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! BETWEEN TRADITION AND THE CHALLENGES OF THE FUTURE Chiara Bianchi Maiocchi and Massimo Montanaro form a dynamic and cohesive duo at the helm of Lanecardate, a historical reality of great importance in the Biella textile world. We meet them in Milan in the splendid showroom of Vitale Barberis Canonico, of which the Lanecardate Group is part even though it is autonomous, to tell the great past and the dynamic present of this reality. PIETRO FERRARI – Can we tell a little about the history of the company? CHIARA BIANCHI MAIOCCHI – We were born in 1977 as a spinning company of Vitale barberis Canonico, after my grandfather had closed the carded spinning department, while my uncles had subsequently realized that carded spinning could be important for the Group itself, which is still a reality today. My grandfather had passed away and my uncles asked my parents, my mother with a Bocconi degree and my father an engineer, to return to Biella from Milan where they lived with my sister and me and to found this spinning mill in full support of Vitale Barberis Canonico. PIETRO FERRARI – Those were moments when it was not very easy to do entrepreneurship and above all to start with a new industrial reality... CHIARA BIANCHI MAIOCCHI – Those were not easy years from a socio-political point of view and after all we did not mind the idea of moving from Milan to Cossato. We both liked the challenge and my father and my mother, lovers of beautiful things, worked hard to create an excellent product, investing in the best technologies available, placing the offices in an ancient building and furnishing them with a domestic touch as if they were home environments.
They thought they were building a service reality towards Vitale Barberis Canonico in reality in those years they realized that their yarn could also serve a wider market, and started working for a selected number of customers in an optimal market situation with the enviable, and no longer current, condition of simply waiting for orders. PIETRO FERRARI – We are therefore talking about a production reality born at the service of an exclusive reference company and then directly present on the market... CHIARA BIANCHI MAIOCCHI – We must think that Vitale Barberis Canonico, not as a company but as an owner family, dates back as the first documentation to 1663, therefore a family passion from the seventeenth century, thirteen generations. PIETRO FERRARI – The birth of Lanecardate in 1977 I suppose involved an important investment in the best of the technology available on the market... CHIARA BIANCHI MAIOCCHI – A technology, that of carded paper, which in any case has remained very consolidated in its production bases. With our parents' decision to pass the baton to a young manager who joined me, there was a very significant change of pace in Lanecardate, because we started to invest strongly again and the family believed in this. new road with a positive result and good results from the point of view of company growth with the doubling of company turnover over the last five years.
THE TURNING POINT
"Basically with our entry into the company – Massimo Montanaro intervenes – we changed the modus operandi of Lanecardate: previously a fixed production quota was destined for the wool mill, then we preferred to build a future that was based only on sales of Lanecardate, expanding and enlarging, slightly modifying the collections but above