Piero Gandini’s appointment as executive chairman of the Flos B&B Italia Group in January was significant news, and not only for the financial pages. It was an unusual example of a design-orientated, family-run company, now part of a private equity-owned conglomerate, going back to a member of the founding family. Gandini had run Flos for 22 years, since the death of his father Sergio, until he left shortly after it became part of the Design Holding Group, alongside Italian furniture company B&B Italia, the Danish lighting company Louis Poulsen, the Italian kitchen company Arclinea, and several other brands.
In Sergio Gandini’s time, Flos, founded in 1962, had worked with both Tobia Scarpa and the Castiglioni brothers on some of the most recognisable lamps ever made. In the 1970s, he went on to acquire Gino Sarfatti’s company Arteluce. His son looked after Flos’ heritage carefully, but also ensured that it did not become a museum. He got the best out of Philippe Starck as a lighting designer, and produced new classics with Jasper Morrison, Michael Anastassiades, Marcel Wanders, Konstantin Grcic, Formafantasma and others. What made the continued strength of Flos particularly impressive was that it was able to negotiate the rapid technological changes that were overtaking lighting. While a sofa designed by Mario Bellini in 1970 is still relevant 50 years later, tungsten, halogen and miniature fluorescent light sources have all come and gone in that time. In the case of Antonio Citterio’s Kelvin desk light, the original conical shade designed to work with a halogen bulb in 2003 made no sense with the LED light sources that became available in 2009, and the whole object was redesigned within the spirit of the original. LEDs have represented almost as much of a challenge to lighting companies as the threat to traditional watchmakers posed by digital timekeeping. The classic lighting designs were based on using a shade to diffuse and direct light. They have as much presence when in use, as when not. But LED lights don’t really need a fitting: they can disappear into their architectural setting, or into other objects. Gandini was able to find ways to make Flos’ classics adapt to new technologies, and to add new products to its catalogues that made the most of what the new way of lighting had to offer architecture and interiors. In the aftermath of Flos’ acquisition by Design Holding in late 2018, Gandini was appointed as chairman of the merged group, and oversaw a spectacular presentation at the Milan Salone in April 2019 that brought all the brands together in a sprawling but beautifully choreographed display. A month later, Gandini resigned from his roles at both Design Holding and Flos.
Not much was said about the reasons for his sudden departure, beyond a terse press statement about ‘differences of strategic and management view’. In fact, what Design Holding had in mind was to create the design world version of LVMH, a luxury conglomerate, and to follow the same playbook perfected by its CEO Bernard Arnault: grow by buying brands, cut costs, put up prices and control distribution.
Daniel Lalonde, a Canadian businessman who worked for LVMH for 10 years in New York and Paris, joined Design Holding (since renamed Flos B&B Italia) in 2021 to implement that strategy. Lalonde told the website Business of Home that the ultimate goal was to become the first truly global portfolio of luxury design brands. Some observers suggested that he had failed to grasp the essential differences between luxury fashion and furniture. Sofas take up a great deal more floor space than clothes, the markups are much higher in the fashion world, and the most important segment in the market is the contract market, reached through a dealer network, rather than retail sales. But Lalonde said, “I’d like to go back to my Louis Vuitton playbook where there’s never any discount for anyone, anytime. That’s the ultimate luxury brand. You go even further, like Hermès – you’re lucky if you can even get in the line to buy a product they will deliver a year from today.”
The return of Gandini suggests that strategy is not working – a realisation which may well have a wider impact. Rather than behave as if it were a luxury fashion brand, Gandini wants B&B Italia, Flos and its stablemates to go back to the natures of the constituent parts of the group. It includes Azucena, which has the rights to the designs of Luigi Caccia Dominioni – the highly respected Milanese architect who has not yet achieved the same prestige outside Italy as his contemporaries the Castiglioni brothers – and an American dealership called Lumens.
Italy became the centre for the design world in the 1960s, thanks to the inspired work of a group of remarkable family-owned furniture businesses mostly based in the Brianza area, north of Milan. Some had started out as craft-based cabinet makers, producing traditional designs. Cesare and Umberto Cassina, for example, established Cassina in 1927, and only turned to contemporary design in the post-war period when they began to work with Gio Ponti, while other companies were established specifically to embrace new technology and radical design from the start. Cesare Cassina and Piero Busnelli jointly set up a company that they called C&B in 1966 that was focused on mass production. They worked with Tobia and Afra Scarpa, Marco Zanuso, Gaetano Pesce to produce some of the first examples of furniture based on moulded polyurethane foam, rather than more traditional forms of upholstery. And before Cassina and Busnelli went their own ways in 1973, leaving what was renamed B&B Italia in Piero’s hands, they had commissioned two architects at the start of their careers – Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers – to build their Novedrate offices.
Piero Busnelli, one of the most colourful of Italian entrepreneurs, had an instinctive flair for marketing. When Mario Bellini’s Le Bambole sofa system was launched in 1972, C&B’s advertising campaign was based on Oliviero Toscani’s photograph of Donna Jordan sprawled over it. Jordan was a model who had worked for Andy Warhol, and the image represented a creative collision between fashion and design. B&B worked with a wide range of designers, including Richard Sapper and James Irvine, but achieved its most consistent success with Antonio Citterio, who is also responsible for the look of B&B’s Maxalto brand.
The last two decades have not been kind to family-owned Italian companies. There are exceptions; notably the Molteni Group and Kartell, which are expanding. Cassina has had four owners since the family lost control: Steelcase (a subsidiary of a large American office furniture business), two private equity funds, and is now secure as part of Haworth, a Michigan-based conglomerate. B&B Italia has gone through a similar trajectory. In 2002 the family sold a stake to Opera, a fund controlled by Bulgari, before the founder’s son Giorgio bought it back, only to sell again to Invest Industrial, in partnership with the Carlyle Group’s Italian arm headed by Marco De Benedetti. Busnelli did not stay long with the new group.
Gandini explains his return to Flos B&B Italia Group as the result of a chance encounter with De Benedetti, and the product of his concern at the direction that the companies had been taking in his absence. He was worried about the way that Flos’ new management had been tinkering with some of its greatest products – such as replacing the white Carrara marble base of Achille Castiglioni’s Arco masterpiece with a transparent block of crystal glass. It justified a much higher price, but it did not reflect the designer’s original intentions. He also cites what Flos had done to Gino Sarfatti’s Model 600 light, a combination of a spotlight and a beanbag base. What was to be gained by a partnership with Bottega Veneta to substitute branded leather for the unpretentious leatherette original?
But Gandini and the investors also talked about the future potential of the companies, which they agreed was about a new emphasis on doing what Flos and B&B have always done best.
“I talked with them, and I convinced them about what to do. It was time to forget about the idea of a big IPO, and to go back to real industrial design. The job now is executing policy. I try to explain to finance people, getting the fundamentals right is not rocket science. We need a good relationship with the clients, good products and, of course, the intangibles. We need to think about what good design means today. Luxury is not the base of what we do: luxury can be a consequence of what we do, but we are not a luxury company. We do high-end design, but we don’t call it pure luxury.”
In Gandini’s view, design is not like fashion either, even if it has some things in common. “Design is more manipulative than it was. Fashion is obliged to be manipulative, they have to push you to buy at an expensive price, based on your self-image. Fashion is very creative and very direct, but it changes every year. In design we try to be innovative but with furniture, we are making companions for life, things that stay with you forever. Compared to fashion our role is long-term, we have to be fresh, dynamic, and be aware of new cultural changes. When you do a lot of collections in a short time, you are obliged to work in a marketing-orientated way. For a lamp or a chaise to come to life is a slower but more sophisticated process not because of productivity, but because of culture.”
Gandini is aiming to quickly take Flos and B&B Italia in a new direction, or rather, back to its roots. “We have to consolidate and bring back quality, the right organisation and good economic performances. But the spirit of the company never really changes: it is all about cultural engagement, vision and being brave about creativity.”
This article is taken from Anima Issue 3, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here