true ambition.

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A decisive encounter

What about me, Adriano? When I went to University I could no longer daydream. I struggled to study and it was much easier for me to think about what I would do after I graduated than concentrate on the immediate task.

I started my second year of engineering clearly feeling it was a waste of time and wondering how I could get out of it. I was late with my exams and I realized I would not be able to catch up. I had to reconsider my aspirations and felt terribly vulnerable because I was looking for a way out knowing full well that I had hit a dead end. And it was then that chance had me meet Maurizio Vitale. It was a Sliding doors moment.

December 1976: I was in Sestriere for the weekend staying in the apartment our parents had given us brothers in use. Obviously it was always full of young people coming and going.

It was there that I first met Maurizio, who had been invited over by my brother Chicco.

We went to sleep in the same room where there were two bunk beds. The lights went out and we started talking. Maurizio asked me what kind of job I would have liked to do. I replied that I did not know, I would not have minded being a photographer but I was studying engineering so‌ Maurizio was eleven years older then me (I was just twenty

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then) and at the time he was the talk of the town; the newspapers wrote about him and that advertising campaign for Jesus Jeans that had raised such a scandal with a photograph showing a bottom clad in denim hot pants and the caption «Chi mi ama mi segua» (lit. «Let those that love me follow me», a misquoted verse from Matthew 16, 24 made popular in this form by Italian authors such as Alberto Moravia, Mario Soldati and Giovanni Guareschi and also used by Pope Paul VI on 16 February 1972, translator’s note) . We turned the lights back on and spent most of the night talking. The following day we went skiing. At one point while queuing for the skilift, Maurizio met a couple of acquaintances and introduced me as «Marco Boglione, the new Marketing Director at Jesus Jeans». I thought he was kidding.

The following Monday around 6 pm I was at home watching tv instead of studying. The phone rang: it was Vitale’s secretary asking me if I could go and see him. I drove my blue fiat 127 at breakneck speed down the hills and a little later entered Maglificio Calzificio Torinese for the first time.

The same entrance now used by BasicNet, in a square now carrying Maurizio’s name. He received me in his office, now my secretary’s office and called in two or three people working for the company. He asked Mrs. Lucca to show me some advertising campaign photographs: they were mostly by Oliviero Toscani. We started talking and he went straight to the point telling me that if I was interested he would help me to start working for him.

Everything had happened so suddenly; I was dazed but quite enticed by his proposal.

But I was enrolled at University how was I going to do this?

Vitale hinted at the possibility of working as Toscani’s assistant and go with him on his photo shoots. I met Oliviero for the first time in a restaurant in Genoa and he immediately started a discussion with Maurizio arguing over the new ad campaign. Vitale also often consulted Armando Testa, who

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he admired enormously, and used a small agency called Viva, owned by advertiser Giorgio Caponetti, who was entrusted with running the company’s campaigns.

After just fifteen days with Maurizio Vitale it was already time for the first photo shoot. We took pictures in Milan for an entire afternoon; I quietly worked very hard. As chance would have it our models were two friends of mine from Milan. Then Maurizio asked Caponetti to give me a job at Viva and at the end of December 1976 I sat at my first workplace.

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A change of gear

I still was a University student, a future engineer, but it was all just theory. It is a lot easier for me to learn while doing.

So I let myself go with the flow and started doing. I stayed at Viva for about three months: officially I was a copywriter and in the meantime I spent a lot of time with Maurizio.

He was a successful and wealthy thirty-year old but beyond this he had become a real friend for me. One night towards the end of March at the Torre di Pisa restaurant in Milan he told me that he was willing to offer me a job at Maglificio Calzificio Torinese.

The moment had come to talk about all this to my family. During the previous three months, while working at the agency I had managed to keep my foot in two camps and was still officially enrolled at the Polytechnic. I asked Maurizio to come and talk to my father about it. He was well known in the family and I had heard positive and flattering comments about him more than once.

He agreed. A few evenings later he came round for dinner: my father listened to him and asked him what role he imagined for me. Maurizio said I could do well in marketing. It might seem strange but thirty-two years ago marketing and its role in a business were not as clear to people as they are now. My father made a few considerations about

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the strategic importance of marketing, more to look professionally up-to-date than for anything else, adding that I would still have to graduate from University even if it was not out of Engineering School.

So I enrolled at the faculty of Architecture. But I never set foot inside there, I never even went to pick up my academic transcript.

A few days later Maurizio called me into his office. He called Mrs. Viziale, the head of human resources, and told her he wanted to employ me as a seventh level clerk, the highest before entering into management, with the minimum retribution legally required for that status. He added that I was almost an engineer (he loved that kind of exaggeration), that I was on the ball and that I would have to go through company training just like he had. A bit like I was his younger brother.

Mrs. Viziale diligently took note, congratulated me and told me to go and see her later to take care of formalities. At that point Maurizio opened the door connecting his office with the president’s, currently my own office: «Mr. Lattes – he said – I would like to introduce our new Marketing Director». I was not yet twenty-one and was often prompted by my appearance to lie about my age to get people to take me seriously. I really looked like a child.

Mr. Lattes was a peculiar type, basically a real gentleman; he had been Managing Director of mct when Maurizio’s father had still been alive. He then became President and had taken care of the Vitale family like a second father: he loved Maurizio very much.

Lattes smiled a little and asked me what kind of experience I had, but before I could reply that I had none, Maurizio pressed on saying that I was two exams away from graduating as an engineer. I shook my head and hurriedly clarified that it was not true and that on the contrary I had only taken a few exams; but Lattes knew him well, paid

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no notice and said that anyway I looked like a good boy, I was well dressed and clean-faced. He formally welcomed me to the company and told me I could count on him for help if the need arose. Lattes and I always enjoyed a good relationship.

My life had completely changed and I had abandoned what I was doing almost suddenly, running quite a risk. I had not taken much time or made much effort to project my imagination towards a future I liked any more than the prospect of another four years at Polytechnic.

Risk means gambling with what constitutes at that time the good you are seeking. Going forward often means just overcoming barriers.

Even today to move forward as an entrepreneur I need something to fascinate me, to attract me, to make me daydream, forcing me to use my mind and the information I have accumulated inside it up to now. Maybe that is the reason why I almost instinctively shun situations of permanent stillness: they scare me because I think that my ability to run risks will fail and consequently so will my nature as a navigator of life. Which is the thing about myself I like the most.

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From the factory to New York

I left the Viva agency and found myself working night shifts in the weaving department; I had to keep an eye on machines coming to a halt either because of a broken thread or a broken needle or more simply because a reel was finished. My duty consisted in, first of all, not falling asleep, and secondly in calling the department manager, who most of the times was sleeping, to start the machinery up again. Obviously, dear Adriano, after a few days my night shift supervisors were able to snore the night away because I could easily do that very simple job on my own.

Luckily this first assignment only lasted a month. I was then assigned to ÂŤDisposizione filati per la produzioneÂť department. A crazy job that any pc could do now but that at the time required about a dozen trained staff with huge tables covered in really small numbers written by pencil so they could be continuously changed and updated. Although for a dyslexic like me it was absolute torture more than a job, I spent two great months with very skilled and friendly colleagues. After that, Maurizio wanted me to experience sales so I was sent to the warehouse department, a room with five girls all a little older than me who kept track of goods going in and out of about twenty warehouses all over Italy updating tax books. My boss was called Wilma.

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After a few days in the office I started travelling around to check the situation on site. That was my first proper assignment, «warehouse supervisor». I had to go and visit our agents with huge printouts and decide what to send them out of the stock sitting in our headquarters. The situation was utter chaos: there was no reliable data support and all contained in those huge folders was an enormous quantity of mistakes. That is when I realized how much companies needed and still need real time information. Without it management is conditioned by a series of errors adding on one another and amplifying each other creating the kind of problems that will slow it down, decreasing its precision and reliability, raising costs indiscriminately thus limiting its competitiveness. Later, when I became an entrepreneur, this concept was one of the founding pillars I tried to build my business on.

Many years later, in November 1995, while reading Bill Gates’ first book The Road Ahead, I found that this was one of the points he most insisted on. A printout is in itself a very bad sign of the state of a company’s management.

In its 25-year-long life BasicNet has never ever produced one! In 1999 Gates further developed this concept and introduced the idea of «business at the speed of thought» and of «digital nervous system» for companies. It is more likely that simple clerks relying on precise and up to date information will take better decisions than a top manager relying on old or wrong information would.

But let’s go back to mct. I took care of the warehouses for more or less a year; Maurizio wanted to be a little hard with me, although he was not at all really, and wanted me to travel a lot. At the time I was allowed to stay at headquarters only half a day a week, Friday afternoon, when I would inform Lattes on what I had found out on my travels and check out the printouts. Those were good times: I drove over 70.000 kilometres in a year and in spring 1978

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my mother decided to change the fiat 127 she had bought me when I was eighteen with a car she said would be safer and a little more comfortable, a purple-red four-door Volkswagen Golf 1100 gl. To say I was proud of it is a complete understatement.

Thanks to my travel and mileage allowance, and my wages I first experienced the pleasant feeling of being independent. In 1978 I made on the whole a little less than 14 million lire after tax. In those days that was lot of money for a young man of 22.

As for University I had gone beyond the point of no return, the matter was closed forever. While I oversaw the warehouses I also travelled with Vitale a lot. He often went to the States to buy denim (the material used to make jeans), as at the time it was almost impossible to find good quality denim in Italy, but above all he went to get inspiration on market trends. So in December 1977 he took me to New York for the first time. It was a fantastic experience.

Maurizio absolutely loved the States and especially New York for its modern, dynamic spirit. We would go back there many times but I will never forget one episode from that first time.

Maurizio always extolled the virtues of the Big Apple.

Among these there was a really great restaurant which he found hard to describe to someone like me who had such a different and traditional view of the catering business.

The thing that had struck me most of his tales was that in that restaurant there were no knives and forks so people ate using their hands. The first time Maurizio took me to McDonald’s in New York I was very impressed; maybe that is why I still occasionally really enjoy a Big Mac. At that point almost ten years had gone by since Maurizio had substantially transformed his family’s business from a tired manufacturer of socks and underwear into a fresh and

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lively company leading the new sector of casual and informal wear with its brands, Jesus Jeans and Robe di Kappa.

But now the cultural atmosphere had changed. I constantly picked up signs of this change and quickly pointed them out to Vitale. Maurizio told me that he had decided to start producing jeans with his friend Oliviero Toscani at the end of the 60s after seeing just how many young people were wearing them in Central Park. And then he decided to call them Jesus after passing the Broadway theatre where Jesus Christ Superstar was showing. The name was Toscani’s idea and apparently his motivation to Vitale had been: «It’s a nice name; and lots of people already know it».

The concept of unisex had been fundamental to the cultural movement of the 60s but it was no longer that important to my generation. In February 1978 while we hit the shops in New York, like we always did to see what was happening on the market, Maurizio and I saw one of the first Athlete’s Foot retail stores, one of the forerunners of the more wellknown Foot Locker. We talked in front of the shop’s window for a good half an hour: I remember telling him that kind of shop could be the «jeans shop of the year 2000».

I reckoned that shops for the new generations I felt I belonged to would be less “hippy-ish” and more “sporty”.

Maurizio, who was very clever and curious, listened to me and also asked me a few questions, but appeared to not really take my vision too seriously, so we rounded off our expedition by raiding Bloomingdale’s, as usual, buying the best stripy polo shirts which would invariably later become a part of the Robe di Kappa collection.

The following day was Sunday and we were to travel back to Italy. As usual before heading for the airport we took a stroll round Central Park. A few months later we were all watching the France-Italy football match at the World Cup in Argentina; a twenty-year-old Antonio Cabrini was play-

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ing on the Italian side for the first time. He came from a well-to-do family, he was wealthy, well-bred, educated, and above all quite handsome, a precursor of Kakà so to speak, at a time when the footballer stereotype was extremely distant from the world of fashion and the lifestyle of the young. Maurizio noticed him and during the match kept pestering his friends, who did not take much notice, telling them that was the new role model the young would love and follow. Someone raised the objection that he was “just” a footballer, as if to say that rock stars were still on another level. Maurizio insisted a little but then that was it.

Well, before the World Cup was over Maurizio, without too many words or business plan talk, had already convinced Boniperti to let him put the Robe di Kappa logo on the Juventus shirt (for the first time in Italy) and the day the Italian team got back from Argentina he was at Malpensa sweet-talking Cabrini’s father, whose son had become for the entire nation «il Bell’Antonio» (Handsome Antonio).

A few days later Robe di Kappa had an extraordinary testimonial and had become the first clothing company to sponsor a Serie A team. And may I add: what a team!

Vitale had opted for a strategic change of direction: no more references to juvenile transgression and the cultural revolution of the 60s. He would bet on the future, on wellbeing, on health, on the good boys, successful and above all sporty. It was a bit of a shame no one in the company had ever even heard of sportswear until then. But that was another issue (a sentence Maurizio always used to avoid any opposition to his plans by Mr. Lattes).

So a little later I started on another great adventure. One evening in his office Maurizio, in front of his trusted production manager Elio Porta, who had already been fully briefed, told me he had decided to launch the sports line.

«Get ready to leave. You have become Robe di Kappa Sport’s Sales Director!»

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Mr. Porta sneered while I was obviously over the moon.

Shortly afterwards I asked Maurizio when he had decided to enter into sports. He told me it had been back in New York, but not outside Athlete’s Foot which he found awful – and rightly so – but on the following day in Central Park, because he had noticed that many young people that would have been wearing jeans ten years earlier were now wearing tracksuits and jogging. But at the time he still did not know where to start from; he told me his eureka moment had come later, watching Italy play on television.

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A brand new company

Vitale wanted it all new: the product, the company structure and organization and, above all, he wanted the sales network to be separated from Robe di Kappa’s and Jesus Jeans’. He gave me 10 million lire and sent me on a mission telling me: «Take this money, go to the States, hit all the main sports shops and buy all the sportswear you can see». I left on my own bearing in mind that the money had to cover everything: travel, hotels, restaurants and taxis. I went to the best sports shops in New York, Chicago, Phoenix (Arizona), Las Vegas – where there was and still is an important sports fair – and San Francisco.

The first surprise was that at the time there was very little sportswear in the States. Or rather there was technical wear to practice all and every sport on earth, but not what we wanted to make: sportswear for leisure. Anyway I bought lots of stuff in shops, second hand and military surplus stores. I also bought a number of books and sports magazines. In every city I visited I spent hours in shops, observing young people on University campuses and in parks and watching television. There were actually a lot of people jogging and quite a few wore tracksuits on tv.

I called Maurizio every day and told him about my trip.

After about ten days I had to admit I had not found much,

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I had run out of money and would have to go back. Vitale sent me more money and told me to go to Los Angeles and carry on buying whatever I though interesting that was sports-related and bring it back home. We would find a use for it.

At the fair in Las Vegas, mostly exhibiting sports equipment rather than shoes and clothing at the time, I saw something which was really new. A few guys in California had integrated a brick-sized tape player into a kind of backpack to be fastened to one’s chest with elastic straps, and connected to a pair of headphones. That was the first time I had ever seen something built for listening to music while doing sport and obviously I bought it, thus giving quite a blow to my funds. A few years later Sony would launch its first walkman, just slightly bigger than the tape itself, a forerunner of the iPod. I travelled back to Italy with all my booty and we started working on our first collection. At the same time I began travelling around Italy to select sales reps for the newlyborn Robe di Kappa Sport. Vitale wanted it to be completely different and independent from the company’s other product lines. I thought of a strategy and he approved it: we would visit the three best sports shops in all the main towns around the country, explain to the managers who we were and what we wanted to achieve and ask them who they thought were the best sales reps in the area.

Again these were people selling football, tennis or volleyball shoes, balls, racquets, skiis and boots; no one had any experience of clothing. So before leaving the area I would contact all the people I had been suggested and ask to meet them in a hotel. The retailers were very helpful and almost all the reps came to meet me.

Robe di Kappa was already well-known and Maglificio Calzificio Torinese was perceived as a serious company

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with an established tradition behind it. I gave everyone the same speech, what we would now call the vision. I spoke to over sixty candidates and it really was a gruelling job; in Naples I caught the flu and conducted a few interviews while feverish. Many of these people, seeing I was so young and a good talker, were a bit offish and I immediately realized they were not interested. I have to admit now that the expedition was a bit of a disaster, especially because when I got back to Torino I could not remember anything about the interviews even if I had taken notes; I said nothing to Vitale and set up the sales network anyway.

New products, collections and a first catalogue saw the light. It was the end of 1978 and Kappa, now considered one of the world’s leading brands of sportswear, had just been established. That date marked the start of two fantastic working years full of great satisfactions.

While the traditional lines still enjoyed a good level of success Maurizio had in the meantime diverted most of Robe di Kappa’s marketing investments on sport, even if sales of this product line were still not very significant. So things were looking up, for the company, for me and for my new project.

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A little mishap along the way

At the beginning of 1980, right when things were taking off, something unexpected occurred. My family – my mother, father and brothers – started to pressure me to leave Vitale, although I had given up on University and gained valuable experience on the field, to join the family brokerage firm and work for myself instead of remaining an “employee”.

Their pressure got the better of me. I was unable to resist and left Vitale; but without losing him. On the contrary I can state that oddly enough this episode actually cemented our friendship even more.

I became officially part of uta on 1 April 1980. I started working hard right away as a deputy head at the Technical Department. I think I did a good job there. But I soon realized it was like being back at Polytechnic. I could not “dream” and clearly felt I was deceiving myself. I wanted to be creative but my father only owned half of the company and if that was not enough my direct boss was effectively my brother. It just could not work. During the summer holidays of 1981 I made my mind up: I could not carry on like that. I had to go back to Maglificio Calzificio Torinese, to my Kappa, to Vitale who believed in me more than I did myself.

That was just what Maurizio had been waiting for and one

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night over dinner at Pollastrini’s in corso Valdocco, Torino, after intense negotiation on terms of contract we shook hands. Vitale offered me an excellent salary as Sales Director of the Robe di Kappa and Kappa Sport brands. Seventy million lire after tax and an executive position at just twentyfive were something quite extraordinary. I was elated.

Every time Maurizio reached a deal he always set a next step so he said: «It’s a deal but you sign tomorrow and start within a month».

I spent the night thinking; my life would once more change dramatically, I was retracing my steps, going to work for uta had been a mistake… From the high spirits of a few hours earlier I sank to the murky depths of anxiety and insecurity. I decided I would tell Vitale that I needed some time, not because I was having second thoughts but to manage things with my family… But it was a lie: I was torn apart on whether I was doing the right thing and really afraid I was doing the wrong thing. In any case Maurizio gave me some time: I had to give him an answer within the end of the following week, after that the offer would no longer stand.

The money he was offering was three times what I was earning then and this was very interesting for me as it really made a difference, but I feared it was an opportunistic choice and would not last.

So I talked about it at home. I did not get the best reaction and I did not like this at all. I was very disappointed to see that my father and brother were almost completely indifferent to what I really felt, to my need to choose the right way in life, the best path for my character and spirit.

There was virtually no discussion at all. To them my decision would simply be wrong, and in the long run it would be inconvenient both for me and for my family. They also emphasized that we would not look very good with the

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rest of uta’s partners who had given me their trust by welcoming me to the company.

Although as usual my mother was trying to keep above sides, she also tried to hold me back; but she gave me some advice which turned out to be very useful. She advised me to seek the council of a few people of proven wisdom and professional experience, hoping this would help me decide to stay at uta. I made appointments with some of my father’s friends, entrepreneurs and managers, but obviously they all advised me to face some sacrifices and stay with the family firm. All but one. After I had illustrated my situation and concerns in depth, which he already knew in part as I was flirting with his daughter, he became even more serious than usual and said: «I know you’ve asked other “oldies” for advice and I don’t need you to tell me what their advice was. I’m fond of you, you’re a good lad and for this reason I’ll take on a great responsibility, so put it to good use. Listen to your heart and go back to Maurizio». I stepped out of Gianluigi Gabetti’s office beaming.

Dear Adriano, I think that if today I have a tale as an entrepreneur to tell it is basically thanks to that meeting.

Gabetti gave me the courage to hurl my heart over the hurdle, he explained in a few words that there is no party without risking. Gianluigi is an extraordinary person. His role, image and manners are worthy of a world champion in rigor and discipline, but he is even more kind-hearted, imaginative, ironic and generous. My decision was taking a definitive shape. Gabetti had served me an assist I could not fail. I still tried to get my parents to approve my decision but my father’s final answer was that after all it was my decision only; and added icily: «Just remember that if you leave you will not be welcome back».

After those words I had no doubts left: I immediately went to see Vitale. The critical moment had come when I

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would break with the family business to go back where I felt I could start dreaming again.

I was very nervous. Maurizio obviously changed the deal a little in his favour scaling my salary down with the excuse that I could not earn more than his production manager who was much older than me. So on 1 June 1982, with a fabulous salary for a lad of barely 26, I was back at my beloved desk as Sales Director and not just for my sportswear line but also for the great Robe di Kappa. After a few months I was back on track and the prestigious financial weekly il Mondo on 6 December 1982 wrote about my first promotion after my return: k-man for jesus. He is not yet 27 but he already is the head of sales and marketing at mct (Maglificio Calzificio Torinese), the group lead by Maurizio Vitale that in 1982 with its various brands (Jesus Jeans, Robe di Kappa, Kappa Sport) will invoice over 100 billion lire. Marco Boglione, who was promoted to his new post Wednesday 24 November, started his career at mct where he launched the Kappa Sport line achieving sales worth 30 billion a year. He then left Vitale to go and work for one of the main brokers in Piemonte. But it was a short lived separation: Boglione has returned to mct and is now one of its top executives.

The first half of the 80s were good for mct and it enjoyed massive expansion: they were the years of the sportswear boom and of internationalization. Our forecast had been correct and we were reaping the rewards. But the peak was the sponsorship for the u.s. athletics team signed by Maurizio in 1981 for the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984. To me that was one of his smartest, bravest and canniest opera-

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tions. Thanks to an acquaintance he managed to meet Ollan Cassell, former u.s. Olympic gold medallist and world record holder in Tokyo in 1964 on the 4x400 metres relay, a former miner, catholic, father to six lovely children, and Executive Director of usa Track and Field. The deal was clinched in a restaurant. Cassell asked Vitale to make his bid; Vitale stated he would but on one condition, that if it was accepted Cassell would tell him how much Adidas, whose contract was about to expire, paid. The American agreed and Vitale offered one million dollars a year for four years! Cassell pulled a pen out of his pocket, wrote «$ 1.000.000» on his napkin and said to Vitale: «Sign!». Vitale signed the napkin and they shook hands. Adidas paid 40.000 dollars a year!

Thanks to that daring sponsorship we started selling in the usa and the Japanese market had opened up to us.

The beginning of the 80s was undoubtedly a good time.

Social tension eased a little, terrorism was not so rife and the march of the forty thousand in Torino had marked a positive turning point, inflation and interest rates had started to fall off after terrible years and they were happy times for Maurizio also on the personal side. On the one hand the company was growing unhindered and things around us just kept getting better, and on the other Vitale was experiencing great emotional security. He was in love with Carolina, a beautiful Dutch girl who he had decided to set up his second family with.

At this point everything was truly hunky-dory but it was then that Maurizio’s family and personal misfortunes started. But that is another story.

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The decline

Soon after that Vitale’s fate took a turn for the worst. In the beginning of 1981 Carolina had had a daughter, Maria, but she was stillborn. For Vitale it was a terrible blow. Luckily a year later a healthy boy came along, Oliviero, and it looked like he had found happiness again.

But real tragedy struck on 7 April 1984. It was a rainy afternoon and I was sitting in my office around 4 pm when the switchboard put a call through. It was the police and they wanted to talk to a company manager.

«What is your post? Are you an executive?»

I confirmed my rank but they persevered: «What is the relationship between the company and Mrs. Carolina Blaauw?».

I explained she worked in the Styling department but that she was also Maurizio’s partner. «Do you know Mr. Vitale well?» I answered affirmatively as I became more and more baffled. «I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mrs. Blaauw died in a road accident and is now in the morgue of Rho Hospital while Mrs. Enrica Giachino who was travelling with her is in the same hospital in serious conditions. Can you inform their relatives?»

The car was registered in the company’s name so the police had got in touch with a manager and unfortunately it had been me.

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Maurizio was talking to a stockist. I found him in the collection hall and asked him to come out. I just told him that Carolina and Enrica had had a serious accident and that they were in Rho hospital. A few minutes later we were on a powerful Mercedes 500. Between our headquarters and the entrance to the Torino-Milano motorway Maurizio, who was overtaking everyone and burning through red lights, hit other vehicles three times but without serious consequences, and obviously without stopping. The first part of the motorway was limited to one lane because of works and we drove along it at breakneck speed, often in the wrong direction, invading the opposite lane and getting back in our own at the last second to avoid smashing into oncoming vehicles. The last number of this kind he pulled was really hairy and it was a miracle it did not end in tragedy.

That is when I decided to do something and told Maurizio that if we carried on in that way we would surely end up dead and it would not be any use because Carolina had died in the accident.

Maurizio slowed down until he stopped the car. Then he started abusing me and accusing me of lying. I was struck dumb. In the end he just started crying desperately. I took on the wheel and we quickly got to hospital. It was awful: I had seen savage hate for me in Maurizio’s eyes as I was telling him the terrible news. I think our friendship was never the same after that.

Two days later Maurizio, after managing to convince the hospital chaplain to bless Carolina’s corpse for him and two lone witnesses, left that Church wearing a wedding ring he never took off again.

Vitale reacted to Carolina’s death with the strength and courage of a samurai warrior but from that moment things started to get progressively and irreversibly more complicated. He was like an airplane hit by a missile but he expect-

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ed things to go back to what they were before. We friends and colleagues were aghast at seeing him in such a state.

He dedicated himself obsessively to little Oliviero who would shortly be three years old, and took up his favourite pastime again, conquering stunning women, something he undoubtedly was a master at.

At the end of 1984, almost a year after Carolina’s death, Maurizio discovered he had aids. He did not tell anyone.

Those were the years when the disease had started to claim its first victims and was the object of severe prejudice: it was considered the homosexual illness. It was only much later that people started to know more about the real risk of infection. I think Maurizio was the fifth case in Italy of heterosexual aids.

At the company we knew nothing.

Everything had started with a case of shingles and then he had to have a big swollen lymph node on his neck surgically removed in the States. The rumour was it had been a tumour. Thanks to help from influential people in the world of medicine and other fields he managed to join a test project for azt, conducted by the fda at a specialized clinic in Boston. The protocol was extremely rigorous and it entailed that the pills given for treatment could only be taken in hospital so Vitale started going to Boston every week. On Tuesday nights he would travel to Paris, sleep in a hotel at the airport and the following morning he would get a Concorde flight to New York where he landed at 8 am local time. There he took another flight to Boston where he landed around 10. At 11 he swallowed the pill e immediately started on his way back, getting on to a Jumbo for Italy in the evening which landed at Malpensa at 7 am. With a driver he managed to be at the office at 9.30 tops having missed just one day at work.

It was a crazy situation which left everyone stunned. Luckily an American nurse, moved by this young and dashing,

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yet desperate Italian gave him an extra pill to take to Italy.

But another disaster was looming: when the test program was started all patients were told that a certain percentage of them would be given placebos. The list of them was top secret and had been compiled by a computer on admission to the program.

When Maurizio got back to Torino he immediately had the pill analyzed. Unfortunately he had just been taking a placebo. That nightmare ended there and then but so did any hope of surviving.

Despite his illness Maurizio continued to lead an almost normal life: work, restaurants, weekends in the mountains or on his boat. But at the time our arguments had become more frequent and heated: he was understandably very nervous and maybe I was too young to really understand what was going on.

Again I perceived a strange state of affairs which did not allow me to project myself in the future with enthusiasm.

Work was going well, I had plenty of money and chances to have a good time. One day we were discussing something quite spiritedly – I cannot even remember what – and Vitale stopped me: «It’s pointless me and you carry on arguing. Soon I won’t be here anymore and I wouldn’t advise you to stay in the company without me. Go and work as an entrepreneur, you’re not really a manager anyway. It would’ve only worked with me on the scene».

Vitale was perfectly right. A few days later I handed in my resignation. It was 14 December 1984.

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An entrepreneur at last

During my six-months’ notice I organized my entry at Football Sport Merchandise Srl, a company my friend Luciano Antonino had opened in May 1983 to market Juventus shirts to fans for the first time in Italy; as Sales Director of Robe di Kappa that manufactured them I had followed the project and its first operational steps. Maurizio did not believe in the idea and at first had not felt comfortable supplying Antonino with a large number of shirts on credit as he could not guarantee payment. So I personally guaranteed it and in exchange Luciano offered me a 50% share in the company for the cost of its start-up capital: small money.

I bought my share and on 1 July 1985 I was sat in an office with him in a warehouse/garage inside a former industrial plant converted into spaces for small companies and artisans. Via Bologna 220/70. My life was starting over once more.

At 29 I was convinced that Maglificio Calzificio Torinese was forever behind me and I would have never thought that nine years later, on 7 November 1994, I would step back in there as its owner. But that is exactly what happened.

Football Sport Merchandise, currently known as BasicNet, was my entrepreneurial launch pad. At mct I had learned

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to deal in casual clothing and at one stage I had chipped in some of my own with my intuition on young consumers’ new need for sportswear. I had also accumulated almost ten years of experience in company management ranging from sales to administration, production and finance; but the most important thing completing my experience had been living at close range with such a natural entrepreneurial talent as Vitale. In my trips to the States I had witnessed the dawn of Sports Licensing. Young Americans wanted more products referring to the sports world but, as I’ve already told you Adriano, there was not much on offer yet.

Being practical and enterprising people the Yankees had immediately come up with a way to transform their classic t-shirts, baseball caps and a few simple nylon jackets, already on the market, displaying every possible company and University logo, into sportswear. All they had to do was print on them logos and brands belonging to famous basket, baseball, and football teams. In order to do that, entrepreneurs had to obtain an authorization from the teams: the license. When Antonino told me about his project I immediately thought of the opportunity of doing the same in Italy and since it was a soccer-oriented country I thought about asking the football clubs for a license.

We really started from scratch. Our first move was handing out leaflets outside Torino’s Stadio Comunale. The leaflets showed a photo of Marco Tardelli in action (he let us use it for free out of friendship) and informed supporters that from that moment, and for the first time ever, it was possible to buy original Juventus shirts. All you had to do was request a catalogue by sending 2.000 lire in stamps.

Then you could place an order with payment on delivery.

We handed out approximately 20.000 leaflets and despite the complicated procedure the reaction was extraordinary: we received 12.000 catalogue requests including the equivalent of 24 million lire in postage stamps!

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That is how some very demanding but excellent years started off.

In the meantime me and my first “wife” Daniela had cemented our relationship. Daniela Ovazza started at mct when I had left to work in my family’s firm. Maurizio had recruited her one evening at a restaurant with common friends. She had just graduated in Economy with top marks and had already been offered a job with auditing firm Deloitte, where she was supposed to start a few days later.

Maurizio insisted so much that Daniela changed her mind before dinner was over and for the following four years she became Vitale’s personal assistant, his shadow so to speak, as well as the youngest member on the board of directors in mct’s history.

After falling ill, Maurizio encouraged her to leave the company, as he had done with me, and at precisely that time we had decided to take our relationship a step further and had even begun planning a family. She had just separated from her first husband and we spent a lot of our free time together. We also had to come up with something for her to do. After her experience at mct, Daniela too was keen to be an entrepreneur.

We thought about it a lot and considered many different ideas including some which were quite bizarre. One day we were in London on a short romantic break; we were going back to my brother Francesco’s house where we were guests. Obviously it was raining. At one point I said to her: «Great, as from now we don’t need to think about your venture anymore!». The taxi we were travelling on had just been overtaken by a guy riding a motorbike with a trunk and wearing a top saying: «Messenger Fast Delivery from Desk to Desk». Underneath there was a phone number.

That was the business idea we were looking for.

Back in Italy within a few weeks we opened Mototaxi Srl

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with two guys from Milan who had had the same idea, and started work on 17 December 1984. Daniela had her own company to develop as well, inside a small former workshop in the same industrial plant housing my fsm. Me with Luciano, she with her sister Mirella. At that point Daniela decided to come and live in my attic in via Garibaldi.

To start this new stage of our life together we pooled all our savings and severance pay together and decided we would give it a go until there was money. We could rely on approximately 250 million lire. If we could not make a go of our companies and ran out of money we would go and look for employment.

The beginnings of our companies were really good times although very hard. We truly had no money whatsoever.

We had gone from a situation of absolute privilege – young execs in a successful company with secretaries, designer offices and princely wages – to something which was quite the opposite. Mototaxi’s first headquarters were rather run-down and inadequately heated given that it was a warehouse. I was full of imagination and enthusiasm and drove Daniela who represented the rational element of the couple. We worked like mad. I earned virtually nothing because money was constantly needed to develop fsm, but luckily Daniela managed to bring something home because Mototaxi had started to run nicely almost from the start and did not need much floating capital to grow.

Anyway when a year and a half later, on 25 July 1986, our first child Lorenzo was born, I had to resort to a small loan to cover hospital expenses.

Dear Adriano, if what I’m telling you can really arouse the interest of young people I would like to say something more: although I remember those times as the most difficult in my life, full of sacrifice and risk, at the same time I reckon it undoubtedly was the best time of my life, and

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the same applies to Daniela. We planned and daydreamed with a child’s enthusiasm but we confronted reality with an adult’s composure and awareness. I think that seen from the outside we could only inspire sweetness and affection.

And many did indeed help us if they could. I am especially thinking of a few bank managers who at times gave us credit more because of the life aspirations we represented than because of the figures on our balance sheet. We were anything but carefree but we were very happy.

In the meantime Maurizio Vitale’s conditions were deteriorating: he had stopped all treatment and was getting weaker and weaker. Half way through 1986 he decided to seek admission to Boston’s specialized hospital. Because of an amazing coincidence that still moves both me and Daniela he left from Malpensa on 25 July at 12.30; just in time to visit a new mum and meet Lorenzo, just a few hours old.

Maurizio stayed in Boston until spring 1987. At the end of April he was transferred to Italy with a special flight and died in his own bed on 4 June. Daniela and I had spent his last New Year’s Eve with him in the Boston hospital.

With Maurizio’s death, Daniela and I felt we had gone beyond a point of no return. Both our families, for different reasons, had let us know beyond doubt that we could no longer rely on them, and our great friend and mentor was gone forever.

In the meantime thanks to Gabetti’s mediation I had realized my first strategic operation as an entrepreneur, selling a 20% share of Football Sport Merchandise to Rinascente. I had started as an employee but really I had always behaved as an entrepreneur, and that is what I would continue to do for the rest of my life.

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PART IV Building, listening to yourself

Waiting

This time I have to wait a while: I’m waiting to resume my conversation with Marco. The wait is prolonged, he is in the boardroom where we talked during our previous meetings, checking a new range of tops for the K-Way brand.

I am sitting in front of his desk. At one point he opens the door and shows me a top modelled for us by a pretty employee: it is a sure winner, beautiful, quite unusual. We will soon see it in shop windows.

Marco follows everything in person, including the design stage of his ranges. Or rather he follows this stage above all. In the sense that he does everything as if it was the most important.

Marco apologizes and the door is shut once again. He will be back to resume our conversation soon. But for me the wait is quite profitable: it is a chance to better understand who Marco Boglione really is. An office reveals a lot about its occupant. I look around and I understand who the president of BasicNet is: a man who adds a personal touch to everything he does, and to everything he achieves. He is behind every aspect of his company which is like an extension to his very body. Photography and advertising dominate the room, Marco is obsessed with both. Only two paintings: a giant photograph of his second “wife�, Stella, and a composition made up of a number of square canvases all showing the same landscape, a line of trees, land and a river flowing. Blue and green are the prevailing colours. Along

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the walls a photo showing him and Maradona (he visited this office stunning everyone with his footballer skills) sitting back to back imitating the Robe di Kappa logo. Then photos of Tardelli, Trapattoni, Chiambretti, Vialli, Zaccheroni shot to advertise the company, many of which taken by Marco in person. On the right a huge print of the flyer Boglione and Luciano Antonino handed out in front of Stadio Comunale di Torino thus initiating their venture with Football Sport Merchandise. Here too a framed print of Oliviero Toscani’s immortal photograph, (the famous female bottom in denim) published at the time by an English newspaper with the caption: «If you love me follow me».

Past and present mix together making the memory of this man who has in the meantime entered the room and sat himself behind his desk. This is a place of ideas and discoveries, and I was quite happy to wait.

Marco never stopped imagining his future even when he was working at mct, on the contrary he tried even harder to visualize what he would do to keep his ambition high and carry out his projects.

Daniela was undoubtedly the ideal partner for him (he says it himself), conscientious and solid. She wanted to build a future too, and in her ambitions there was room for a family and some children. To become a mother and a father, which was, as Marco’s mother said, the desire «to make a position for oneself». Marco was starting from scratch but he knew where he was heading: two companies, a family, a lot of hard work. The fact that he was very good at the latter is well expressed by the fact that when Vitale had to replace Boglione after he first left the company to go and work for the family firm he had to employ four people and a personal assistant: Daniela.

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When I met Daniela she was working as Vitale’s assistant.

She came from a good Jewish family from Torino and was born in 1956 in Uruguay, where her parents had moved because of the ww2 madness. The entire family moved back to Italy in 1966, when she was ten years old.

She was the second of five children, four girls and one boy, and soon established herself as a leader even with her brother and sisters, a real point of reference then as she still is now. She always was successful: she is pretty, petite, nervous, feisty, very clever and very good in school. She graduated quickly and as I have already said Deloitte, that looked out for all the best graduates also according to their social background, immediately offered her a job. But she ended up with Maurizio Vitale who had been utterly conquered by her.

She arrived at mct immediately after I had left to go and work for the family firm. One day I had an appointment with Vitale as an insurance agent but alas it was usual for him to leave his guests waiting for a while.

So Daniela came over to entertain me. We chatted for ten minutes in the waiting room and then moved to the coffee machine to carry on our conversation. After about twenty minutes – I don’t really know what happened – I took a

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nice ballpoint pen I had in my shirt pocket, gave it to her and said: «Keep this because one day I will marry you».

And that is what would happen even if Daniela did not take me at all seriously. She was engaged and was due to get married soon, but not with me. I guess there is no point in saying she had struck a chord in me. Anyway a few years later that vision of mine became reality.

At this point, Adriano, I would like to make a brief digression to illustrate my idea of marriage and thus explain the meaning of the inverted commas around the word “wife”…

I have four children with two different women that I have always considered my wives but never married. Or rather I was never married by a priest or a government official. I always felt that accepting the conventional ritual’s formula and words was like taking a short cut, an alibi that could decrease the intensity and importance that, on the contrary, I would have to feel invested exclusively myself, my integrity and loyalty towards my spouse and mother of my children.

If I did not marry with a stencil, with the same formula applied to everyone, I would have felt more responsible, which was exactly what I wanted: to feel inextricably bound to my responsibilities as a parent and as head of a family; just bringing my own face into the picture, the same face I see in the mirror every morning when I shave, the same face I intend to be able to look straight in the eye until I close my eyes forever. So I thought that in case I ever decided to have children I would make a series of irrevocable commitments to their mothers, just based on my dignity.

Here they are: I will do everything in my power to stay with you forever and grow old with you. I will always take care of your maintenance, health

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and quality of life which will never be different from my own. I promise to educate our children according to a culture arising from our common feelings.

The lack of reference to faithfulness is no chance. As a matter of fact I consider it the true separation line between a rich, solid and aware married life together and hypocrisy.

Yet I believe that promising to be faithful could become, under certain circumstances, something that could force me to not keep a promise or lie, the two things I try to avoid at all costs.

These are the values through which I feel inextricably bound to both Stella and Daniela. Even more so now that I have also had the chance to test them after our “married� life came to an end. Our separation lasted five years before we were both ready (almost concurrently) to start a new important relationship. We did not go to lawyers, we always respected each other, and although separated we have always put our commitments (especially the first) before anything else. It took a lot of effort on both sides but we are very proud of what we did and so are our children.

Daniela and I are now certain that if our health allows it we will grow old together.

I think that if on the other hand we had signed a piece of paper including a legal clause for annulment, it would have been much easier, when the going got really tough, to give in to the temptation of parting company via the official legal path, but we would have betrayed our real intimate desires, reflected in those commitments.

Fifteen years later more or less the same thing happened with Stella. One day in June 1998 I was taking part in a seminar of the Council for the United States and Italy, of which I am a member, organized by Studio Ambrosetti

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di Milano in Cernobbio, Lake Como. The conference was very interesting but there was something else behind the speakers’ table attracting my interest far more than what was being said: a young, beautiful Asian girl leading the works with great elegance and professionalism while handling questions from the audience and keeping in contact through an earpiece with her boss sitting at the end of the room. I decided I had to capture her attention and then try to approach her during the coffee break. I kept my eyes on her constantly and obviously she noticed. Later during a break I walked up to her and exchanged the small talk necessary to obtain her e-mail. On that occasion I did not insist further.

After the conference and back in my office I wrote her a few lines trying to be likeable but I never got an answer.

Exactly a year went by before I was to meet her again at the same seminar. We bumped into each other in a corridor inside the hotel housing the convention before it started.

As far as I am concerned I felt my heart swell.

But from the few words we exchanged I realized straight away that I had not been the only one to think back to our brief encounter a year before and to the email I had sent with no reply. From that moment we never left each other again.

A few days later we went out for dinner together for the first time. Stella lived in Milan, worked for Studio Ambrosetti, studied Political Science at Statale and shared an apartment with two young psychoanalysts. It was obvious to me that she was a really good girl, bright and funny, who acted on solid healthy principles. And I also found her extremely pretty. On that first date we stayed up late and talked about ourselves in some detail. At one point Stella told me she wanted a family and children and I replied that I could not promise her a standard marriage ratified by a certificate but that we could talk about children. It was in that moment that I decided she would become my second “wife”. Ten

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years have gone by and luckily I am still as much in love as I was that night.

Stellina is a wonderful person. She was born in China in 1971, but moved to Italy with her family when she was just two. She always helped her family in its different ventures: first in the leather goods industry in Bologna, where she attended Primary and High School; then in the catering business in restaurants in Como and Milan. She is a great companion, very sensitive and generous. When she finally became an Italian citizen in 2001, after waiting for so many years, she cried, sincerely moved, as she swore loyalty to our Constitution.

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Dear Marco, I am sorry to interrupt you. I listened to your words and I can see you are a monument to simplicity, honesty and sincerity when you talk about yourself, even when you talk about your love life…

So I think of my own and of my love for Bianca.

Let me just say I too know that swelling of the heart you mentioned. I remember it as if it were yesterday: it was summer 1979. I was in the corridor of the Humanities building in Torino: I noticed Bianca from a distance as she was trying to sell a magazine to people entering the building. She looked stunning in a green short-sleeve flared dress with a high bodice. In an instant I connected that moment of marvel to all the talking and the time we had spent together in the previous months. How many times had we spoken, also on the phone, about our work as student representatives, of the problems on her degree course, or our studies and of the meetings we often both attended…

I decided to declare my love. One evening we were coming back from a walk with friends along the river Po at Valentino park, I gathered my strength and told her about my feelings for her. But… even before she replied a thought struck my mind: I imagined myself (I don’t know how or why, or maybe I know all too well, it is because I feared rejection) to be a fatally wounded animal on a hunt. I could see myself fall, almost dead and hit the ground…

Marco… it did not go like that… Our story together officially

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started a few days later but it was clear that the first steps had been taken on that evening; it was 17 July.

Thirty years have gone by since then. What did I possibly do to conquer her? I am convinced it was destiny as you so often like to say…

You rascal! Look at what you are making me talk about with the tales of your lovelife…

A few years went by before I thought about marrying her. Yes, marry her with what you call the stencil formula. I wanted to stay with her forever – I did not know how and what the consequences would be. But the concept itself, “forever”, was quite clear to me. I told her five years later in the beautiful church of San Domenico, in Torino; it was 8 July 1984: I promise to always be faithful to you, in joy as well as in sorrow, in sickness and in health and to love you and honour you every day for the rest of my life.

You know Marco, I worked out a number: to this day over 9000 of those days «of the rest of my life» have gone by. It is not that many… but it is not that few either.

Our daughters arrived, first Ivana and then Barbara, and as time goes by they seem more and more like a miracle to me, and not like an inevitable and somewhat mechanical consequence! We have had our share of troubles (with work, between us, our differences…).

Twenty-five years have gone by since that «yes I do» and thirty since that swelling of the heart I told you about. And I am telling you all this without feeling tired in the slightest. It is marvelous!

Have I kept my promises? Fate will tell me, Fate with a capital f, when I will meet with him face to face since I have asked – and always ask – Him to give me His strength and His freedom.

But if you and I keep on talking about women we could lose the thread of our conversation…

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Starting from scratch

Ok, let’s go back to the point we were before we started talking about wives and marriages: back to the mid-80s, at the beginning of the beautiful human and professional adventure that made me an entrepreneur.

Daniela and I started from scratch. She took the first step on 17 December 1984 when she started Mototaxi; I would take the next step six months later by jumping into the Football Sport Merchandise venture. Mototaxi started off with a street billboard campaign: a stylized, futuristic moped simply saying «At last!» and then a big highlighted four-digit phone number: 2602. A strategic choice: four-digit phone numbers are used by big companies. And that is what we wanted to be associated with in the minds of our customers. Fsm would also have a four-digit number, the same 2617 which is now BasicNet’s number, preceded by the prefix 011. We wanted to communicate something simple but important. A modern desk-to-desk parcel and envelope collection and delivery service was at last available in Torino.

The adverts worked, everyone caught on immediately and a few hours after the first billboards went up the phone (luckily!) began to ring. The campaign was very expensive and if the business had not taken off we would have never been able to pay for it.

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The way Mototaxi started off was really great. There was no money to furnish the garage that was to serve as an office but Daniela and Mirella set it up with furniture and above all desks that Vitale was throwing out of mct.

The biggest expense was with the only telephone company of the time, sip. At first Mototaxi could not afford to buy a real switchboard, but had 20 phone lines installed, necessary to handle everyday business and to get a fourdigit number, with twenty separate telephones. Daniela was lucky in that sip also gave her twenty boxes full of phone books, which were completely useless since the phone lines could only receive calls. But those boxes came in very handy to prop up some of the recycled desks that were missing a leg.

Years later Daniela and I had an adorable discussion after I encouraged her to buy some new desks, since at that point she could afford them, and she refused to do so on the grounds that the old ones propped up by the phone books were just fine!

Mototaxi needed a very simple organization, more or less, that of a radio taxi firm. Customers phone in, the operator enters their request with all the necessary details in a digital interface which transfers it to the radio operator who calls it out on the radio and assigns it to the messenger closest to the collection address. Thing is, Mototaxi started operating without any of this. Daniela and Mirella started without computers, radio link or a switchboard.

For the first three or four months messengers would scatter around the city equipped with a bagful of phone tokens and would keep in contact with the head office from a phone box until they got a delivery. It was utter madness: the two girls frantically answered customers’ calls and then started lifting up a phone after the other asking the messengers where they were to optimize the route. They carried on this way until they were sure that it

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could work. Only then did they start leasing all the necessary equipment and the business took off once and for all.

We had identified and satisfied a latent market need. To be completely clear I just want to stress that in the mid-80s there were no cellphones, internet or faxes.

Things were going well, we were gaining experience on the job, and learning how to be entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, the new company and its partners were under a sword of Damocles. It was enough to ruin everyone’s sleep. We were accused of violating employment regulations because of our messengers. We had defined them as occasional workers. Most of them were students who found a way of supporting themselves and could always decide by themselves whether to come in for work or not; nobody could or wanted to force them into anything.

That is not what inps and Ispettorato del Lavoro thought (Italian official bodies respectively in charge of state pension contributions and safeguarding workers, translator’s note), and they expected us to offer full employment to all of them.

Unbelievable but true. Because of all this a year later we were notified with a fine for over 1 billion lire. A terrifying sum considering that in one year Mototaxi had invoiced 600 million lire. Starting from scratch we had developed what was beginning to look like a winning idea and we were expecting our first child while a billionaire fine was looming over our heads with over one hundred criminal proceedings related to our workers. Not bad really.

In the meantime I had taken over at the helm of Football Sport Merchandise. It had its share of problems too. Unlike Mototaxi, Football Sport Merchandise needed more floating capital; before seeing a return we had to finance the stock, put a catalogue together and distribute it, wait for orders to come in, prepare them and send them out. It

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was a rather long cycle so fsm had to resort to credit right from the start.

At the time banks were closer to businesses on their territory, they knew small companies and their owners quite well so at first it was not difficult for me and my partner Antonino to secure a first loan of 50 million lire from the director of the Rivarolo Canavese branch of Cassa di Risparmio di Torino. But after a few months that money was not enough. We obtained a further twenty million from our local San Paolo branch but they did not last long either.

The financial situation half way through 1985 was not rosy at all: suppliers were quite tolerant but in September we did not have the money to pay vat or wages. Although we were owed a lot of money no one would give us any more credit. The situation was desperate also because Luciano had not kept the accounts before my arrival at the company.

Every day a new surprise would pop up: unregistered invoices found by chance in a drawer, duties missing from the books and so on. Mototaxi had already received its superfine of over one billion and fsm was ready to file for bankruptcy. There were a dozen employees in the company but they had no specific roles. For example no one was responsible for administration yet the company invoiced almost a billion lire a year. At this point I was forced to take the situation in hand.

Among the most mature and reliable people working at fsm one was German and another came from a Jewish family. On these grounds I decided that the German, who had studied languages, would be responsible for our administration – Germans are famous for being punctual and precise – while “the Jew” would be our Purchasing Manager.

The situation was so bad that I had to resort to the savings me and Daniela had decided not to touch, which we

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used to survive. In any case they were not enough so I had to ask my father for help. In this context I achieved my first increase in capital: 100 million lire, of which 50 were ours and 50 were on loan.

Yet, despite these circumstances we were untroubled and I carried on thinking and dreaming big.

Now, dear Adriano, I have to make a digression or you might think I’m a fool. My enthusiasm and imagination were based on something quite factual which was difficult to transmit to others but that for me was a certainty, a bit like religious faith. In those years I had bought my first personal computer, an Apple II, followed by a IIc and by my first Macintosh.

At the time, and Daniela remembers it well, I spent entire nights trying to understand that new world which, probably thanks to the aptitude for maths Brother Roberto had discovered in me during my time in school, I found irresistibly fascinating.

During those nights I began to imagine the extraordinary opportunities that it would provide to business men who would manage to integrate its latest evolution within their companies. At the time Internet did not exist yet but you could already imagine many of the revolutionary applications that would have been possible with pcs and so-called micro-software dedicated to specific company procedures.

That is what my optimism was based on, and it still is today. Here is an example: the first mail order catalogues fsm produced for the fan bases of big clubs, a bit like any colour magazine, would cost approximately 1 million a page just to design, not including the cost of paper and printing. It was a huge amount which massively raised the company’s point of balance and limited our capacity for offer because we could not afford many issues.

I was sure that with the new machines and software which

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would soon be available the cost of a layout before printing would fall to approximately 50.000 lire by doing it inside the company itself. And that is what happened a few years later and it allowed us to establish ourselves on the specialized mail order market.

In 1985 I started to invest what I was earning in software for my companies already imagining a fast reliable and flexible company, managed in real time without paper, which is exactly what BasicNet is. I would already think to myself: «If I can pull off something like that, why shouldn’t it go well? I will surely be more competitive than others and the company will grow». Today, Adriano, on any website belonging to our group there is a little caption at the bottom of each page saying: «Copyright © 1985-2009 BasicNet S.p.A. All Rights Reserved». The same 1985 we are talking about, and many of the software we still use every day, for example to process online orders, were written exactly at a time when we could have suddenly been forced to file for bankruptcy. Beyond what people may have thought that was the solid and substantial reason for my optimism, even in the most difficult moments: the power of it, the reliability of data management procedures that if well planned would enable me to speed up and improve the efficiency of my company, boosting its growth, profit margins and ability to compete. That was it, and it still is today.

Our offices were ugly and mine was particularly so. Before Luciano and I moved in it had been a fuel warehouse and years later it still smelled rather bad. When it rained hard water would pour in, flooding the place but I did not care. I actually loved it. It is during those years that I began to value the word “basic”, that later became fundamental in my life and in all my enterprises. Quality and efficiency without unnecessary frills.

On 10 December 1985 a journalist came to see us for the first time looking for a Juventus shirt to give to his son

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for Christmas. The following day la Repubblica published a whole page dedicated to our company. It is interesting to read the opening now.

From la Repubblica, 11 December 1985: We are in Torino, via Bologna. (…) Lots of nondescript hangars marked with numbers.

No. 70 is home to Football Sport Merchandise.

A room full of very tidy shelves; half a dozen young people work here, rock music fills the air, in a corner offices and a number of ibm terminals. Fsm is a young company with a joint stock worth 99 million lire, balance certified by Price Waterhouse, at the helm young entrepreneurs. (…) Marco Boglione, former Marketing Director of the Kappa group, is its President and Managing Director. He looks like a Savoy yuppie, talks about “up to date” (in English in the original, translator’s note) and of “entrepreneurial feeling” (…).

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Despite my enthusiasm and the interest the company was also raising in the media, the balance in 1985 was negative.

Back from yet another trip to the States to see what was new I once again turned to Gianluigi Gabetti for advice. I had a precise idea of the company I wanted to develop, I would build it later with BasicNet, but at that point I was in serious financial difficulty. I told him I needed a strategic industrial partner to obtain the credibility and trust from the banks I could no longer elicit with my own resources.

I asked him to help me secure two meetings I thought might help me improve the situation. One with Rinascente, where, being a large distribution company, I could offer my experience in specialized mail order sales, and the other with Silvio Berlusconi, because he could potentially be interested in mail order sales via television. What is currently known as Media Shopping. At first Gabetti, as usual, encouraged me to keep going and then he kindly set up for me two very important meetings: the first with Berlusconi who was not into politics yet but was an extraordinary entrepreneur who I wildly admired; the second with Nicolò Nefri, the powerful Managing Director of Gruppo Rinascente.

The meeting with Berlusconi, set for 12 January 1986,

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was cancelled by his secretary at the last minute because of issues related to the launch of La Cinq in France. The second took place in piazza Carlo Erba 6, Milan. I still do not know and never will whether it was to please Gabetti or because of an actual interest on his behalf, but my meeting with Nefri lasted a lot longer than expected. Finally he asked me: «What would you like us to do for you and how much money do you need?». «No money – I said – I would just like Rinascente to become my partner.» He replied: «If I agreed would you be willing to definitively cancel your meeting with Berlusconi?». I enthusiastically said yes. «Then it’s a deal; discuss it with Garbolino» Nefri concluded. Ezio Garbolino was the Groups’ Financial Director.

Thus Rinascente became Football Sport Merchandise’s partner with a 20% share and a capital increase reserved to it, on an overall evaluation of the company, of approximately one and a half billion lire. On that occasion we also changed from Srl to SpA (the equivalent of Ltd to Plc, translator’s note). Fsm could not yet offer guarantees but within a month its overall credit with Italian banks went from 120 million lire to over a billion.

The partnership with Rinascente would be indispensable for the growth of fsm over the following years.

From 1986 to 1990 we changed headquarters three times.

Our business grew and reached a turnover of approximately 12 billion lire and had 20 employees. Football Sport Merchandise now had a big partner and a grand dream to realize.

At the time we had an open business policy. Thanks to the software and the equipment we had developed to produce merchandising catalogues for football fans we decided to try and sell other kinds of products with the same method. We established MusiKa Srl, a specialized catalogue for music lovers that looked like a good niche in the mar-

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ket but was a total flop. Although for different reasons the same happened with Moda Mail Srl, an attempt to sell yarn to all the women who did knitting along with diy kits for making designer clothes. Inside the parcel along with the yarn and the instructions to make the sweater there also was an original designer label. We contacted Missoni and Versace but they did not believe in the project and refused permission to use their brands. I realized that without great designer labels there was no hope of succeeding and this enterprise did not last long.

We also took a shot at a catalogue of high quality handmade food products, Villa d’Agliè Srl. There is an interesting story to this venture because it certainly was the most disastrous I have ever undertaken: we printed over 20.000 catalogues and for the first time in my life I let myself be talked into buying mailing lists. After all the costs incurred in printing and sending them out we got two, yes, two orders! For a few years we made Christmas gift packs for a few companies belonging to acquaintances and then closed down.

Not happy with one bad experience in the food business I opened Caviar Service Srl: we wanted to sell caviar, lobsters and American steaks. Customers had to order the goods by phone and would receive them within 24 hours. It did not last long ma on the up side I found some excellent wholesalers of these delicious foods that I have kept and still use when organizing luxurious and succulent dinners with my closest friends.

We even sold for Fabbri Editori a collection of booklets on the life of the Pope to be paid in instalments.

We had already bought our first as/400, an innovative ibm machine that could work as a relational database even if it was a compact system. The first applications we wrote for that machine gave us a feeling of omnipotence so I nonchalantly entered into any kind of commercial venture.

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Another business I set up with Daniela and a dear friend of ours who was into bicycles and triathlon was pats Srl (Prodotti ad Alta Tecnologia per lo Sport – High-Tech Products for Sport). One day in 1988 I walked past a bike shop in Soho and was struck by what I saw in the window. It was a mountain bike, a virtually unknown object in Italy, but it had a very special feature: it was made in aluminium and the frame’s tubes were huge compared to those on traditional bicycles. I went in and got the phone number of the manufacturer in Connecticut, Cannondale. I put off my departure and the following day I went to see them. It was a fantastic company housed in a former old train station, established and run by a very special character: Joe Montgomery, a typical American who looked like he belonged to a Ralph Lauren catalogue, fifty years old, handsome and charming; during his life he had worked as a small commercial airplane pilot, as an estate agent in Bahamas, as a banker and had finally decided to build the bicycle of the future. Joe listened to me immediately, probably that was all he was waiting for, and the following day I left for Italy with a mandate as the exclusive importer for my country of that weird and innovative bicycle named after a small abandoned rail station in Connecticut.

That product enjoyed sensational success: the first container of bicycles we imported was sold in the bat of an eyelid. We immediately organized a national sales network made up of strapping 30-something sports enthusiasts with a special interest in bicycles. We also purchased distribution rights for other emerging brands, the product of Californian creativity and of Silicon Valley technologies of those years, which would later become famous like Giro helmets and the revolutionary GripShift system.

Pats gave us a lot of satisfaction. In 1993 we sold to Cannondale the business we had developed in Italy with their products, they established their European headquarters in

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Holland, and Daniela and I left the company passing on to the other partners the honour and the onus of carrying on the business.

In the meantime we continued to develop our original enterprise selling football shirts and accessories with the clubs’ logos. We still sold via mail order but we had already opened our first Fan’s Shop and were getting ready to open twenty of them on the grounds of the new Stadio delle Alpi that was to be finished in time for Italia 90. In 1988 we had also opened BasicMerchandise Srl – the first company with a “basic” in its name – to produce the football t-shirts, tops and hats we already sold, manufactured by others, with our own brand: basic.

The world cup was just around the corner and an exuberant company called Football Sport Merchandise could not keep away from it. We worked on two ideas, both quite good I have to say, that also yielded good results, one of them excellent.

The first was obtaining an exclusive license for manufacturing the Cup’s mascot in all its three-dimensional representations: any kind of soft toy and figurine. Luca di Montezemolo, who was the organization’s director, gave me the go-ahead and tapped me for a substantial guaranteed minimum on the contract, but the operation was a success and quite profitable too.

The other idea looked less profitable on paper but was a must for us given that we dealt in all the best Football Clubs’ merchandise. We had decided to produce a catalogue with all the official merchandise of the national teams that were coming to Italy to play. In order to do this we had previously contacted all the most important federations and my friend Domenico Sindico, future attorney, who had recently left a prestigious studio in Torino specialized in brands and patents to basically work full time on our projects, had literally

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travelled the globe visiting them and securing their authorization. The catalogue was to be called The Fan’s Supermarket: the cover design was ready and we were just about to go to print when suddenly Oscar Massari, the owner of a communications and licensing agency who had already worked with Ferrero in the previous World Cup in Mexico, gave me an idea. Ferrero had been looking to acquire the right to promote its excellent products throughout 1990 using the symbol of the World Cup, becoming one of its sponsors, but they were beaten on the finishing line by Barilla who through a partnership with the American Mars Corporation had been able to offer more money.

Therefore Ferrero had presented the advertisers with a great challenge: finding an effective alternative idea to sponsorship, a kind of plan B. There was very little time.

I thought about it a lot and one night, during a weekend in the mountains, I had a great idea: we would hand over to this giant of the food industry our Fan’s Supermarket; instead of selling our products we would ask consumers to collect stamps off Ferrero’s product packaging and send them to us instead of money. The result was a colossal operation.

In the first run Ferrero printed eight million catalogues instead of the 70.000 we had envisaged. The products with the stamps to exchange for the Italian, Brazilian or Argentinian shirt literally sold out in supermarkets. And that is how Ferrero managed for the first time to overtake its rival from Emilia in bakery products thanks to the shopping stamp collection of the century which was called «Vinci Campione» (lit. «Win Champion», translator’s note). It was a very intense collaboration but very profitable too. Ferrero relied on us for many other issues related to the huge logistics machine activated by over one million Italian families that completed the collection and received the chosen prize. Other two operations followed that first one in the

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following years, one offering sweatshirts from the most prestigious American universities and the other products with the logos of Italian Serie A football teams.

It looked like everything was starting to work out. We had also become distributors for the American firm Starter that produced those shiny jackets with the names of American teams that were highly fashionable among young consumers at the time. The company’s accounts had much improved and we were about to close the year’s accounts with a considerable profit margin for the first time: something around one billion lire.

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A nasty surprise

One sunny day I was on the motorway to Milan heading for Linate Airport to fly to Moscow when I received an unpleasant phone call from Renate Hendelmeier, our company secretary who had in the meantime effectively become the real head of the company. Early that morning we had received a visit from the Work Inspectorate and the Police.

They had stopped all activity, sealed wardrobes and drawers and were questioning all our employees. We could not understand what was going on.

Once I got back from the ussr, where I had been forced to go as I could not cancel my meeting, I realized things were quite serious. I met the inspector, a decent chap forced by his position to fully follow bureaucratic guidelines. He told me the situation was grim; he realized there had been no malicious intent on our behalf and that we had not tried to cheat anyone, including the State, but that unfortunately he would have to issue us with a fine that according to his calculations would be colossal. He asked me if I knew anyone that could get to the Inspectorate’s top spheres and I obviously replied I did not. This is what we were guilty of: over the years we had taken on about thirty people through a Training Contract. On those occasions I interviewed the candidate and if I decided to take him on Renate asked Re-

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gione Piemonte for the contract concession. Although Regione Piemonte was prompt enough, it took a few weeks, a month at most, for the authorization to be issued. During this time we quite naively asked the person in question to start work and paid them for the time previous to receiving the authorization as if they were self-employed, deducting in advance the appropriate tax.

Everything was thus apparently legal and in order. Unfortunately among the clauses to the Training Contract there was one stating that there could have been no working relationship between the employer and the resource previous to the start of the contract. Thus all the Training contracts we had issued to employ our collaborators, many of whom had gone on to permanent contracts, had to be considered null and consequently all the tax evasion and fines, that had considerably increased over the years had to be worked out.

The inspector seemed to be sincerely sorry but according to him he could do nothing to help us avoid the worst; at one stage during one of our interviews he looked at me straight in the eye and hinting at our new, fresh, bright open-space office said to me: «But Boglione, a lad like yourself, with such a nice company, couldn’t you pay these people under the table for the few days before the contract was valid?». I turned it into a joke: «When I grow up, if I become Prime Minister, I don’t want to have any skeletons in my closet!

Unfortunately we are so stupid in this company that we do not pay cash». In any case the fine amounted to over one billion and a half lire. Uncanny.

In the first two years after the World Cup I carried on opening new business lines. We entered into a joint venture with Swingster Inc. Kansas City, a much bigger company than our own, to develop the kind of promotional activities for large companies that we had started dealing in thanks to Ferrero, as well as other enterprises including opening the first Western-style supermarket in Kazakh-

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stan and a heli-skiing business for tourists on that country’s mountains.

Rinascente, our partner, did not want to hear about appealing and suing inps over the heavy and unfair fine looming on the company, something we were doing for Mototaxi; the initial enthusiasm for our partnership was rapidly cooling off. Salvation came through a measure by the government of the time, the possibility of applying for one of its many remission schemes that helped us limit the damage which still amounted to a total of 900 million lire.

All the profit made in those happy times dissolved but at least we bought back our freedom.

On the other hand the market conditions so that we could carry on renewing licenses with Italy’s biggest football teams had changed a lot. The big sports companies, Nike at the forefront, had raised their interest in football sponsorship and offered the clubs a lot of money but expected exclusive rights. Unlike what was happening in the States, as time went by our business would be wiped out because of the direct intervention of the big companies.

Our partner had also grown tired of our company and if that was not enough the final balance for 1993, that I had assured Rinascente’s Managing Director would definitely be positive, was actually a disaster because of the unexpected bankruptcy of a big Greek customer and a couple of other unforeseen events.

When I had a look at the books with Renate at the beginning of January 1994 I had to face facts. There was no way out. Losses were high, our debts amounted to over two billion lire and we would have to immediately recapitalize the company, something our main partner would never agree to do. I looked around for potential investors but I realized it was not an option. At the time I also met Alessandro Benetton who was then very young and setting up his company, 21 Investimenti. It was an interesting meeting

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with a young man who had just returned from the States, tired but very lucid, quite focused on what I was telling him and, unlike others, very sincere.

«You don’t have much time – he said – and I don’t want to make you waste any. We are not interested in investing but thanks for telling me about it.»

It really looked like we would not be bouncing back: goodbye dreams of glory, goodbye to all the dreams of a young man who wanted to be an entrepreneur. Maybe my family was right…

When it was looking like the end a historical turning point was reached. On 14 January 1994 Maglificio Calzificio Torinese was declared bankrupt. Seven years after Vitale had passed away the family business he had loved so much had followed him.

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PART V An amazing adventure

“Mission impossible”

I was told Maglificio Calzificio Torinese had gone bankrupt

by Aldo Berta, a former colleague who worked there (and still works with me today). I was in a car and I could not believe my ears. It was the most incredible thing I could imagine. But I remember that even before I put the phone down I was already mulling over the mad idea of buying up that big company, me with my little firm which at the time was in the red, full of debts and had a partner who could not wait to leave.

I had already entertained the idea of buying Maglificio Calzificio Torinese. It was known that the company was not doing well, and I had also talked about it with Moreno Martini, a lawyer married to a close friend of mine who had briefly dealt with the file for a well known merchant bank based in Torino. But the company’s whole set of problems and debts made it a “mission impossible” at least for me, as I already had loads of problems.

I remember that shortly before Christmas 1993 one late afternoon me and Moreno agreed to drop the idea: we exchanged our Christmas wishes and parted saying that we could resume talks if mct went bankrupt, which is exactly what happened less than a month later.

The strategy was crystal clear to me. My small, young

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and computerized company, who had been struggling to survive and expand for years, only needed one thing. No, Adriano, I’m not talking about money, or at least not just about money: it needed its own brand. The business model was: a company based on a network of entrepreneurs we supplied with all the necessary services to deal in our brands on their territory, giving them a license for production and distribution. It was quite clear to me and my closest collaborators, but it would not work on the medium and long term if the brands we had belonged to others who could at any time drop us. On the contrary if we could rely on established brands such as Kappa and Robe di Kappa our proceeds would grow to the point that we would be able to stop dealing in “anything and everything” to survive and concentrate exclusively on our core business which was “making t-shirts”.

The first person I called after talking to Berta was Daniela who, being quite pragmatic, after a few moments of silence just said: «It was inevitable…». She had immediately understood what I was thinking from the tone of my voice and suddenly, like she often does, started raging against me, predicting loads of trouble if I were to get caught up in that mess. She said in so many words that it had «already lead Maurizio to an early grave». She tried up to the last minute to get me to promise I would drop the idea and I only managed to put the phone down when I got home.

I then called my friend Motoo Hagiwara, director of Phenix Co. who had been distributing Kappa in Japan for ten years with great success. Before going bankrupt, mct invoiced about 80 billion lire in Europe, and Phenix, sold Kappa products for almost 200 billion just in Japan. I had known Hagiwara well since my days at mct with Vitale and at the beginning of the 90s he had also become a distribu-

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tor for my BasicMerchandise. He was aghast at the news: he really had a lot to lose.

During the weekend I got in touch with Moreno and talked the thing over with Carlo Pavesio, a very close friend of mine and highly valued lawyer, the man who more than anyone had shared, supported and defended my ideas over the last 20 years.

Carlo knew everything about the situation at fsm and could not see how we could step in given that the company was already in serious financial trouble by itself. Moreno, on the other hand, did not know much about mct’s bankruptcy or about my company’s situation.

I also discussed the issue with Paolo Pellizzari, a third degree cousin on my mother’s side who had introduced me to William Fung, my partner to start manufacturing BasicMerchandise products in China.

Early on Monday morning I called Berta and asked him to find me the trustee in bankruptcy’s phone number. A little while later I was sat at my desk staring at a phone number and going over what I would say to this man I had never met. That time, unlike others when you know what you want to say but do not know how, I did not even know what I wanted to say. I decided to call him anyway and tell him the truth: that I did not know how but I would like to try and acquire mct’s brands. That is exactly how it went: it was a very short phone call. The trustee was called Enrico Stasi, and had been described by Moreno, who had met him in other circumstances, as a tough, surly type, so I was not particularly impressed by our conversation. He just said that it was too early to start any negotiation: the company had just gone bankrupt and he had just been appointed. He told me to call him after a week. I tried to introduce myself but he ended the call with an offish: «I know who you are». I could not tell him anything; the only thing I clumsily managed to mumble was that I hoped I had been the first to express an interest.

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Behind my office in via Padova, there was a little caretaker’s flat that we had renovated and set up as a guest room for visiting fsm business contacts.

On the same Monday afternoon I summoned my generals. Carlo Pavesio, Moreno Martini, Aldo Berta and Roberta Alberghini former mct, plus my trusty collaborators of the time Renate Hendelmeier and William Carelli, with the young and promising new employee Paola Bruschi.

We decided to kit those rooms out as the project’s headquarters (our bunker!) and the first thing I did I gave it a name. Our new crazy adventure would be called tok, which stands for Take Over Kappa. No one knew how to do it yet but we wanted to buy Kappa.

Everyone took on a specific task. Berta and Alberghini would find the last available data on the company’s sales and organize a meeting with the most important reps in the area for me. We decided that Moreno would be our lawyer and handle our relationship with the receivership and that Carlo would work with me on the corporate and financial part of the operation. Carelli would think of how to implement our small but ultra-modern and efficient data management system to handle a much bigger company. Renate would keep an eye on the figures. Paoletta would serve as a secre-

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tary and support our little task force’s communications. The first palpable result of that project was that a few days later Carlo had a litter of cats and he called the first one Tok. Apart from that nothing extraordinary happened in the first week. In the meanwhile the second call to the trustee was getting closer. On paper the situation was really desperate.

Fsm urgently needed an injection of capital of at least 1.3 billion lire or it would go bankrupt. Rinascente, who had recently bought Antonino’s share too, wanted out and was not at all favourably disposed. Also our new potential partner in China did not know about our operating loss.

On Thursday morning we came to a turning point; Motoo Hagiwara called me from Tokyo and told me he wanted to come to Torino as soon as possible to find out more and asked me for support. During the weekend William Fung let me know through Paolo Pellizzari that he was sorry about the losses at fsm and the consequent failure of our first joint venture but that he thought my idea of trying to acquire the Kappa brand very interesting to realize our plan on a larger scale.

I was quite encouraged by that attitude.

I realized that at Phenix they were literally panicking at the thought that the Kappa brand could be bought by a large corporation and that they would lose exclusive distribution rights for Japan.

At first I thought they wanted to use me as a foothold to purchase Kappa themselves. But I very soon realized that they were very uncomfortable about considering business and investments outside Japan. I realized they wanted just one thing; and I can say that it was exactly on the ability to satisfy their wish that I effectively built my future.

I talked about it with Carlo, Moreno and the other bunker mates: everyone liked the idea right away. At first it seemed like absolute madness: why would the Japanese pay for the

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brand just for Japan the same amount we would have to pay for the same brand worldwide? The reason was obvious to me: Phenix did not want to run any risks on its territory, it was very wealthy and knew perfectly well that someone had to take care of Kappa outside Japan and it was much better if it was a small, easily controlled company like ours than one of their weightier competitors. They were also quite aware of the political, bureaucratic and union-related problems of our country and consequently did not want to know about operating here.

As agreed I called Stasi for the second time on Monday morning. My aim was clear: meet him as soon as possible and expound my plan. He gave me an appointment for a few days later; in the meanwhile I had written to Hagiwara’s boss, the great president Tajima (obviously known as Tajima San!) a letter that would go down in history.

It was a very brief letter and I am still very proud of its subject. A bit like I am of my photographic business in boarding school or the ungrammatical ad published in La Stampa to sell German Shepherds posing as a German: a little trick of sensitivity.

After much thought I had decided against writing on the subject heading something like «Kappa Purchase», «tok – Take Over Kappa» or something of the sort, technical and professional and just wrote «Zero Risk Opportunity».

What I was really keen to communicate was that they would not be running any risks! I also thought that the word «zero» would be very important for the Japanese, and that they would be impressed by its use in the first line of such a delicate letter.

I think that is how it went. In the letter I said: if you help me buy Kappa I commit to selling you the brand for Japan forever at a pre-arranged price! No trouble due to the mess that mct had made around the world, to its workers living off redundancy funds and all the rest.

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But I needed a final financial guarantee from them to purchase the assets from the courts. The Japanese would lay out the money only when the brand was transferred.

They replied they were very interested in the idea and Hagiwara immediately jumped back on a plane.

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Take-off

I first sat down in front of Stasi at 6 pm of a Monday afternoon. I told him a bit about me and stressed the fact that I had a powerful Japanese group backing me.

He was very polite but did not dwell much on what I was telling him. At one point he took the floor and after making me understand that he knew perfectly well who I was and the kind of relationship I had had in the past with mct, he told me it was a very complex operation and quite taxing for the buyer. It would all have to go through the official receiver and be approved by the unions. As if to say: «Watch it lad, this ain’t no game». He added that he had already commissioned the necessary surveys to estimate the value of the company’s assets but he already knew that most of it was in the brands. He also told me that to safeguard that value he would at first look for an entrepreneur to rent the bankrupt company, providing continuity to the business and its marketing investments. Later he would put assets up for auction. Whoever would rent the company had to commit to taking part in the auction with a minimum offer to be agreed previously.

At the time it seemed an extremely complicated procedure, but I obviously pretended to understand it perfectly and acted as if I was equipped to act as required. As I was

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leaving I dropped a line on the fact that having been the first to express an interest I ought to get a little bonus in case some competitors turned up.

Stasi’s reply reminded me of those by Brother Roberto in boarding school and felt like a blow to the stomach: «I never said you were the first».

Me and my big mouth! Maybe I had annoyed him.

Mulling over the meeting I became convinced that the operation Stasi had described was tailor made for me.

Within a couple of weeks I would have to recapitalize fsm, convince Rinascente to fork out more money instead of dropping out, convince our potential partner in China to support the new project and negotiate the terms of the financial agreement with the Japanese, as well as putting together a credible 3-year business plan for the Italian banks that would have to provide a second guarantee on top of the Japanese guarantee. As if that were not enough I also wanted to be the first to get in touch with the unions.

A time started that in retrospect I can say was fantastic, with moments of great drama but a lot of fun too.

It was then that I started sleeping at the office at times.

The first obstacle was Rinascente. I got in touch with Ezio Garbolino who dealt with us and also sat on the board at fsm. We decided to meet late afternoon the following day. I drove to Milan with Carlo Pavesio; Massimo Boidi, a friend and company business consultant met up with us there.

The meeting got off to a difficult start. The first news was that the last financial year’s balance was a lot worse than we expected. Thereby a recapitalization was needed. Secondly, I tried to convince Garbolino and his assistant that our future looked rosy because in the meantime mct had gone bankrupt and I had thought of buying it up. As I spoke Garbolino became more and more somber and his state of growing alarm was obvious to us all. When I had finished

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a deep silence reigned for a few seconds, which seemed never-ending to me and during which Rinascente’s Chief Financial Officer looked for an adequate reply. I could see him trying but in the end he could not find anything better to do than stare at me in the eyes and say: «Boglione, you are insane».

Frankly he took me by surprise and my first instinct was to burst out laughing but luckily before I could utter a sound Carlo had already taken the floor and was busy defending me.

«Sir, “insane” is a bit much!» and off he was with an address paying tribute to my honesty and entrepreneurial spirit.

The meeting did not end well. Garbolino said he would inform the Group’s Managing Director at once and that he would not be happy about things.

Carlo and I left the Rinascente building in Segrate around 7 pm with our tail between our legs. We were rather pensively walking towards the outdoor car park when Carlo snapped me out of my grief crying out: «Isn’t that your car?».

As a matter of fact a young man, clearly from Eastern Europe and wearing a black leather jacket, was at the wheel of my virtually new fiat Croma 2.0 Turbo, driving off after having just stolen it. It was the icing on the cake.

We got back to Torino in a taxi under a snowstorm. Halfway through the journey I learned that my eight-year-old son Lorenzo, who had gone to the mountains with my brother Chicco because I was late and Daniela was working in South America, was alone in the woods under the snow: the snowmobile that was to take him to Monti della Luna could not reach him because of heavy snowfalls and it was getting dark.

As I was trying to handle that emergency, trying to contact all those who could give me information or help Lorenzo, the battery on my cellphone went dead near Novara.

The following hour’s journey home lasted a lifetime.

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In the following days we tried to come up with a way to find money to recapitalize fsm. It was not simple but I got a loan from a bank by using the house Daniela and I had moved to in the meantime: it had been bought for us by our respective families and was in our name. I also managed to convince my family (mother, father and brothers) to put together the 500 million I still needed. Obviously they would hand over the money only if the operation with the Japanese went through. Otherwise no one would have to recapitalize fsm.

At the end of the week I had managed to get together 60% of the resources needed to carry on but we were still waiting for Rinascente’s decision, who had to guarantee its part, 40%, peanuts to a giant like them. A negative decision would be a tragedy for us; first of all we would not be able to find the money we needed; secondly if such an important and established partner were to leave it would send out a really bad signal to all those involved, and surely put the word «end» to all our plans.

On the Friday night before the meeting with Stasi scheduled for the following Wednesday we got a concise fax from Rinascente’s legal department: they had no intention of balancing the losses and agreeing to the small recapitalization we needed. We were back at square one.

Pavesio did not take it well and immediately hit back officially reminding Rinascente that its attitude, although perfectly legal, would deeply and disproportionately damage fsm, inevitably driving it to bankruptcy; and all because they would not contribute a small amount at such a crucial moment.

We tried to contact Rinascente’s Managing Director, Giuseppe Tramontana directly, as it appeared he had vetoed the operation in person, but Garbolino and his secretary put up a united front and we failed.

The only thing left to do was to write an angry letter.

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At that point we would not go down quietly. If we were to go bankrupt and because of such an arrogant and irresponsible decision, we would vent our anger and look for compensation for the huge damage we would suffer, which could on the other hand, easily be avoided. As if to say: careful, you have decided to pull out but watch it, if we go bankrupt because of this decision we will do our best to get back at you for years to come.

The letter was very well written, yet it seemed very harsh to me and I was quite worried about that giant’s reaction.

Pavesio, on the contrary was untroubled and very determined, and just as he often does at critical moments of our ventures he just spoke the magic words – «It’s all under control!» – and carried on.

The letter arrived Monday morning at 7 as a recorded delivery. At 5 pm on the same day Carlo was summoned to Milan to draw up the terms for recapitalization.

Events speeded up during the following week. I attended the first meetings with mct’s union representatives who joined the cause although with some wariness. Many employees registered with the unions and many at the rsa had worked with me a few years earlier so they trusted me; this played a crucial part.

I had also met with Stasi again, who told me the surveys’ results and the minimum price I would have to guarantee to acquire brands, real estate and warehouses. The total was 21 billion lire.

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Phenix representatives arrived in Torino and one day later Hagiwara and I shook hands in the kitchen of our tok bunker: 22 billion for the brands in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. That’s right, one billion more than what I needed to buy everything up.

We signed a binding agreement to be confirmed by a credit letter worth 22 billion to be given to Italian banks as a guarantee. The letters were punctual and had been issued

by Sumitomo Bank, a huge Japanese corporation that at the time was the biggest bank in the world.

It seemed the wind was finally blowing from behind. Stasi also took me to the courts to expound my industrial plan to the official receiver, Vittoria Nosengo, and the meeting went well. I had the impression that Nosengo was intrigued

by Stasi’s project to attempt the operation with someone like me, financially weak, but quite bold as an entrepreneur.

Nosengo just expressed some doubts regarding my ability to handle such large amounts of money, but Stasi already knew about the Sumitomo letters and he reassured her.

After a few endless meetings with the unions I reached an agreement with them: I would initially take on only 37 people but I gave my word that I would do everything I could to give jobs to all 213 who were on redundancy funds. They

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trusted me and left it up to me to set up criteria for calling people back.

We had finally taken off.

At this stage everyone at fsm had been working for almost a month on integrating mct. We had decided to give it a try regardless of what the probabilities of success were.

I told my men: «Let’s pretend the acquisition has already gone through. If something goes wrong we will just chuck it all out. But if it goes well, the day following a signed agreement we will be ready to take over the firm and save autumn ’94, which is paramount to balance the books».

We knew perfectly well that even if we found all the money to pay the receiver, we would have no additional resources to invest in our relaunch campaign. We could only rely on our earnings. Usually autumn and winter collections are presented between November and December of the previous year but that year mct had skipped the event.

Also, because of the bankruptcy, it had not even managed to deliver all of its summer orders. Our products risked being off the shelves for a whole year. A true disaster for the brands. We worked eighteen-hour days without a break and we were obviously neglecting almost all of fsm’s usual business.

One day we all realized together that if the acquisition did not go through we would not stand a chance of avoiding bankruptcy. We were destroying what little was left of our company hoping we would succeed in our “mission impossible”. In this case too, we had nonchalantly gone beyond the point of no return.

After meeting the official receiver and signing an agreement with the unions we felt a bit relieved thanks to a credit letter from the biggest bank in the world. We successfully finished our plan for balancing fsm’s losses, which in the end also included Rinascente, and we were waiting for an

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answer from one of the Italian banks we had asked to issue a guarantee for the court based on Sumitomo’s guarantee.

On paper it was a simple and risk-free operation.

One morning the day started off quite badly. The previous evening the credit committee of a large and well known Torino bank, the first we had approached with our operation, sent us a negative verdict: the operation was too risky.

We thought we had not described the terms of the issue well enough, but Carlo, after looking into the bank’s reasons in depth, explained to me: «Although we have planned it so that it will all happen concurrently at the same notary’s, between the moment we transfer the money for the acquisition to the courts and the moment we collect the price for relinquishing brand rights to the Japanese a small lapse of time will intercur; maybe, if it has all been organized well enough, it will boil down to a few seconds».

According to the bank during that very short period of time I could go mad, die or whatever. In any case because of that brief interval I was not reliable for that amount of money.

I could not believe it. How could that be possible? I thought they were having me on. We tried with other credit institutes and turned to a few renowned Torino professionals for an opinion but that was the way things were.

The banks would not go along with it. A few years later a “little bird“ told me about a conversation he had heard during a board meeting with another bank based in Torino we had approached for help. Beyond the predictable and ridiculous formal reply which was formulated immediately afterwards, one of the members commented that I was getting bigheaded and it would be better if I kept my feet on the ground. To emphasize his point he added that he had learned that I had said I wanted to buy mct to build the biggest company operating in the field in the world (which was actually true). A few people burst out laughing but in any

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case they all agreed: I was getting too big for my shoes and it would only be for my own good if I gave up in time.

Unbelievable. «Why on earth – I thought – if a little boy says he wants to play in First Division, win the League, the Champion’s League and a Golden Football he receives praise and if a “boy” of 37 with almost fifteen years of honourable career behind him says he wants to become a world business champion people think he is bigheaded?»

After a few days I decided to inform Stasi. We did not all agree on this move. There were concerns he would grow suspicious and that to avoid risks he would choose another candidate for the lease, and there was more than one at that stage, and all flush with cash.

I had behaved with complete transparency right from the start and I believed that Stasi would appreciate that. In any case I knew I had nothing up my sleeve and that I would manage to succeed only if everyone wanted me to do so, starting from the receiver.

Stasi immediately saw the unquestionable legal aspect of the issue; what the banks were saying was technically sound but the fact that it was a radical stand, put forward to avoid giving a different explanation, was not lost on him. I got the impression Stasi was quite annoyed, not because I had done something wrong but because he understood that the operation he, the official receiver, the unions and all the former mct employees on redundancy money believed in, was not what the Italian banks had in mind. He told me that if we could not come up with a solution right away, he would have to resort to a Plan B. There was very little time but he would immediately inform the official receiver, hoping she would not take it too badly, given that my financial reliability had been her only reservation right from the start.

Late afternoon the following day I went to see Stasi in his office. «I spoke with the official receiver. There could

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be a legal way out. After obtaining an authorization from the president of the bankruptcy court in person, we could replace the guarantee application for the entire bid, 21 billion lire, with a smaller guarantee by putting down a deposit.» He told me that if on the day of the auction, to be held approximately six months later, I could not produce a guarantee for the entire 21 billion, I would lose the deposit: «Think about it, talk to your family and try to work out how much you can put together to guarantee a deposit; but remember that it cannot be far from half of the total value».

It was all really complicated! Everything seemed to go to pieces in front of my very eyes. I talked about it with Carlo and Moreno who were already busy writing the gigantic contract for the receivership. The only thing to do was to talk about it at home right away.

It still seems madness to me now, as it did then: we had a watertight guarantee for 22 billion to sell someone a small part of something much bigger which we would pay only 21, and we were stuck. It was the beginning of a frantic week. My father and brothers understood that by now it would be madness to pull out. For once I realized that even my father was annoyed with the banks that were treating me unfairly. If we had stopped there, it would have meant disaster. We would not be able to balance fsm’s losses and as a consequence Daniela and I would also lose the house we were living in.

A few days later, after obtaining the necessary signatures from my family and Daniela, Banca Brignone was ready to issue a guarantee for the deposit. An insurmountable limit was set at 11 billion. But there still were reservations about something which I also fully shared. Besides that money fsm would need further funds, not many, but at least 4 billion to use as working capital to start the company rolling the day after the deal was signed. Our budget for 1994 predicted

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sales for approximately 40 billion lire and that amount of floating capital was just about enough. We could not hope to get that money from the commercial banks that had already rejected our plan. We needed a business bank ready to invest in fsm’s capital.

The day following our deal with Banca Brignone Judge Nosengo, Stasi and I, without any lawyers, were received by Corradini, who was the president of the bankruptcy court: a tall quiet man with kind eyes. He was perfectly aware of the facts but pretended he knew nothing. Nosengo summed up the situation and at that point Corradini turned to me: «Have we made a bit of a mess of things?». Not bad as a preamble! Actually, he said that with a benign smile. I took it in my stride and opened my arms as if to say «Sorry!» and I started to explain how I would relaunch the company, that I was the best person to give it a try and that I would surely be successful because I had the unions and the workers on my side. He interrupted me almost immediately: «So, how much money have you put together? Can you pull it off with a 12 billion deposit?».

I knew I could count on 11 and thought: «It’s done!».

The atmosphere was laid back and relaxed so I started an understated but firm negotiation. I told him my family would provide 4 billion, my wife would stake 1 billion and that I would mortgage my house (which, to be honest, was already mortgaged) and that I could get to a maximum of 6 billion.

«Good – said Corradini – find a further 2 billion and it’s a deal.»

«Ok – I replied – in that case it’s a deal.»

«Are you sure you can come up with the money?»

«I’ll find it Mr. Chairman, I’ll find it!»

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I flew down the court’s staircase: I had to talk to Pavesio and all the others immediately. I still had to solve the floating capital issue and find a partner who would invest some money in fsm, since Rinascente did not want to hear about it. I visited a few business banks but no one was interested.

Terms were excellent but to no avail! Time was fleeting and even Li&Fung (William Fung’s company), who wanted to be a part of it, had let me know that without an Italian investor our deal would not come through.

Towards the end of April 1994 I left the offices of one of these institutes in via Turati, Milan. After the latest «no».

As I walked towards via Manzoni I called my brother Francesco. I told him I could not find anyone and that I did not know where to turn. Francesco gave me a piece of advice that turned out to be decisive – «Try talking to Enrico Minoli» – and gave me his phone number. I called him and he knew what I was trying to do because it had been reported in the papers. «Where are you?» he asked. I replied I was in Milan. His answer was, as usual, quite matter-offact: «Come to see me and tell me all about it». I asked for his address and he said «via Manzoni 40». I looked around: I was standing in front of it! I climbed the stairs and a couple of minutes after calling Francesco, I was sat in front

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of Enrico who was asking me if I wanted some coffee. I must have looked rather tired and anyway, I did nothing to hide it.

Enrico is our cousin. He had also been at Villa Nina, among the many cousins of different ages there, and I had been one of the youngest. The Minoli brothers always were our favourite cousins. There were a lot of them and there was one to match the age of each of us brothers. Francesco had Giovanni, but also Enrico because they were close; Chicco had Lorenzo and Francesco, more or less his age; and I was very close to Chiara, the only girl of six children; a great girl who was forced, just like me, to defend herself from her older brothers.

The last time I had seen Enrico I must have been about ten and we were roller-skating in the garage of our house in San Vito, which opened on to a half-empty room where Grandpa Edo built his models: it was the «model-train room». To make our pastime more interesting we started skating through the door between the two rooms. We went faster and faster and at one stage someone suggested we try it in the dark. My friend Walter and I, the youngest of the bunch, were very excited at the idea of breaching the rules and had no idea of what was about to happen. The “elders” had planned a terrible practical joke at the expense of our naive minds. Once we had reached the appropriate speed in complete darkness someone would close the door. And it was I who, as I skated at full throttle, saw a bolt of yellow lightning and could not understand what had happened. The bang was amazingly loud and everyone was scared to death. For a few moments I was stunned and then I burst into desperate tears calling for my Mum, «la signorina», or anyone who could free me from that nightmare. If I had climbed the stairs in that state they would have been done for; so they started consoling me trying to

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convince me that I had to behave as a grown-up, and that grown-ups do not cry and bullshit of the sort.

After a while I let them talk me into it and stopped crying but it was obviously not enough for them. They wanted me to swear that I would not spy on them and that I would tell Mother that I had fallen over by myself. I reckon they pitched their case with me very well on the spot: I walked up the stairs convinced it was all under wraps. I told myself: «You’re old enough now, don’t spill the beans», but as soon as I bumped into «la signorina» in the hall she started wailing. One of my eyes was as big as a tennis ball. And I had also bled from the nose and spilled loads of tears which I had wiped with my hands. So it looked like somebody had cut my throat: I was a blood-mask. Someone took care of me and the others headed for the garage to punish whoever was responsible without even asking me what had happened. Of course the “elders” thought I had spilled the beans and started blaming each other for what had happened. Luckily that time they were all appropriately lectured.

Although it probably was not true, the family had assumed that it had been the Minoli kids’ idea and that it had been Enrico who had closed the door. After that I had only fleetingly seen him on another occasion and I was now sitting in front of him with his assistant beside me, a beautiful girl but plainly dressed. I was obviously very worried and shaken because I only realized a month later how charming Sara was.

I knew that over the years Enrico had made a name for himself and at home it was rumoured that he was very wealthy. In the 80s he had set up his own Merger and Acquisition company and had sold it to an important bank. In any case I entered his office thinking he was just a business consultant.

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Although I was there I did not really know why. Enrico was very kind so I started telling him about my life, more or less starting from the incident in the garage. It was an interesting tale and it could become even better. But I told him that I felt I was stuck. I told him about the issue of those few blasted seconds, and that I could not get any more money from our investors. And that even my Chinese partner would soon be dumping me.

It was almost lunch time. Enrico asked me: «Do you want to have a sandwich here?». I obviously replied affirmatively.

«Do you have any documentation on this mess?» I pulled out the folder I had just taken to the bank that had sent me packing. Enrico started reading the file which was quite extensive and complete. I knew it off by heart and I noticed that he stopped to consider what he was reading.

He went over it for an hour without uttering a word. I was relaxing a little. I was facing the first person reading my project throughout.

When he had finished reading Enrico asked me to clarify a few issues, especially pertaining to the value of giving out brand concessions to Japan. He thought the price was too low. No one had ever told me something like that; I could not get a billion and a half worth of capital, imagine 23.5!

I told him it was all I needed to close the deal, that it was probably a profitable deal for the Japanese and that it was for me. So he said to me: «So what do you need to carry it through?».

«I need someone – I replied – who will guarantee for a few seconds 21 billion when we go to auction; and who can afford to pour into fsm a billion and a half immediately.»

With William Fung’s two and a half coming in to top what we had already poured in, fsm would have a net capital of 4 billion, enough to undertake the venture.

At that point Enrico thought about it a while and then said: «If I give you 1.5 billion will you give me a 15% share

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in the company and give me exclusive negotiation rights to purchase Rinascente’s share? We can then think of the 21billion-issue together».

«Of course» I replied.

The proposal was totally to his advantage but on the other hand risks were high and I had no other alternative – and he knew that all right – but it was not a bad deal for me either. I would have gone for a lot less.

I was aware of what that kind of situation would entail so I asked him how much time and further information he needed to confirm the offer. He replied: «What confirmation?!? We have to start tomorrow morning». I insisted: «Don’t you want to carry out due diligence on the data I just gave you?». «There’s no time left. If you lied, it will be your problem!»

Enrico then told me that besides his work as a business consultant he had set up a small merchant banking outfit, Turnaround Srl, to manage part of his personal estate through venture capital operations; those figures were small for him, so he did not have to ask anyone or think about it too much.

When I left his office I was happy but a bit puzzled. I called Pavesio, who I had spoken to before the meeting, and told him about it. We were both lost for words, and a little doubtful. We thought it would be great but after all the disappointments we had recently endured, we agreed not to count on it too much and to wait for events to unfold.

Although usually sceptical about on-the-spot decisions that have not been thought through properly, that time Carlo tried to see the positive side: «In any case at least we have found someone who openly likes the operation».

While I was trying to sort out the finance with Pavesio and everyone at fsm was working as if we had already signed the deal with the receiver, Moreno was busy writing up the contract. It was quite complicated: the final draft including

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addenda, was over 600 pages long. We had agreed with the receiver that we would sign on 30 April. After the deal with the president of the bankruptcy court I had no longer kept Stasi informed about the problems I was facing in finding the final necessary funds. So although Minoli had immediately sprung into action on the evening of 29 April we still did not have all the agreements and collateral documents we needed to sign the contract with some peace of mind.

That evening Carlo and I were at Moreno’s with a few friends. After dinner we retired to a small room to exchange the latest news and make the last decisions. There was no time left. If we did not sign on the following day we would probably miss our chance. Carlo summarized the situation and suggested I sign only after receiving the last formal confirmations from everyone which would mean having to ask Stasi to extend the deadline. That time Moreno was not so technical: «If you don’t sign that contract, I’ll kill you».

It was more of a romantic stand than a professional one but quite understandable. In the end even Carlo agreed we had to run the risk.

The following day, at 8 pm, Stasi and I, both exhausted, finished signing three copies of the 600-odd pages long contract. It was a deal.

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Taking over the factory

At precisely 8,30 am on 2 May 1994 I entered mct’s building as the temporary owner (having signed a lease for the company) and having officially received the keys from the receiver, although we still did not know how to trace funds for the 21 billion guarantee to be able to take part in the auction without losing our deposit.

I had decided to use the entrance in via Foggia 42. We had the keys to the main entrance in corso Brescia 86, but as a precaution I wanted to cross that threshold only after a successful auction. I knew the building intimately not only because I had worked there in Vitale’s days but also because during negotiations I had visited it a few times to find out what was still there in terms of machines and raw materials, and to check on the state of the building itself.

Besides Carlo Pavesio and Moreno Martini, all the other professionals working on the operation were there. There were also union representatives, a few current colleagues, some former colleagues and Stasi. Enrico could not be there, but on the plus side my parents were. Dad had never been enthusiastic about the enterprise because he thought there was a high risk of failure, but in the end he allowed himself to be involved and did not abandon me, putting at stake a significant chunk of the family estate.

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We opened the big metal shutter sealing off the entrance, among the cheers of those present celebrating that first difficult victory, and started on a recognition tour of the plant.

The setting was depressing to say the least, almost a postwar atmosphere. Everything was frozen, it was all lifeless, exactly the way the receiver had found it on Friday 14 January when he had turned up to seal the place.

It was quite surreal, as if the world had suddenly stopped: everything was covered in dust; the looms were half-way through a job; on the cutting benches there were half-cut pieces of fabric; there were half-processed bundles everywhere. To me it was like an enchanted forest.

Half way through the tour, on the second floor there were huge rolls of fabric piled on the floor. At one point as I was describing what we were seeing I noticed that my father was slowly slumping on those rolls while my mother tried to support him, to soften the fall.

We all ran over. Dad had fainted like a man realizing he has a huge problem. Fortunately it only lasted a few seconds. As soon as he came to, still lying down, he succinctly told Mum the reason why he had fainted: «He’ll never make it!». He was obviously referring to me.

Mum tried to soothe him: «Everything’s fine, it’s just a bit of a mess… And anyway, what a thing to say, ‘he’ll never make it’…».

Dad was scared by the future and his nature was to seek protection from problems. Mum was never scared by the future.

There was a lot of work to do. We had to get the wheels turning. A truly epic time started.

As agreed with the unions, during the first 2 weeks I interviewed most of the 213 former employees on redundancy money. They all turned up apart from a dozen.

Twenty minutes each assisted by two colleagues, plus five

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minutes to register a brief comment on the resource. It was a real endurance test, but it was paramount to appropriately choose the first posts to be filled and plan the employment of all the others, which we actually managed to pull off.

We worked like mad; we were joined by an extra 37 colleagues from mct and fsm’s staff had more than doubled.

We had to think of everything: sample books, sales network, manufacturers, it infrastructure, administration, contracts and sponsors. And above all we had to find the way to obtain a guarantee for 21 billion from an Italian bank before the auction was held in the fall.

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The Stendhal syndrome

Dear Adriano, now I have to take a step backwards. Because although as soon as I had heard about mct going bankrupt I had thought of buying it, even if I did not know how, at this stage I was extremely clear about the project.

I had always imagined an ideal company as a network, operating in the field I had actually been working in for so many years: basically made up of two kinds of entrepreneurs: manufacturers and wholesalers. A number of businesses worldwide, manufacturing and selling products with the brands we would provide with legal rights and all the services necessary to enable them to do so. This was the concept I had had in mind for a number of years and the opportunity to acquire such prestigious brands was exactly what I needed to give it a go.

But until mid-February of that year my project was still lacking something. I was thinking of an aggressive and innovative use of the it technology already available at the time, of pcs and the first servers centralizing ibm’s as/400 system. With a little imagination I could envisage the outline of a system managing a complex, widespread network like the one we had in mind, but still could not solve the issue of real time connection between the different platforms. There were many different protocols, every large

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company had its own system and they were all very expensive and owned by someone.

Wednesday 9 February 1994, between 4 and 5 pm, something very important happened in the boardroom in via Padova, influencing everything that has happened to date.

Paola Bruschi was not married yet, and worked as William Carelli’s assistant, who was my it man.

William had been head of edp (Electronic Data Processing, translator’s note) at mct and when I had gone solo he had decided to come with me. He came from a “classical” background, mainframes and ibm. Although he was not an expert he had also felt an attraction for the potential of the new micro-systems. We had written lots of software together; fsm and Mototaxi were both ran thanks to him.

He already spoke of «object-oriented programming» and «client servers» then.

Paola was a lot younger and had just graduated in Economy with top marks and a thesis on it applications to improve company procedures. And she was already very ambitious, which is a good thing.

Carelli, despite being indisputably an authority in the subject, was at the time rather sceptical about the reliability of new technologies. And I could not fault him for it.

Anyway, that afternoon William was not with us in the basement. But there were a couple of recent graduates, one in Physics and one in Maths, friends of Paola’s, who could not care less about ibm and mainframes. They already had a pc on, working with Windows 3.1, connected to a modem; Paola wanted me to see something special she thought could make a difference to us.

The guys opened a little program called Navigator that helped to connect and move on the Network. I still did not get it.

After a couple of attempts they managed to connect to a server at Polytechnic. After a string of beeps, old modems

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a few years ago used to chirp for a while before establishing a connection, I noticed that in the main window of that program meant for “navigation”, another small window had opened up displaying scrolling lines of text and numbers on a black background. The window closed shortly afterwards but the display made it clear, without any graphic embellishment, that we were connected to the athenaeum.

I thought: «Interesting, but what’s new?». We had already been connecting to our warehouses and distributors in the u.s. and Japan in the same way for a while. So that was no news.

One of the guys keyed in a short string of digits and pressed enter. For about 30 seconds the screen went blank and then, as if by magic, a new window appeared inside it saying: «Hallo!», and it was not us who had typed it. We exchanged a few sentences with some 15-year-old American youth who had seen us online.

I was intrigued; they explained that our pc and the computer used by the American kid were in that moment connected via modem to a network provider which was in our case housed in the Polytechnic. Every provider was connected to another and all together they formed a network through which it was possible to navigate connecting any pc as long as it was connected to a provider. Thanks to a little network-traffic-management program we found out that in that instance our conversation with the American kid had gone through South Africa!

I realized what Paola’s point was: it was the data transmission network we needed to make today’s BasicNet come to life. At this point I had to find out where the catch was. I was told that Network users would only pay to connect to a provider and after that it was all for free. I was already aware then that nothing comes for free but I could not see the catch. I thought there had to be someone who owned the data transmission protocol and that they would thus

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make a profit by selling us the software. They told me the protocol was public domain and there was no owner. I then thought it would be extremely difficult to integrate it in the different it systems we were using.

So Stefano, the Physics graduate, Paola’s husband-to-be, reopened the black window I had seen when they started Navigator: «Look, this is the protocol. It was developed by the u.s. military but they made it available to the public». I felt slightly nauseous and then I felt a fire starting up inside me. Maybe I had had an episode of Stendhal syndrome due to something which was not art but that I had exceedingly appreciated. We were talking about Internet!

I had already heard about Internet a few years before and towards the end of 1993 I had read an article on Il Resto del Carlino that said there already were approximately 20 million computers connected worldwide. But until then I had not realized what use we could make of it.

From then on the vision was clear and complete, maybe not for everybody, but it surely was to a significant number of young graduates connected, for different reasons, to my business who shared my fascination for it.

So I, Paola, and a few other colleagues who had been drooling for months at the thought of being able to purchase mct, thought we may realize our vision, knowing we would be able to exploit such a powerful tool before anyone else. It had always been our problem: being able to rely on a global, efficient network with a cost compatible with our stature. Internet was exactly what we needed to start our venture without the feeling we lacked something.

And this was happening in February, right in the middle of our ups and downs trying to get a lease on mct, and without being able to share our excitement with any of our financial contacts who were, at the time, light years from that kind of issue.

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The foundations of our new enterprise

But let us get back to the epic time when we restarted old mct, after it was paralyzed for a few months by bankruptcy.

A lot of things happened during that time. I spent a lot of time travelling to get to know mct’s former sales network but, above all, to try and kick-start the production process and somehow save the winter season.

We were also still trying to find a guarantee for the auction to be held in the fall. We went back to all the banks but to no avail. In the end we put together 21 billion thanks to Enrico Minoli who decided to guarantee out of his personal funds the 10 billion we still needed. To hone the operation we turned to an important Swiss bank. Around 2 pm, after complicated procedures with notaries, lawyers and bankers, we were asked if we wanted a snack from the bank’s own catering service. We thought: «Why not?». It is funny to admit that after all that complicated affair carried out over almost six months, the thing that struck me most was the bill I received for some light refreshment: 15.000 Swiss francs, more or less 250 euros for a sandwich! I obviously asked them if they had lost their minds but I was told it was all perfectly normal. I still thought that something was wrong and that I would never understand that scene.

We had struck an important deal involving loads of money

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but how on earth a sandwich could cost half a million lire I could not, and still cannot, understand!

While we waited for the auction we were busy laying down the foundations for our future. We were planning the group’s new international corporate structure, with the aim of organizing a network of entrepreneurs that would operate worldwide, with the same products and the same mission.

We presented our project to mct’s old distribution network to convince them to work as entrepreneurs instead of sales reps; to become Basic Network licensees.

The model of today’s business was already there: we would design and realize collections and we would take care of their industrialization through selected trading companies.

License holders would buy finished products directly from the manufacturers paying the trading companies a commission and a royalty to us later, once the product had been sold to a retailer on their territory. In everyone’s interest we would spend part of those royalties in advertising.

I thought that by offering a real and factual opportunity of becoming entrepreneurs, instead of selling t-shirts around the world, we would quickly internationalize the Kappa brand, our first aim. It was all to be done without money obviously, or rather, by getting others to lay it out in advance.

I was often told that globalizing a company was something that required huge amounts of resources and a lot of time. I would listen but I still thought that it would have been true only if I wanted to directly sell my t-shirts worldwide, not if I could just find sixty entrepreneurs on the planet who would have exclusive rights to operate with my products on their territory. I was convinced that if our plan was really as good as I thought, we would get global coverage for our products within a couple of years. On the

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other hand if our business model was faulty we would immediately become aware of it.

To be sure that the model would work right from the start, since at the time our sample books were basically non-existent, I decided to stake everything on large sponsorships. Juventus, which we had managed to hold on to with some difficulty, and fc Barcelona. I thought that with those shirts license holders would be able to contact any sports shop in the world and that is exactly what happened.

What retailer dealing in sports and football could claim he was not interested in the product?

On the weekend of 30 July 1994 we had summoned what was left of mct’s international sales network to Sestriere for our first convention. I drove there on Friday afternoon; I remember it was one of the last times I drove somewhere for work. After we solved the issue concerning our guarantee for the court, my associates had demanded that the company take out a huge insurance claim on my life with them as the beneficiaries. Since most of them knew from personal experience how I drove a car, the board had insisted I drive as little as possible and never for work reasons. At the time I was always lost in thought and not at all naturally inclined to drive slowly, so‌ I now think it was a very wise decision!

But on that day I still drove, and with me there was Pere Matamales, one of Kappa Spagna’s three partners. Pere was my age, Antonio Oliveres and Juan Barros were a little older but they were all equally enthusiastic about my plan.

We saw a lot of each other, and I also discussed strategic issues with them, especially with Pere.

It was a beautiful sunny day, there was not much traffic as it was lunch time and my old 1974 Porsche Carrera 2.7, recently fitted with a new engine, gave its best. It was a very pleasant drive.

Pere was not afraid and the view was fantastic. We talk-

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ed about the many things we had to do and at one stage we started wondering whether we had taken on too much.

Pere really was a great guy, a certified Catalan, he always had a joke, a line and above all a proverb or a saying on the tip of his tongue. To play things down he said: «In a case like this we say in Catalonia that one must carry on without pause but without haste». Never stop but without rushing.

I thought it was a good saying but we were in a hurry to carry out all those plans. We carried on our discussion for a while but then Matamales insisted: «When you do things in a hurry you risk making mistakes and then you have to start over and lose time you cannot afford. If you are in a real hurry you have to do things slowly; otherwise you might have to do them again, and that way you lose time».

It was the best advice anyone could give me at that moment. What more could I do than work all the time trying to avoid mistakes as much as possible?

After a long silence Pere said in his almost perfect Italian and very strong Spanish accent: «Slowly please, I’m in a hurry. That’s the way to do it!». I told Pere he was a genius and that he had given me a great idea.

The meeting with the sales force went beautifully and by the end we already had ten license holders.

In the meantime we had started a massive sale of mct’s stock using the old store in via Foggia, inside the factory; it was yielding extraordinary and unexpected results. But the real objective was to get products bearing our brands on shop shelves in the autumn. Immediately after the meeting in Sestriere, I left with Monica Adami for a worldwide tour to do some production shopping. We also flew to Mauritius where an important group of clothes manufacturers had decided to give us credit without bank guarantees. It was an unforgettable experience for me, and I believe it was for Monica as well. In the space of 48 hours, resting on the

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whole for just 8 hours, we placed orders for a total of over 5 billion lire. We would hole up in the sample rooms with a merchandiser and start choosing designs, weight, colours, labelling and above all the price of a collection that would go into production without us even seeing a prototype, hoping we would receive the goods in Italy before the end of August and be able to sell them between September and December.

Monica was great, extremely precise and always very calm.

On that trip we must have said to each other slowly please, I’m in a hurry at least 200 times. And it worked a treat.

With those goods and thanks to the credit those companies had given us, mainly due to the enthusiastic presentations Renato Catalfamo gave us, a great man and a good friend, honorary consul for Mauritius in Italy, we managed to save our first commercial season.

Between the sale at the store, quick sales and the first royalties from our license holders, we closed the books in 1994 with a fantastic success. At the end of the year fsm had invoiced 46 billion with a net profit of approximately 8 billion lire. Not bad considering where we had started.

At the time we were also aided by growing support for us.

Everyone was amazed and had started helping us.

Everything was going the right way. As a precaution, in case of a possible raise in the purchase of mct, I began to think about what I could do with the building. We decided to sell it only if it turned out to be necessary to sustain a raise at the auction, otherwise we would later look for a way to stay there. I thought it was very important for our plan.

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The auction

With all this effort and hope in the background we quickly got to 28 October, the date set by the court to hold the auction to award Maglificio Calzificio Torinese SpA’s assets.

We had the famous 21 billion, but thanks to the excellent work carried out we had at least another 5 between our profits and the value of the property that had already attracted a few (ridiculously low) offers, in case we needed extra funds. At precisely 9 am I entered the bankruptcy court in corso Valdocco. The auction was public and anyone could take part. A lot of people turned up: colleagues, union representatives, relatives, professionals and a few friends. Minoli and Hagiwara were also there. The judge was amazed at how many people turned up.

As soon as I entered the room where the auction was to be held my heart sank. There was not just my gang in there.

A well-dressed distinguished man was leaning on the wall on the right side of the room. It was Gianni Lico, managing director of a well known company operating in the field who during the months of negotiation and the lease contract had more than once expressed the intention of attending the auction and steal mct from us thanks to his huge wealth.

Many people already knew him so in a flash everyone

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learned who he was and why he was there. And this contributed to making me nervous.

I was very wound up. Before the proceedings started we had to wait half an hour and it felt like an eternity. Everyone was trying to tell me something and I could barely talk. I could not remember anything, I tried to think how I should behave at each raise. I thought the time had come. If “they” had turned up for the auction they would not let the deal be taken from them for a few bob. I knew I had some extra funds but I also knew that they were peanuts if compared to what they could rely on. Yes, I was very worried. So was Pavesio but he kept repeating: «It’s all under control, let’s see how things go…». Moreno was very pale and I think he was as terrified as I was: he did not speak much either.

The auction started; a little later the official receiver asked me if I confirmed a minimum offer of 21 billion. Not in so many words, it was the end of a longer speech peppered with bureaucratic terms. I did not understand the question at first so I answered only after I was nudged by Carlo; Nosengo and Stasi had realized how perturbed I was because I saw them exchanging a quick smile. The receiver then asked if anyone wished to raise the offer. After the prescribed amount of time had passed Vittoria Nosengo looked at me and said: «In that case it is yours».

At that point I heard a loud buzz in my ears: I thought the room was very noisy but I realized it was not the case only when people started clapping their hands. I was taken over by emotion and when Stasi asked me: «Well, then aren’t you going to say anything?», I just made a silly wave with my left hand to say that it would be better if I did not. If I had opened my mouth and released my frozen jaw I would have most certainly burst into tears before I could utter a word.

Our competitor had turned up but had not raised the stakes. A few years later at a sports goods fair in Germany Lico told me he had come to pay tribute to our courage. He

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too would have liked to close that operation but his partners had not backed him. As if to say: «The only reason you won is because I could not compete; well done anyway».

Someone took some pictures, Mirella Ansaloni did some filming, and everybody came over to me, joking or congratulating me. So we started to leave the courtroom. As soon as I was outside I left the group and called Daniela.

Daniela had not come to the auction and this in itself was a strange thing given our relationship.

I had started sleeping in the caretaker’s flat a few months before. Because of the different time zones I often had to have long conversations on the phone or discuss documents with the Japanese in the middle of the night. Since I had started working on acquiring mct Daniela had become quite defensive. We were right in the middle of our sevenyear crisis; for the good of our relationship we should have cut off all external distractions and concentrated exclusively on each other. But on the contrary I had decided to work even harder and even started sleeping at the office. Daniela was worried, and probably rightly so, that my absent-mindedness and absence from home, which already upset her enough, would just get worse.

At the time I realized things were not good between us but I was hoping for a miracle. I called her hoping that miracle was about to happen. I told her: «We won the auction, it’s amazing, mct is ours». From Daniela’s first word I knew that what was happening was the exact opposite of what I had hoped for. There was to be no quiet after the storm, no chance to start over…

She said: «I’m really happy for you. Now you’ve got what you wanted so you can drop buy to pick up your suitcases, they’re ready. I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to create further problems before the auction».

Our married life ended there and then, at 11.30 am on 28 October 1994.

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PART VI An endless battle

Corso Brescia 86

So I officially and definitively moved into the caretaker’s flat where I stayed a little over a year before moving into one of mct’s production departments converted into a spacious office with a small apartment.

At precisely 8 pm on 7 November 1994, to the sound of a cheering crowd we opened mct’s main gate in corso Brescia 86. We gave a big party inside the factory.

At the end of December we signed the notary act so starting on 1 January 1995, we became the owners of all that was left of mct, including the famous Kappa, Robe di Kappa and Jesus Jeans brands.

We had taken off!

I spent the first six months of the new year travelling around the world looking for license holders and manufacturers. Things were going really well. Work increased in intensity every day but in autumn something completely unexpected happened.

Enrico Minoli came to see me; I had seen him or spoken to him every day for the last year or so. In the months running up to the acquisition and in the following I had done extraordinary work with him. He was determined and confident and helped me a lot. I think it was a great time for

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him too. But that time he announced his visit differently: «I want to talk to you about something», but he did not want to go into detail and handled my curiosity with a concise: «I’ll tell you in person».

The following morning he was in my office and after our usual warm greetings he gave me his business card. I asked him if he had lost his mind. «Have a look at what it says underneath my name» he replied. I looked and saw the words «Merchant Banker». I said: «Merchant Banker». There was a brief silence like when someone has finished telling a joke and no one gets it. He insisted: «Merchant Banker». I still did not get it and I thought Enrico was mocking me.

He said: «You really don’t understand?».

I said: «No, I don’t, cut it out!».

At that point Enrico, defeated by my ignorance, played his last card before giving up on his act.

«Do you know what merchant bankers do, you animal?»

«I don’t give a shit about what merchant bankers do, you jerk! Tell me why you’re wasting my time.»

Enrico could not believe I did not get what he was trying to say and we both burst out laughing: we should have filmed it. He said: «Merchant bankers buy up companies».

«I know» I replied.

«In that case you will also know that merchant bankers don’t buy companies to make them their family business, but to sell them on!»

All of a sudden I got the message! There was nothing left to laugh about. Enrico carried on: «I didn’t look for anyone but I have received a very interesting offer. If you want to carry on find someone to buy me out otherwise we’re selling. No one can afford to miss such an opportunity».

I really was not expecting this: Enrico was very understanding but told me there was little time. A large British group had made a good offer, 60 billion lire! They were just interested in the brands and at the time our company

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was very small, did not employ many people and had just successfully balanced its books getting rid of all liabilities.

It truly was a unique opportunity.

Although it must be said that pocketing 30 billion at 39 would have been quite amazing, it was the thing I was the least interested in at the time. I could not consider the possibility also because I felt it would mean betraying all the people involved in the venture.

The turnaround operation we had carried out had been quite brilliant and maybe we could find at that stage an investor to buy Enrico’s shares. The first thing I thought of was calling not a business banker but a great entrepreneur.

Shortly after my meeting with Minoli, and after giving Pavesio the news, I called Benetton’s secretary and asked to speak with Mr. Luciano.

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Deflecting the attack

I have known Luciano Benetton since I was working as a very young man for Maurizio Vitale and they were on friendly terms. I first met him in February 1979 during a visit to Treviso with Vitale. I was 22. We had recently become sponsors for Juventus and I had prepared an official Juventus bag for Mr. Luciano, full of all the new Kappa wear. It was rumoured that he was a Juventus supporter.

Since then I had met him a few times in airports around Italy and on holiday with Vitale in Sardinia.

For someone like me, just starting out in the ÂŤrag tradeÂť, like he called it, meeting him was a bit like having a vision of Our Lady. In 1994 someone told me that as soon as mct went bust, a Torino banker had consulted him to know whether he was interested in the company. Apparently Benetton replied that it was not necessary to go far to find the best man to buy mct in those conditions. He reckoned he was already in Torino: a smart lad who knew the company and its business well and would also be highly motivated. He was talking about me!

That statement filled me with pride so in January 1995, shortly after the auction, I asked for an appointment and went to see him to thank him and tell him about my plans.

I have never denied that BasicNet’s business model was

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strongly inspired by the Benetton experience. Benetton is a network of entrepreneurs as well, a kind of franchising. I wanted to do the same thing not at a retail level but wholesale: not store owners but license holders. Benetton listened to me carefully then said the idea was good although not new but there was a danger license holders might be “undisciplined” affecting results on the long term. I replied that the danger was quite real but that we could avoid the problem thanks to the new technologies, that is, if we could build the company we had in mind: paper-free, fast, punctual, and reliable with all the data available in real time.

Benetton said that was true only in theory; I insisted that thanks to Internet it could also work in practice. His final comment was: «Intriguing».

So it was that a year later I called him again.

With Mr. Luciano pleasantries on the phone are short lived. «How’s it going?» he asked. «Very well, so well in fact that a British company has put up an offer and my associates want to take it up.» «I thought that might happen, but what do you want to do?» «Naturally I want to carry on, I have barely started.» «Talk to Alessandro then, he has 21 Investimenti, maybe he can replace your associates». Great!

I immediately called Alessandro who as I have already said, I had met a couple of years before and who had by chance recently had a chat with my brother Francesco.

Events unfolded very quickly. In December 1995, Alessandro and his father came to Torino to see where we were at. A few days later Alessandro told me on the phone he was ready to go forward with the idea. He told me he wanted a share equal to mine and that he would not interfere in running the company. I accepted and we agreed on all the other points with extreme ease. On 9 May 1996, the day of my fortieth birthday, all the biggest Italian newspapers gave the news of Benetton’s entry great importance.

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La Stampa headlined: «The Persuaders!». Obviously they were referring to Alessandro and I. It was exactly what I needed. A new exciting season in the life of my Basic began: 21 Investimenti and I controlled 42% of it each, William Fung 12% and the rest was held by my brothers and by Fenera SpA, an investment firm owned by friends in Torino who had bought some shares to support me when Minoli had become a partner.

I wondered if I was safe from any further surprises for a while…

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Congratulations, mamma Dani!

In the meantime Daniela and Mirella’s Mototaxi had continued to operate and had grown quite impressively despite the Damocle’s sword represented by the billionaire fine we had continued to fight with all our might with a long string of lawsuits, assisted by the great Milan barrister Giuseppe Trifirò, but we had lost first and second degree rulings.

Fortunately, also thanks to an inspired closing address by Trifirò, we were fully acquitted by the court of appeal.

Thanks to that ruling, acknowledging that we had operated well inside the boundaries of the law, the motorbike delivery service started to look attractive to the big groups.

Our long-standing competitor Pony Express was the first to be acquired by world-class giant tnt that had just become property of the Dutch Mail service.

At the time Daniela had taken me by surprise telling me she thought it right for her to drastically cut down on the time she spent working. She said: «The boys are at an age when it’s important that I look after them more than what I have done until now».

Lorenzo and Alessandro were respectively 12 and 10 and at first I could not understand her reasoning. What was this? All the other mothers I knew said the exact opposite when their children reached that age: «Now the children

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are old enough so I can go back to work». I told Daniela that maybe she was wrong and that in any case that could not be the real reason.

I was deeply impressed by the wisdom of Daniela’s reply.

«At what age do you think our children are more at risk of making terrible mistakes? Before they are twelve or between twelve and eighteen? From now on, and until they are twenty, I want to be right behind them. Help me sell the company».

What could I say? She was perfectly right. Bad company and awful behavioural habits young people often run into are typical of that age, while later they are more hardened to life’s snares and consequently less vulnerable.

In 1998, thanks to Alessandro Benetton, I met Corrado Passera who was trying at that very time to transform the Italian Mail service from a State-owned monopoly to a joint-stock company on a competitive market. He wanted me to meet him to help him design a modern sporty look for postmen but when Passera discovered from my brief introduction about myself that I was involved in Mototaxi, we instantly stopped talking about uniforms.

In December 1998 we signed a binding agreement and in the following spring we perfected the sale of Mototaxi, that through a subsidiary, sda SpA, had become property of Poste Italiane and Daniela could take on less demanding entrepreneurial ventures.

Lorenzo and Alessandro were closely guarded by Daniela, got through school and college with good results and did a lot of sport, reaching the age of twenty ready for life and without collateral damage. Now they are both attending University with good results and are already planning their entry into the workplace. Congratulations, mamma Dani!

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How do you revamp a tired brand?

I have not been left to wait for some time now. My meetings with Marco take place without delay and I walk directly into the office through BasicNet Village’s inner yard. I bother the secretaries…

Roberta, Daniela, Monica. One of the alloSpaccio’s employees, obviously in charge of security, dashed over twice to check who the man quickly slipping into the president’s office after locking his bicycle to the railings was. Now she knows she can trust me, that there is nothing to fear and that Boglione is waiting for me.

Over the time I have spent listening to his life’s story and to his adventures as an entrepreneur we have become quite familiar. I can feel that both of us look forward to our meetings. At times a week went by without meeting and when we finally managed to see each other it was a real celebration!

I am grateful for his friendship not because he is a successful businessman or because he is wealthy enough (I said “enough” because it is the correct definition, not in a manner of speaking), but because I can always find new reasons to admire his attitude to life. That is why I hope he will decide to publish a book with the memories I have noted down until now…

Actually as our meetings progress Marco is coming to enjoy going over his own story: he is rediscovering himself and the reasons behind his past and present actions.

Today Boglione has just got back from China. I ask him how the

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Chinese are faring, if the crisis in the u.s. and Europe is affecting them as well. Of course it is and he confirms it. But from his words I find out that, unlike us Europeans… what am I saying… us “Torinesi” for example, the Chinese are suffering a lot more at the moment: businesses are closing down suddenly, job are lost for undetermined periods of time. Marco reckons they are suffering more because they have not been hardened by 30-40-50 years of expansion and recession, crucifixions and resurrections, periodical ups and downs like we have. The Chinese are a bit like a rocket that has been travelling towards the stars for 30 years and they do not know what it means to be forced to suddenly slow down… Maybe we will be able to face the crisis better.

Probably BasicNet is now doing so well because it was born out of huge effort and enthusiastic impetus, hardened and tested by episodes, circumstances and situations always on the edge of disaster. We could say – and the story up to now demonstrates this clearly – that intimacy with critical moments was and still is the inner strength, the hunger and the thirst of this company. Marco Boglione has never shipped the oars and has no intention of doing so: he is still sitting among the oarsmen and rowing with them. He has sailed through failure more often than success and maybe his current success, his performance despite the crisis, is due to this.

To this day BasicNet has shown that it is possible to acquire commercially dead brands and revive them. The model for this company (and in some respects its secret) was actually acquiring what is past its time and take on the challenge of infusing it with new life. That is how he made a profit, developing brands.

«I get entrepreneurs worldwide to work – says Marco – to resuscitate the brand with their own money and to their own advantage.»

I observe Boglione as he talks to me walking up and down his office: he reads out loud a few considerations he has written on the causes of the economic and financial crisis sweeping the entire planet.

Then he stops and says: «You know Adriano, a lot of people tell me: “You could allow yourself a lot more, you could profit more from the company… Who could criticize you for it…”. No, I cannot do it. I

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have always thought that the company interests come before my own. I don’t have a house, my living quarters belong to the company and are located inside the company itself. I do not have my own bank account, I perceive a salary that guarantees an adequate lifestyle and I work all day for the company but also for my wife and my children».

Today BasicNet can only compete with global giants like Nike, Adidas, Puma; in Italy it has no competitors left… Yet if you think of those terrible days back in 1994 you can understand the gamble, or rather, Marco Boglione’s provocation to destiny.

Unions put a lot of faith in him. Maybe this is worth a brief digression. It would have been possible to reach an agreement to save Maglificio Calzificio Torinese “only” with the support of all the unions… the fate of 213 people was at stake.

His first pledge, as recalled by him earlier, was to take on 37 of the 213 who had lost their job, but at the initial stage Boglione made clear that he was serious by taking on more than agreed: 45. Later, a few at a time the others came back.

Boglione still was a young entrepreneur, he was 38. Things went so well with the unions that at the end of the fourth year, a year earlier than agreed, Boglione had employed 212 of 213 who had lost their jobs because of mct going bankrupt. All except one who just did not want to know anymore and changed career.

Three years after the agreement – signed on 11 April 1994 – union representative Bruno Roberti, Cgil, in a letter to Boglione remembered as «extremely positive the open and loyal relationship» they had established and stated that the agreement had been «very important and innovative». As its foundation «there was a “pact” that the company and the union» had kept to, thus making the first job offers possible as well as an open discussion to define «together without confounding our respective roles, amendments, choices and company prospects». «As far as I’m concerned – concluded the union man in his letter “although I am currently filling a different post, I will do what I can so that the new relationship that has come into being between BasicNet and the union yielding such good results may continue».

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How a product is born

At this point I have no idea of what we are driving at.

Surely we both had opinions and we have both formed other opinions since, but what could be the result of our conversation? A book? Something else? In any case I’m sure we should start from the product: this is my system.

Let’s work hard, let’s make a product. Later, when we have finished, we’ll have time to modify it and to decide. And we’ll see if what we have done is what we wanted, without forgetting that an entrepreneur wants his product to be something that no one else has done before.

There are decisions that are the consequence of how the product is. In the end this is also my way of life.

I think I can state that my best products have already been made but not yet sold. And they are the ones that need more time to be understood but if you manage that, you enjoy them the most. It is so beautiful to make the same product for thirty or even eighty tears. In actual fact why should young people stop buying Superga? Or Robe di Kappa Polos which we make in 11 different designs, 38 sizes and 64 colours? Or the classic Kappa tracksuit, the famous «dueduedue»?

People in our line of business must have products to cover every moment of a recurring cycle, but one thing

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I am quite sure of: products labelled as classic or basic have something of an uncontaminated quality to them and will always have a market despite fashion cycles. The true strength in our business does not exclusively lie in being able to spot the latest trend but more in being able to make ageless products.

Alessandro Benetton’s arrival to BasicNet, half way through 1996, allowed me to develop this and much more.

It made it possible for me to lay the foundations to build the company as it is today. Alessandro gave us maximum support but also maximum freedom and trust. He was eight years younger than me and had built his own business by establishing 21 Investimenti within the Benetton group. We were equal partners, the best way to operate untroubled, so he said. And that is the way it worked out.

The four years we spent together were very important and good for me as far as my life as an entrepreneur is concerned. Being close to the Benetton family and the entrepreneurial culture that came with it, helped me to grow a lot. Benetton invested in me when I had already reached the age of forty. He believed in my plan and that I had the entrepreneurial skills to realize it without first thinking how much money he could make thanks to it.

We did not write up a 3 or 5 year business plan. Our only aim was development. Thanks to Benetton I was able to carry out all the strategic investments I thought were necessary to build the company of my dreams. If in a video aimed at our sales force I said: «Speed and flexibility are what our competitors will be missing in the near future», Benetton called me right away to congratulate me. I felt he was close to my thinking, in line with my plan. And if I told him I was thinking of realizing a BasicVillage inside a former factory half in ruins and that I could not provide all the economic and financial details necessary to prove it would be a profitable venture, but that it was paramount

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to experience that transformation with feeling because it would be very useful for the company and for the young people who would work there, immediately a bank would come out of nowhere granting us 30 billion to renovate 22.000 square meters just because of my vision. And if it came to dropping out of a sponsorship deal before time, like the one we had with fc Barcelona, after its president had offered the considerable amount of 15 billion but I thought it was not enough, Alessandro would encourage me over the phone: «Stand your ground». So I closed at 19 billion.

He gave me strength. In those days I had a powerful, wealthy and esteemed partner who took on by my side all the challenges faced by the company without sparing himself.

During the first two years with Benetton we grew a lot.

Everything was going well, our accounts and estate, but debts had grown to a point I feared might go against my interests. A recapitalization could work as a solution and Alessandro was willing to take it into consideration but it would upset our equal standing when it was working perfectly well. One day I told him: «Let’s refill the tank without upsetting our balance, let’s get a bank in».

He agreed.

We got in touch with a few financial institutions and only met with interest. For the first time ever I could choose! The Swiss giant ubs entered into business with us and through an outfit set up to deal with venture capital, brought to us 50 billion lire in July 1998. The company had virtually extinguished all of its debts and could rely on plenty of liquid assets; Alessandro and I still controlled just under 70% of the company that could, from that moment, also rely on the direct support of one of the biggest and established banks in the world, besides the powerful Chinese group Li&Fung.

It was a fundamental pit stop.

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Towards the Stock Exchange

The deal with ubs was clear: they would leave the partnership within a few years, when it would be quoted on the Stock Exchange.

Due to financial events in the late 90s and internal issues at 21 Investimenti, just three months after ubs entered Basic, Benetton changed his mind. His objective was one and one only: get quoted on the Stock Exchange right away.

I went through some very difficult times: I was between a rock and a hard place. Between ubs claiming our agreement was different, and Benetton insisting we should opt for that solution and claiming it would be better for me to back his decision.

That is what I did and we carried on, despite the fact that ubs did not agree. A turbulent journey (especially for me as it was my first time) towards a quotation on the Stock Exchange started off; a journey which would be over a year later, on 17 November 1999.

You see Adriano, it did not just involve carrying out a few formalities and preparing a plan to present to Piazza Affari (the Italian Stock Exchange, translator’s note). The real issue was working to “phase” the entire company towards its quotation and it was a job that needed to be done quickly.

Our relationship with ubs did not heal, even with time.

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The choice to go on the Stock Exchange turned out to be a very expensive one because ubs gave us its approval on condition we went with a minimum price guaranteed for them.

In the end we accepted. We feverishly worked on closing the price. The final negotiation was held one evening in an office inside a big Milan business bank. The listing price was low and we had to meet ubs’s conditions, since it had decided to sell all its shares. I did not want to but I had to sell some of my shares to meet the Swiss bank’s requirements and so did my family. Negotiations lasted until 5.50 am on the following morning. My relationship with Stella was firmly established at the time but she still lived in Milan; she came to the bank and waited for me outside. I had told her: «Come there around 11.30 pm and we’ll leave for Torino». I thought we would be finished by then.

Our debut on Piazza Affari was three days later.

The surprise was that the long and costly road show we had conducted through all of Europe before our quotation to present our plan to the most prestigious financial institutions resulted in zero share purchases! Fortunately we were rewarded by the retail market: small investors believed in us and demand for shares was six times more than the amount available, but it all came from small investors.

We resumed operations with energy and determination although, I must admit, I was a little dazed.

I tried to see the up side and started to feel convinced the right thing had happened. I finally felt released, free from everybody, the captain of my ship, and confident about my plan: make BasicNet into «the largest company in the world» operating in sportswear and casual clothing, in spite of those who years before had patronizingly smiled at the thought. With these ideas and hopes I left with Stella on 19 November for a 5-day holiday in Mauritius.

The bonds went well at the start. From 3,9 euros they

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climbed to 4,3. The interest of our investors was stable and alive and we also got some good press. Our shares were really news because they represented a company which was fully integrated online and exploited new technologies although it operated in a traditional field.

We had five years of expansion and profit behind us and had put on the market the majority of shares. When we went on the Stock Exchange capitalization in relation to the company’s net estate was slightly above double: well below the average quotation for comparables and start-ups of the time. Mine was a transparent game, my bet had no hidden agenda. We really were a digital company. But we had not taken into consideration how shallow but powerful the media are…

One morning Stella woke me with a strange face and voice. It was 27 November, we had been on the Stock Exchange for 10 days, we had rested a little on our short break after the hard work leading to our quotation and were still tanned…

Without a word she showed me the first page of an important financial paper, Milano Finanza, headlining in huge letters: «www.traps.it». In not so many words we were one of these traps for small investors. Also because – it said – BasicNet had claimed to be hi-tech but behind the company name there was «nothing».

It was Saturday morning: what could I do to explain that our company really was what it claimed to be even with its name? How could I state that I had had my episode of Stendhal’s syndrome in 1994 and that I had based my company on Internet when in Italy there were 200.000 users and there were just 20 million in the whole world? Were we not at the cutting edge, were we not innovative? So why could we not present ourselves on the market and ask investors to trust as such?

I realized right away that I would not be able to issue a

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prompt reply through the printed word. I called a couple of economics journalists I was friends with but they both gave me little reason for hope. It was impossible for them to fight such an authority’s position and on the first page.

It was the kind of decision they could not make without consulting their editors.

So I decided to write a letter to Consob and I urgently summoned Valentina Bassano and the guys at Menestrello to record an interview. Il Menestrello (The Minstrel, translator’s note) is an innovative company tv channel we had started in 1997, a state-of-the-art facility producing a large number of hours of programming to communicate with our network of license holders and within the Group. We had decided to share our strategies, products and all the news in the best way possible, namely using multimedia.

That was the first, and hopefully the last, time we used Il Menestrello to communicate something outside of our network. Valentina was our presenter and our company video journalist. We started recording at 2.30 pm. At 7 pm the interview was online. This is a transcript.

Angry?

No. My grandmother Maria would have said: a donkey’s bray can’t reach the heavens! But that isn’t the problem. They wrote something on Milano Finanza that isn’t true, and that is a problem for them and maybe for their readers who have been ill informed. It’s consumers who are being deceived. We’re not deceiving anyone.

Admit it, you must be at least a little mad…

Maybe I’m worried, but not about us. This just confirms our strategy and creates an interest in our way of working. If someone thinks we’re bluffing I don’t care, facts will make them

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change their mind. I’m worried about investors who will be confused to the advantage of the usual speculators.

Let’s try to clarify things; why are they pointing their finger at us as a company taking advantage of the circumstances?

Simply because whoever is writing isn’t informed about us, and above all about what is happening in the world thanks to Internet. The Web is changing the world: these days there is a lot of business in selling connections. It’s obvious that everybody needs to be connected but once the world is connected it will be those who are integrated that will assert themselves. And we are a company that was born integrated into Internet five years ago. We don’t sell “Internet”, we use it. We use it freely to make t-shirts and sell them all over the world. We believe in a company that can manage its offer and its related data flow in a fast, interactive, and reliable way exactly like the human body does through its nervous system. We believe in a company with a digital nervous system. I think everyone should read Bill Gates’ latest book, Business @ the speed of thought.

What does being a company integrated with Internet mean?

Internet is a data transmission system. It works very well, grows constantly, increasing efficiency and reducing costs. Until now it has responded flawlessly to democratic laws and market rules.

But it still is a system for transmitting data. For me the historic opportunity lies in exploiting

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such an innovation. Everyone can rely on a super efficient global data transmission network with a cost proportional to their dimensions and the use they make of it. It’s extraordinary!

Those who will exploit it first, whatever their sector, will acquire a great competitive advantage and expand more rapidly. That’s the way life works. That’s how we want to make t-shirts; four years ago we started from scratch, and this way we have reached 70 markets, increased our proceeds fourfold, taken on 250 people; some also say that we are something of an example in our sector, and on top of it all we have made a profit and built a solid financial situation. As soon as it was possible we put the majority of our capital on the market, distributed shares to all the Group’s human resources and declared we wanted to build a public company. That is what we believe and what we are trying to do.

Even so, some say that there is nothing behind the façade even asking the Authority to ban the use of suffixes like net, web etc, to avoid deceiving investors.

Again, I don’t think that’s our problem. Or actually, now that I think of it, it’s also in a way our problem as it shows our communication is lacking enormously.

Our company?

You see, online you can find anything, the good and the bad about us. We have basicpress.com free to all, a real journalistic site about us, but people have to know it’s available and want to go there. Many journalists do so, some give us advice, and in any case they appreciate the ef-

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fort aimed at providing better quality to their work and information in general. Probably many still don’t know about it and this is, of course, our fault.

What is your advice for investors at this point?

The same it was up to a week ago, namely buy our shares, but also, as I have always maintained, keep hold of them for at least a year.

Our company makes t-shirts, we need time to show our partners that by using Internet we will grow faster. Any kind of journalistic or financial speculation is useless and just a distraction.

At what level would you like shares to become stable?

I would just like them to become stable. Full stop. Or rather, dot com!

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The objective drifts away

On the following Monday, when the Stock Exchange opened, shares started to drop in value. A month later they had lost a third of their value. Talk about stable‌ And what is worse, at a time when everything was skyrocketing.

I felt like a mountaineer close to the peak that for reasons not depending on him is drawn back down.

Shortly afterwards other problems came to the surface because the company structure started creaking.

It was not just because of the wind raised by the media and the financial world against us. Our problems were directly related to the turbulent growth of recent years, troubled by the necessity of working to deadlines to get quoted on the Stock Exchange: a real race against time which had forced us to consider as done things that still needed work.

We soon had to face three main problematic areas that would affect us for years to come: in Germany, Spain and the u.s., where we had just as many shareholders. Issues in Germany cost us three years of company restructuring, in Spain, after Antonio Oliveres died, we got to the point where we were forced to buy everything back, thus compounding our financial situation. And finally the emergency in the States.

Our structure began to sway until it risked collapsing at

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the end of 2003 under the weight of consistent losses made worse by other problems like Giacomelli’s bankruptcy, who was at the time our biggest client.

Not only, in 1999 we had to say goodbye to our established and long-standing collaboration with Juventus. We were just thrown out without much sweet-talk; Barcelona behaved quite differently but they had decided to go with Nike.

More debacles followed, one after the other. We lost Vasco da Gama in Brazil as well as the South Africa and Jamaica teams, the pillars of our international marketing.

At the time we had to endure extremely violent attacks from our competitors.

The storm lasted for at least five years, between 2001 and 2006; difficult years where I managed to stay at the helm but not without struggling.

If all that was not enough in those years important players inside the company decided to jump ship: Leproni, Marconetto and others who were quite important for our style department, left. But above all William Carelli, my long-standing it point of reference. The man who already spoke of client servers and object-oriented programming in 1993, who had effectively become BasicNet’s it manager. The man with whom I had planned, starting from zilch, or rather from a field, our first integrated logistics plant in Strada della Cebrosa, Torino and with whom I had first talked about the company’s digital nervous system. He left, almost slamming the door, another case of: «You are insane».

One day he said: «The difference between the as/400 and pcs is that in ten years the as/400 has never crashed, and on the contrary a day hasn’t gone by without pcs crashing at least once. You can’t expect to run a business worth 100 billion with some toys». I replied that if that was his point, men and women stopped working a lot more than once a

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day if only to have some coffee, and above all they made a lot more mistakes than pcs, and that I did not want to go without the as/400 , but just have it “talk” to his “peers”, pcs and not people; I reminded him of the many times we had spoken of “desktopcracy” instead of classical bureaucracy but it was all in vain. He practically left within 48 hours!

At the end of 2000 a financial emergency also hit us: a financing line worth 20 billion lire with a pool of important banks was about to expire. We asked to renew it but it was not approved. Drastic action was required.

At that stage I was alone, gone were Minoli, Benetton and ubs, but luckily Carlo Pavesio was still on the scene. We had looked for different solutions with a number of financial institutions, also overseas, hoping they would be interested in the prospects offered by our business model, but they only made offers subject to purchasing my stake to then take the company off the Exchange and sell the brands.

I spoke at length with Carlo and with William Fung and in the end we resolved to carry on by ourselves.

The two years following our quotation had been extremely hard and both our young managing directors, Paolo Cafasso and Simon Bamber, were, for different reasons, in a pickle. Carlo and I decided we had to recruit somebody from outside the Group to entrust with the financial and operational management as well as cost control. Despite everyone’s commitment, willingness and courage we would not make it by ourselves.

Carlo knew that Franco Spalla, after many years spent at the helm of Fenera SpA, the investments firm that had held a small percentage until the Exchange, was ready for a new professional challenge.

I had known Franco for a few years and he knew us well enough. He was the right man and if it was true that he was looking for a real professional challenge, he had found it.

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At that point the situation was critical. We had to regain the confidence of the credit business, but also handle some important issues regarding our financial accounts. All in all the risk of failure was at the time really high. If there is something Franco is not lacking, and after eight years working with him all day I can confidently state this, it is courage; and he showed it on that occasion by agreeing to come on board of our small ship sailing on troubled waters.

I handed over the helm to Franco and left the bridge to personally join the crew in the most critical manoeuvres; in the meantime I had reached 45.

As a matter of fact Spalla was the first person with an established professional experience that came to fill an important post at BasicNet from the outside.

Not long after Franco had joined us the 9/11 tragedy took place. In the following four years we had to manage a rather unusual and surreal situation, a bit like in an epic war movie: a seriously hit destroyer struggles not to sink and at the same time carries on fighting, untamed, instead of falling back. Every year we hoped for a new season to dawn, dressing our wounds, trying to battle on and avoid sinking. We drastically cut back on advertising and stopped hiring new staff. We had pulled the purse strings wherever it was possible but on one thing we did not cut down a single penny: it. It was our heavy artillery and if we had to cut back on that we might as well give up. We would rather stop breathing than stop investing in our business model.

The only moments of tension of the few we experienced with our collaborators of the time were always due to this kind of decision.

What we wanted to achieve made sense, even if the risk was high because we were saving money in any way we could, but we carried on investing there.

Half way through 2004 I feared that would be the last year with me as the head of the company. Our shares had

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progressively sunk in value to the point of losing 90% of their original quotation, and that year it looked like we would close the accounts with a loss worth a staggering 12.5 million euros: a disaster.

In previous years our beautiful outfits for the Italian national football team had increased our shares’ value in an incredible yet technically unexplainable way. In a few days shares climbed from 70 cents to 3 euro, but the disastrous match between Italy and South Korea during the 2002 World Cup, refereed by that shady character known as Byron Moreno, put an end to that improvised lottery and our shares lost all they had gained in a few dramatic sessions.

As if that was not enough at the end of 2004, we received two further blows: figc (Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio), a.k.a. the national team, barred us from the tender to renew the contract and chose Puma. Also toroc (Torino Organising Committee for the xx Olympic Winter Games), with whom we were at an advanced stage of negotiation to become sponsors of the Italian Team for Torino’s Winter Games, sent us packing at the last minute and chose a Japanese sponsor, Asics.

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The time of K-Way and Superga

On the whole, 2004 was a real mess and our shares dropped to 50 cents. Only four years earlier we were at 4 euros! Stella and I had also been together for four years. But I could not give up. One day I was talking to Alessandro Benetton (we had always kept in touch) and he asked me how things were going. Once more, and with the usual confidence, I told him about my vision, and all the things I was doing to keep going. He was very quiet. I felt that on the other end of the line Alessandro, on that occasion, did not see eye to eye with me. «You don’t think we can make it, right?» I asked him. He replied that he thought it was too late but he congratulated me on my determination and, naturally, said he hoped he was wrong.

At this point I feel I have to draw a parallel because the final weeks of 2004 were in many ways almost a repeat performance of the unbelievable events of 1994 when I had taken over mct.

Ten years earlier I was in a spot of trouble with fsm, but I had managed to get out of that almost hopeless situation with a gamble, managing to acquire a much bigger company which had recently gone bust. At the time I was once more in troubled waters and had decided to stake all on

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acquiring the K-Way and Superga brands, as I knew they were in trouble.

So I got in touch with Nicolò von Wunster, partner and administrator of Formula Sport Group, the company that owned them. I realized straight away they were in deeper trouble than us.

Unicredit and Intesa, the banks we are closest to in Italy, found our plan interesting, also because they where in some ways involved with Formula Sport’s poor performance. At least they did not tell me I was insane.

As usual we had no money but a grand project. Debts had increased considerably, our accounts were empty, banks were cutting back everywhere they could and we now had to beg them not to force us to cover our overdrafts.

It was in this apparently disastrous situation that I tried to hit the jackpot.

In January 2005 the banks approved a loan of 9 million euros to the Group to buy K-Way and another worth 11 millions to me for a different gamble: a 25 million increase in capital for BasicNet that I guaranteed for my part thanks to that money.

The market’s reaction to the capital increase proposal was a disaster. Basically only William Fung and I went for it although the price was excellent: 0,52 euro per share.

On the plus side thanks to the shareholders who had not joined in the capital increase my position had gone from 30,001% to 42,5%, although heavily in debt and full of covenants.

The increase in capital was carried out to give the company the resources necessary not only to buy K-Way, but also to relaunch the Superga brand that we had leased with an option to buy a few years later.

It was tears and blood for BasicNet’s shares, that from 0,52 carried on losing value and it seemed that nothing could stop their fall.

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If they reached 0,34 euros the banks had the authorization to take all my shares to cover the credit they had given me.

On 13 August 2005 I was sailing into Budelli bay, in the Maddalena archipelago, when I received a call from Pavesio: «Shares are at 37 cents, at 34 the banks can start collection procedures». It was a blow but I decided to say nothing to Stella and the boys: it would only ruin their day as well. I spent a very thoughtful few hours. At that point I was almost sure shares would keep falling. I did not call Pavesio or go online all day; I decided to wait until we returned to the harbour to discover what my fate would be. In the afternoon rates recovered a little and shares were at 35 cents when markets closed. I still had a business.

That was the lowest our shares ever fell.

2005 ended better than we had expected. Our shares got some oxygen but we still risked not being able to keep to the covenants included in the loan agreements signed with the banks to buy K-Way and increase our capital. As if that was not enough a reasonable forecast for the following years confirmed that the balance between debt and credit would soon be upset the wrong way.

Already half way through 2005 the banks had told us we would have to recapitalize the Group or they would be forced to declare us in default of the contract and revoke all credit.

We were well aware that our estate was worth a lot more than the balance figures the banks used to work out its ratio to debt because, over the years, we had created a huge value bound to our intangible assets, namely our brands.

But since these were not accounting data they were not taken into consideration. Someone – at the time everyone had some advice for us! – kept on telling us we needed an industrial partner to guarantee for our plan. I was sure of just one thing: I had to find in the shortest time possible at

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least 30 million euros to add to BasicNet’s net capital. If I did not I would lose everything.

Carlo, Franco and I sprung into action.

The months from October 2005 and the end of April 2006 were one of those times when anything could happen, and it did, including the Olympic Games in Torino I was heavily involved in because we were housing what was to be a great success, Casa Russia, but it also brought to the historic turning point we were waiting for, which is still supporting us now.

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China

In September 2005, Chen Yihong – a very intelligent man who I hold in very high consideration, the president and owner of Kappa China, and a successful license holder of ours for years – invited me to his convention to talk about something he said was very important. He explained he had the opportunity to expand massively but he also needed capital; to make a long story short he offered to invest in Kappa China. At first I looked at him stunned, then I explained I was looking for investors too. So Chen proposed a new long term license contract valid for at least fifteen years; this would allow him to find investors thus the resources necessary to support an increase in the number of single brand Kappa shops, an increase that would be quite considerable. At the time we had 700 retail shops in China, now there are almost 3000 Kappa shops! The idea of a long license contract could also suit us as long as I could find someone to pay a part of the minimum royalties guaranteed in advance.

A few days later Chen was in Torino with a real and interesting offer. Essentially he was offering a minimum of 120 million dollars guaranteed for the first 12 years. Maybe we had found a solution to our problems but we still needed to find a bank to sell the contract to in exchange

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for an advance of a third of the proceeds of the following 12 years.

At the same time negotiations undertaken with a number of financial institutions that had expressed an interest in considering an investment in BasicNet were in process.

The solution envisaging a long term licensing contract with Kappa China was my favourite by large as it would have made it possible to settle BasicNet’s financial situation and to hold on to the brand in China, and above all we would not jeopardize the amazing growth opportunities on that market. I would also still be completely independent in managing the company as no new financial partners would be coming in who could influence strategic decisions and investments.

Unfortunately no Italian credit institution wanted to take part in the operation. I even went to Shangai to see if there were any possibilities through Sanpaolo’s Chinese branch but they did not want to know either. To put it in a few words the operation Chen and I had planned was not viable.

Fortunately on the other hand in December 2005 negotiations with an investment company seemed to be going well; we had gone through all the most critical aspects of the operation and solved them, reaching an agreement on basically everything. BasicNet would receive the liquid assets it needed to satisfy the banks and I would still be the majority shareholder in the Group even if I would share control and management decisions with the new partner.

During the first months of 2006, with the bank’s approval, we would have to formalize the operation in time for the shareholders’ convention to be held at the end of April. I thought we had once again found a way out of our predicament. Since we could not make it on our own I was hoping in a new partner because the alternative would be selling the Kappa brand to the competition.

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I told myself that in the end I would have by my side a prestigious partner whom I very much esteemed.

On 4 February Rocco was born, on the 9th I carried the Olympic torch and on the 10th the xx Olympic Winter Games opened in Torino. But during the first week of the Games I started to worry; a few meetings with our prospective investors went unexpectedly wrong. We were supposed to hone the last details but everything was again up for discussion. A few days later we realized that our potential partners – I still can’t understand why – had radically changed their minds. I spoke about the situation with the banks; they were perfectly aware of the situation but they were less than forthcoming. I remember that one late Friday afternoon I asked the bank manager, who did not want to hear about taking into consideration an extension of our credit lines for the time I needed to find a solution, what I was supposed to do after the Group meeting, since I certainly could not replace the investor who had just dropped out by that time. He looked at me astonished and it was as if he answered: «Why the hell are you asking me? You know perfectly well what you’ll have to do»; then with a half apologetic, half rueful tone of voice he literally said: «You’ll file for bankruptcy, what else are you going to do?!?».

I left the bank in a hurry. I was obviously wasting my time and it would have been better if I did not lose my temper too, something hard to keep in check after such a reply.

The following day I got in touch with Chen’s interpreter.

I explained I had to convey an urgent message to his boss.

Instead of the 15-year contract I was offering the definitive sale of the Kappa brand for China so long as he could find Chinese investors who could front the resources we needed, as well as funds for the development of Kappa China.

Chen was interested right away.

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The following week I travelled to China and Chen told me that a Hong Kong investment fund, through an important and prestigious American business bank, had expressed an interest in the operation with a view to opening on the Stock Exchange. It was late February, just a month before the meeting that would have to approve the data to take to the shareholders’ meeting at the end of April; not much time at all to close such an important and complex operation given that we had just started talking about it.

We decided to give it a go anyway. An unforgettable 30day-period started and on 27 March 2006, the day before the board meeting, after an exhausting negotiation and a lot of travelling, we finally signed the deal selling off the Kappa brand in China at an important Hong Kong law firm. BasicNet would cash 30 million euros and with that money it would ward off the covenants menace forever.

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A new frontier

Thanks to that sale we were able to balance our accounts and start on a new voyage.

It allowed us to decrease our debts 30 million euro and to increase our net capital over 25 million. All the covenants’ parameters were sorted, or actually they were better if compared with our limits. And that is why 2006 started on a very positive note, at least from the point of view of company management.

We were seeing the first results of our strategies to relaunch Superga, results which would have been impossible even just a year earlier. Our shares recovered well, going from 0,70 euro to approximately 2 euro. To be honest in the first six months of 2006 we managed to catch up on many fronts. It was a decisive turning point: because of the relief due to selling the Kappa brand in China, because our shares were increasing in Piazza Affari, because of the final results of our six-month audit that benefited from Superga’s success.

On the other hand Formula Sport Group SpA, who had sold us K-Way and leased us Superga, unexpectedly tumbled towards bankruptcy. And that meant that if we wanted to keep Superga within the Group we would have to move very quickly to purchase the brand, without any guarantee

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we would actually succeed. And that is exactly what we did and ended right back in the middle of the storm to avoid losing the brand responsible for our growth.

The exclusive long-term lease was as a matter of fact no longer valid after they filed for bankruptcy so we found ourselves in the middle of a new challenge that was over after the first three months of 2007 when we finally managed to buy Superga. We bought the brand for 23 millions, half of which was ours and half through a new mid-term loan from the same banks that only a year earlier had shunned us: we had finally convinced them we were able, reliable and capable of creating value.

I knew that we were always under scrutiny and that during our history we had constantly had to show that we were “worthy” and not to someone who wants to test you because they believe you can make it. No: we had to show what we were capable of to people who thought we could not make it from the start. And this, Adriano, makes a hell of a difference. We have always had to put in an extra effort because we did not just have to prove ourselves, we had to fight against prejudice.

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A safe journey on a stormy sea

And now Adriano let us talk about the present. A year and a half has gone by since that new, decisive turning point.

We had managed to secure the ship that was to take us on our voyage on the high seas.

Since then BasicNet has fully confirmed a tendency to improve the management and results of its enterprises.

A trend rooted in what happened at the start of 2006.

So it is a solid trend, based on the growth of volumes, profits and capital. We managed to keep going despite the first signals or rather the first jolts, of the economic and financial crisis we are all aware of today. These jolts have come through to the present and have also affected the value of our shares. Within a year all the hard work to get to 2 euros was invalidated and shares fell to approximately 1.5 euros, but apart from this, all the rest – the way we handle our financial strategies with credit institutions, sales, profits, cost efficiency – has constantly and systematically improved. And this was confirmed in 2007 by the return of dividend distribution, something that had not happened since 2000! In the meantime I have sold some shares and more or less halved some of the personal debts I contracted to increase capital.

So where are we at now?

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Before talking about me and my company we must first of all take a look at the social context. If we did so we could get the feeling that another “Berlin wall” has fallen, and that the time has come to pay the bill for winning the Cold War. We can say that the battle against communism was won not so much with market capitalism but more simply with consumerism and credit-supported capitalism.

We live in a world that took advantage of the globalization short cut with the illusion of creating wealth with large, superfluous consumption or even worse with the so called financial industry instead of a solid real economy.

And now everybody is terrified that the crisis might reach the core: consumption; that with time the crisis will cause us to collapse. And at that point the problem would not just be a simple loss of capital. The real risk would be the definitive defeat of capitalism, because there would be no more fuel for the engine to run on. How will we reach that point? Consumption will fall if unemployment rises because poverty will also spread, so there will be less spending capacity.

But when and how do we cause unemployment? When a company is no longer competitive on the market. The point then is, especially today, that it is paramount to strive to be more competitive. So this is what we need to ask ourselves: am I competitive enough to conquer my share of the market? And more: is there a sufficient number of really competitive firms at least on the European scene to face the world market? If the answer is yes – and I believe it is – then we could possibly conceive this crisis also as an opportunity to relaunch the western model of social organization through our best assets, thus in a more solid and long lasting way. If the answer is no then we are in trouble.

We will have to issue protective measures for our companies, thus backtracking from the purely theoretical point of view of the free market, but escaping recession.

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Concerning our company we need to put it into context in the the last part of 2008, the worst period for the economy since the post-war years. Nothing was moving. We held out, our ship carried on sailing without running aground.

I have wondered about the reasons behind this many times and I think it is because in the previous 10 years we made the right choices. We have always tried to build the company, nothing else. As Moana Pozzi rightly put it: ÂŤWe always lived as if it could all end tomorrow, and thought as if it would never endÂť. We worked with strategy, method and creativity. And we always thought that we could not be competitive without being at the forefront in the use of new technologies. We always believed in a company that could be considered such because it was global. We always believed in the contribution that an entrepreneur can bring to a large organization. We always believed in transparency and in operating in accordance with the law. We never gave in to the temptation of solving our problems with operations of a financial nature or purpose. We always insisted, even when the wind was blowing against us at 100 knots, on what we perceived to be the right positioning for our product: premium merchandise and clever price.

In the last 10 years we did all this. Fortunately for us many of our competitors did exactly the opposite. Today when our sales force goes out with our products it finds a smaller market, or to use a metaphor, a smaller buffalo but there are a lot less lions to hunt it. So even a very small, but quick and enterprising lion can eat very well, obviously after the biggest are sated.

Today we are in a strategically positive situation. Consumers respect us because they can see we are serious. I have been making t-shirts for 32 years (so much for eclectic Boglione, like some continue to say!). Everything I have done until now has been in the interest of making t-shirts. Our

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customers also respect us because they can see we strive to do a good job, to use less paper, to be fast, clear and transparent. And now we also have a solid network of entrepreneurs, our license holders, using BasicNet with profit.

Now I am here, I have almost finished telling this story to my friend Adriano, and I’m already thinking of what I will do when I will quit work: the forecast is for 8 May 2016.

I am still sleeping at the office – it has been converted into a weird but very comfortable home – I still think about the future, about my family, about what I have to do to avoid mistakes. I still have the same fears, insecurities and weaknesses I have always had. I look in the mirror and tell myself that I am 52 but if I had to say at what stage of my journey I am I would still say: «Not half way, not at the end, still at the beginning».

I still have the same relationship with money: I do not have any, I have never had any. Yet my budget has increased very much over the years, my expenses have increased, I basically have two families. And I am very happy that I managed to do this thanks to my work, and to my salary.

As far as I am concerned I still believe in something I understood about ten years ago, namely that the richest man in the world is not the man who has the most money, but the man who has the least needs; so for a few years now I have no longer increased my consumption.

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AFTERWORD Slowly please, I’m in a hurry

Accepting fear

Marco, I have a lot of questions for you. Let’s start from the beginning: we said that writing your story would make sense only if it was useful to young people, if it became an opportunity to make entrepreneurial ventures interesting for them.

That’s right. I would also like to tell young people that there is a necessary condition: you need to accept fear.

What I often find is just the opposite, that people tend shy away from experiencing fear. This happens because we live without experiencing fear for our lives. Both these attitudes are wrong. The first, trying to avoid the experience of fear, truly is a disease. The second, living without experiencing fear, is the symptom of the disease. On the contrary young people must feel the anxiety and fear deriving from their expectations.

What is the meaning of your work, what drove you to do what you have done until now?

It was the need for independence, for myself and for those close to me, the eagerness to make a position for myself, the desire to be a free man, or at the very least not to be too much of a slave. Work is for me the means, the tool, the good Christian’s vineyard, the body of the soul… otherwise what should we do to avoid being enslaved, to

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best take advantage of our brief existence? And if we don’t work, what do we do?

As far as I’m concerned I could live as a hermit but I am responsible for too many people. Sure I could’ve lived under a tree, desisting from all effort like the fox with the grapes because nondum matura est (Latin for «it isn’t ripe yet», translator’s note), but my dreams were my starting point, earning a good living. It would’ve certainly been easy to think I’d wander around with a boat when I still didn’t have so many people depending on me. But I must also think of those working with me.

Is that how you think of your employees?

They’re my colleagues. In my company there are two kinds of people, typical of the life of a businessman: partners and those I call my colleagues. To use naval terms the former are the ship owners the latter are the crew. I have with them the typical relationship that good captains in movies have with their crew. Ours is a relationship. Before anything else they are my buddies, because work takes up a large part of life. Some people have been with me for over 25 years. And those joining us now, coming on board now,are deciding in some way to be my mates.

I am also friends with some of them. Maybe half of my best friends (which goes to show that there aren’t so many) are also colleagues of mine. But our working relationship is still based on hierarchy.

BasicNet is built on a system based on hierarchies. But I have also travelled up these hierarchies myself, and I think this is the reason for the respect I am accorded by my colleagues. And I also thing it is my duty to plan everyone’s future, always, and I’m sure this makes my work easier because for my mates it’s like having a problem less to deal with, because I’m taking care of it. And they trust me.

Some people in the company call me, within our “circus”,

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the “lion tamer”, which is also a form of security for the circus. For the time being my colleagues have never seen me desperate.

Do you think it’s important to know how to toil?

Of course, but you have to find a way of getting a lot done but also limiting toil. Because toil is tiring! You musn’t be tired. In my line of work the real problem is stress, which can tire you out more than climbing a mountain. That’s why I have always worked against stress. If anyone asks me who the architect who designed my house is I answer: «Mr. Stress». I wanted to design an stress-proof home, a home that couldn’t become untidy. I designed wardrobes with no drawers because drawers are a source of dangerous and permanent mess. I have 15 televisions indoors to avoid the stress of having to remain seated and not be able to do other things. Fight stress with irony, with games. We already knew this when we started this venture: we organized lots of parties, also inviting our clients. When we first moved into this building, that had to be completely renovated, we often used to rollerblade around it or dance to music at full blast.

Ok. Handling fatigue by fighting stress, but… defeats – and you’ve experienced quite a few – how do you deal with them?

Defeats are also part of the game. It’s better if you’re defeated because you made a mistake. And it’s true, this has happened to me on more than one occasion. But unfortunately it can happen (and it does quite often) that you’re defeated because somebody cheated. It would be much better never to experience that kind of defeat. I experienced some bitter defeats of this kind. Clearly they too make you stronger, but they also make you more wary and cynical and in the end they limit your creativity. On the whole I would say that you learn the most from your own mistakes.

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Is gratitude important at work?

It’s the foundation of my work. When a client buys one of my t-shirts, I say t-shirts but it could be any of BasicNet’s products, he does so because he is grateful. Grateful in the sense that he acknowledges something for which I have to be thankful myself. Gratitude is the foundation of the market. This is very important in our relationship with our clients, our license holders, not because we are “good” but because, on the free market, gratitude is economy.

Let’s delve a little deeper: when you achieve something you aspired to, when you reach success, what do you think about? Are you prone to saying thank you?

There always are new battles. You must consider that if a product is successful, nine times out of ten it doesn’t mean it didn’t have or still has some problems. There are a lot of stages to the journey – and consequently in the success – of a businessman. Mine were, for example, acquiring mct’s brands, the arrival of Benetton, being quoted on the Exchange and finally recapitalization and the sale of a brand in China: it always is a crescendo. These have been our milestones, one battle after the other. But they were battles won by a group of people. So yes there is gratitude, because you congratulate those that made success possible, your companions on the adventure, your colleagues and the lawyers who gave you a hand.

A company must also be grateful to those who financed it…

BasicNet’s relationship with finance is the same a car has with petrol, or the human body has with blood. It is an essential tool for the life of a company and above all for a company’s growth. But BasicNet and I don’t have a relationship with the financial industry because I don’t understand it. I already struggle to grasp our industrial, commercial and financial process – as it’s quite difficult to understand –,

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imagine if I understand how some papers sold to others can help me in the industrial trend. Financiers or investment funds representatives have often proposed I let finance into the company, but during those conversations I never managed to understand where, how and if they would help me make t-shirts and build a modern company.

We respect finance and gave it a lot of attention from the start, since Sanpaolo’s branch number 20 or crt in Rivarolo helped us. We still work very well with credit institutions, there is no dirt on us in their databases. We have been quoted on the Stock Exchange for almost 10 years and we still hope that the capital market will one day be able to play an active role for well-managed companies looking at the future.

During our conversations you have often talked about your business model. How would you sum it up?

A summary could be as follows: BasicNet does not sell tshirts but business opportunities, and capitalizes the results basically by increasing the value of its brands and related commercial activities. BasicNet is a networked company, exclusively made up of entrepreneurs, each carrying out a portion of the clothing industry’s pipeline. All this still in a competitive way, without the possibility of trusts cropping up at any level. All the main exchange procedures and related information is managed by it systems owned by the Group and without the use of paper. The Group’s activity and performance can therefore be verified and corrected in real time.

You have often sailed through failure or even just the risk of failure, and you have always come out as the winner and strengthened.

What are the qualities necessary to face company difficulties?

In my life I never lost hope and at the same time I don’t think I ever deluded myself. I undoubtedly got myself in

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very tight corners but I did it thinking I could win. But this isn’t a quality really. A quality would be, for example, the ability to evaluate, because you have to make a decision anyway. So you need to evaluate correctly. But before this quality it is necessary to have a clear vision of what could happen, including the possibility that you might not hit the target. If there is this clarity then you can spend all the energy you have, because on the other side you see the “carrot” that could become yours. I have never done anything without perceiving the existence of this “carrot”.

I think that the bankruptcy of your own business must be a very sad thing: something comparable to a captain watching his ship sink. But the only kind of failure I take into consideration is when one can say: «I tried and I didn’t succeed», and he is, of course, the last to abandon ship. I am not interested in other forms of failure.

How did you manage to breathe new life into “dead” brands, presenting them as new?

Fortunately we don’t just own one brand. In 1994 when we bought Kappa, and we were just starting out, it was even “deader” than Superga, one of our most recent acquisitions. And K-Way was even worse than Kappa and Superga. How did I bring them back to life? I know my job, but that’s because I had the opportunity of learning from the best at an epic time, and received the most comprehensive training you could imagine. And I then understood that to achieve results you need a system, a method, a tool, and some ideas, you must know your job inside out. What came first, the egg or the chicken? I tried to build a chicken that would lay eggs.

Who are BasicNet’s designers?

They are our brand managers and above them there is a supervisor, the senior brand manager, a man who knows the

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market as much as I do, and it is not by chance that he is the same age as me and has had the same mentors. His name is Alberto Balloco. He is the “shepherd” of these young brand managers who are the real designers behind the brand. And then, to be honest, I am the head designer. Not because I’m me, but because no entrepreneur can risk delegating one of the fundamental aspects of the business to someone invested with less responsibility. I’m sure fiat’s chief designer is Marchionne. He takes the first or the last decision.

What is your input in the collections?

My input is having built a vast style department to develop products based on effective, efficient and fast systems.

This is the important part I take merit for. I imagine the product in its entirety. So I think about how K-Way should evolve for the next five years, what image it should put forward when compared to its competitors. I painstakingly research the product’s philosophy, its values. For instance, I wanted to base K-Way on classic products made contemporary by the K-Way style, that are always functional, never short-lived, always up to date, modern, with a technological feel and brightly coloured. Then we go into product details, by category, to check whether they make sense. BasicNet also has an Art Director, Alex Jorio, who looks after the Group’s aesthetics, so to speak, and marginally also its products.

How important are women in your work and for your company?

In life I am definitely a romantic, a dreamer, a visionary.

And this must have played a part in my relationship with women. But beyond that, maybe it is with them that I managed and still manage to communicate better. It’s easier, you can always be ironic without ever having to become vulgar as it often happens between men. The relationship between a man and a woman is more sophisticated by

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definition. In our company 75% of our human resources and 50% of our managers are women, so this must say something about their importance here. They are the key people. They are a lot more faithful to the company if compared to their male colleagues (of course this must also be because of the employment market), who are more prone to look for other employment opportunities. And it also seems to me that women are more stable on the job because they more easily feel that the company is something of their own.

You often speak of “destiny” as of a key to understanding an entrepreneur’s commitment. What do you mean?

The way I see it destiny is what you carry inside you.

Maybe it exists as a landing place one is destined to get to, but it’s difficult to say whether we are living a movie which has already been shot or if we’re doing the shooting ourselves. We don’t know that. I think we all make our own destiny, we create it ourselves. The world is determined by us human beings. However on other occasions you also experience the reality of an adverse fate, which is beyond you. There are blows you can dodge and others that you simply can’t. All in all, and work is a perfect example, in life there are so many different influences that it’s absolutely impossible to predict what will happen.

So if we determine our own fate, do you act within society with a mission?

When I was young I wanted to change the world, but for some time now I’ve taken action to prevent the world from changing me. Apart from this, I think entrepreneurs have a mission, and it’s the same as mankind’s: to undertake rather than fight. In this sense I think I am in the right place because I want to build something, improve our life in common, aiming at quality of life. What’s the alternative?

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Where do you get the enthusiasm to start your work again every morning?

I don’t get it together every day. There are mornings when I look for it and can’t find it. If I get up on the wrong side of the bed I am absorbed by the “machine”. In that case I get to the office and go through meetings, urgent things to do and everything I am reminded of by Roberta, because they’re on my schedule. So I just start running. Where do I get my enthusiasm when I find it? It’s inside me.

What is time for an entrepreneur? Is it a favourable condition or a barrier to be knocked down?

Time flies and the worst thing that can happen is having to do something twice. When in doubt it’s better to move slowly as to avoid going back on one’s steps, because time is limited. It’s true that the quicker a company moves, the further it travels, but statistically it’s more important to do things properly than quickly, even if it feels like it’s taking longer. This is because in the long term you travel further if you never have to go back. So I think about all the time we spent building our IT procedures to make our network function at the speed of light without any mistakes. And as we were doing this we felt we were wasting time. But… One of our claims really hit the nail on the head, as a Spanish friend of mine once said: «Slowly please, I’m in a hurry».

Hhm… I like that, it could be the title of this story. So Marco, are we putting this book together?

Yes.

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BLOG The archetypal entrepreneur

by Carlo De Matteo CEO Iride Servizi A characteristic trait of an entrepreneur’s life is the choice to exercise his freedom and personal responsibility within a financial initiative.

We know that behind any entrepreneurial venture, even the most modest ones, there is a personal ambition to build something, and that this ambition to succeed must be based on a winning idea (the “business idea” of management theory). Marco Boglione has had a lot of ideas, but undoubtedly his best was the one that brought him to purchase mct and its wealth of established brands from its trustee in bankruptcy. All the qualities making up the ideal entrepreneur can be seen in this operation: boldness, vision, a sense of risk, managerial rigour, personal sacrifice, leadership, respect for money – both one’s own and other people’s –, and creativity; but something intangible is necessary for the sum of these qualities to result in an enterprise: genius, that is, the ability to create something new that is more valuable than the simple sum of available resources. It is thanks to this process, defined by economists as the “creation of value”, that an entrepreneur redistributes affluence for himself and for his employees, offering products and useful services to meet our needs. If we thought about this every morning when turning the water

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tap on, we would be surprised to see it flow and we would feel grateful for all the work and innovations that brought us through history from the well and bucket to our sink.

So genius, not superego; because an entrepreneur is a man or a woman, not a superman or superwoman beyond good and evil, someone who may fail and is aware of it.

Quoting Boglione: «A quality would be, for example, the ability to evaluate, because you have to make a decision anyway. So you need to evaluate correctly. But before this quality it is necessary to have a clear vision of what could happen, including the possibility that you might not hit the target».

In the end the problem of our dramatic times is all there: the great assumption that everything depends from us, that everything can be controlled and that the presumed supremacy of technology and its possibilities is the only justification for our actions. Making an entrepreneur a legendary figure as a Nietzschian hero is misleading, because enterprise defines every man and woman: marrying, having children, improving one’s working status even if as an employee, studying, or buying a house by getting into debt is in this sense an enterprise, that is, risking to build a greater common good. The alternative is our contemporary unemotional sterility maybe peddled with the theoretical notion that everything can be rented without owning anything. In the parable of talents he who buries his own because he is afraid of losing it, in the end loses himself, that is, he destroys a potential value infinitely greater than that of talent alone.

In reconstructing the tok operation the main factor that determined its success was the team working with Marco Boglione. Assigned roles and related responsibilities, sharing risks and motivation, and everyone’s own personal sacrifice, highlight another intangible aspect of an entrepreneur’s

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success: the ability to organize and motivate not just one’s own work but the work of all those collaborating.

Many entrepreneurs and top managers build successful businesses they then destroy because they make them into projections of themselves: their collaborators are just executors, assistant managers have no real responsibility and the organization is conceived as a radial model with single vectors converging on a sole fulcrum animating it.

Many companies have gone down because, after expanding, the owner could no longer drive the business keeping everything in sight, yet still expected to continue to do so thus becoming an obstacle to growth. No organization can prosper in time (and a business is an organization) irrespective of the human factor. Once again it is not an abstract or idealistic principle but a “critical factor” for the success of the organization itself, because it exploits that formidable drive towards creativity and improvement, and thus creation of value, i.e. the freedom of someone operating to achieve a shared goal. This freedom is not abstract but it must be measured with responsibility and rules. At one point in the book’s afterword Boglione says: «It would’ve certainly been easy to think I’d wander around with a boat when I still didn’t have so many people depending on me. But I must also think of those working with me (…) They’re my colleagues (…) I am also friends with some of them (…) But our working relationship is still based on hierarchy». And then later: «I am the head designer. Not because I’m me, but because no entrepreneur can risk delegating one of the fundamental aspects of the business to someone invested with less responsibility».

These sentences summarize a successful management model: a dynamic and adaptive balance between managing and delegating. In the end, the first risk an entrepreneur has to face is related to choosing the people he will work with.

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Another issue raised in the book relates to competition on the market and competitiveness as a condition for the survival of the business. The 2009 has been the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin. His most quoted work (which does not mean his best known), The Origin of Species, has been reduced to the easy concept that natural selection ensures the survival of the strongest individual.

What Darwin expounded is an interpretational factor of an aspect of reality (the extinction of some species and the evolution of others over time), but the 20th century’s ideological mechanism absorbed it and applied it to organizations and markets. In the end it is the same old dream: to find a factor, a formula explaining the whole of reality in a deterministic manner (in this the greatest 20th century ideological systems, Marxism-Leninism above all, are a lot closer to Gnosticism than science). Vice versa, reality cannot be made to fit into this pattern and requires an adequate method of analysis for each of its different aspects.

In the case of organizations and markets the Latin etymology of the verb «to compete» is to reach a goal togeher (cum pètere) and not to annihilate the other. Applying this concept to organizations and more in general to society as a whole, is not an issue of a priori morality (you must be good) but one of efficiency and effectiveness in using the human capital.

A business exarcebating inside competition, thinking it will thus select the best and drop the rest, encourages predatory and opportunistic behaviour in the winners: «Today it’s me, tomorrow another… better concentrate on short term results and take stock options and bonuses». These concepts are dramatically well documented by the current crisis. This kind of business also destroys human capital because the “losers” also have a wealth of knowledge and experience that will be wasted or under-exploited.

On the other hand a business defining a system of values

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rewarding the best and providing a chance to renew professional qualifications to those who want to become the best, even taking on different activities and not necessarily within the business itself, is by comparison a lot harder and a greater challenge of the first because it requires people to feel personal responsibility towards this system of values, and is much more effective and efficient because it maximises organizational leverage.

Within the business and market system annihilating the competition almost never brings lasting benefits: there is no certainty that clients will be willing to buy products and services from the winner, the “loser’s” technologies and human resources are dispersed creating opportunities for new entries, the economies of scale expected by purchasing stock shares are often deceptive, especially when the “loser’s” products and services cannot be immediately replaced by the winner’s. Imagine if Marco Boglione, instead of risking his own fsm in buying mct and then BasicNet in buying up the Superga and K-Way brands, had thought of manufacturing t-shirts, shoes and sportswear to conquer the niche in the market left vacant by his competitors.

Probably we would not be reading this book, no one would remember these brands and the 213 people of those days would not have had the opportunity to use their know-how and skills within a new company. In not so many words it would have been a waste of resources and a loss for the market.

The example of our productive districts shows that a network-based system where one is at the same time a competitor and a partner is a lot more resilient to technological and market changes if compared to the single nodes it is made of. A district has a greater and longer lasting creation of value if compared to that generated by single businesses moving by themselves.

BasicNet itself is a network-based business, as defined

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by Marco Boglione, its business model is based on the mutual interests of «entrepreneurs each providing a stage of activity in the clothing industry’s pipeline» (what is called in game theory a «win-win» that is a model, a behaviour, a set of interactions, an economic transaction where all the single players profit if they play by the rules).

I would like to close with a nod to Marco Boglione’s other great intuition: the potential of icts (information and communication technologies) applied to organizations as a competitive advantage (it was the beginning of the 80s).

It is an issue deserving of a book in itself, but let us just state that the circulation and spread of data in real time, linear processes, the adaptive ubiquity of a business that must reinvent itself and create new products every season, are on the one hand BasicNet’s distinctive characteristics, but that every business will have to become “basic” to guarantee its future.

Marco Boglione became a great entrepreneur also because he was humble enough to learn from the teachers he met during his life. Be wary of self-made men: those who have never loyally followed someone else in their lives will never be true leaders; dictators perhaps, but certainly not entrepreneurs.

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Thanks to Roberta Cantaluppi Franco Grassi

INDEX

foreword – A corrispondence A friendship

6 7

part i – What we care about The trail To the young The risk of endeavour

10 11 14 17

part ii

– Where an entrepreneur is born The origins A tantrum, a fish, and my first contract Tales of grandfathers and children Entrepreneurial roots Far from home The red bow

21 22 27 30 37 42 50

– On the path of destiny Driven by desire A decisive encounter A change of gear From the factory to New York A brand new company A little mishap along the way

53 54 56 59 62 68 71

part iii

The decline An entrepreneur at last

76 80

part iv – Building, listening to yourself Waiting Love/1 Love/2 Starting from scratch The first strategic partner… and we’re off!

A nasty surprise

85 86 88 93 95 102 109

part v – An amazing adventure “Mission impossible” Take Over Kappa Take-off Banzai!

The final charge Taking over the factory The Stendhal syndrome The foundations of our new enterprise The auction

113 114 119 121 126 132 138 141 145 150

part vi – An endless battle Corso Brescia 86 Deflecting the attack Congratulations, mamma Dani!

How do you revamp a tired brand?

How a product is born Towards the Stock Exchange The objective drifts away The time of K-Way and Superga China A new frontier A safe journey on a stormy sea

153 154 157 160 162 165 168 175 180 184 188 190

afterword – Slowly please, I’m in a hurry Accepting fear

194 195

– The archetypal entrepreneur

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