A bet on beauty that started in 1979
The history of this machining company, now known by everyone in the production chain for high fashion accessories as Euro Stampaggi, formally began at the end of 1979, just before Christmas holidays. Silvio Cortigiani and Giuliano Simonelli, two inexperienced entrepreneurs brimming with youthful boldness, already had metal filings under their fingernails and chose to follow their own path.
Giuliano, the youngest, had taken a three-year course at the Industrial Technical Institute in Florence and had begun to master his skills as a mould worker at one of the most important fashion accessory companies in Florence; and shortly thereafter in a small pantographist workshop in Sesto Fiorentino, after giving up a secure job with Galileo where he would have been hired. Silvio instead came from the school of his father Gastone, who owned a respectable workshop for metalworking in Florence, to be more precise, a turning workshop.
From the Cortigiani family’s commitment to keep the machinery of a small Florence-based metal printing factory in business (which went bankrupt in the latter half of the 1970s), came the opportunity to start a new company and take over an old friction screw press, the classic machinery used to hot stamp essentially small bars of solid metal which were pre-heated by a furnace to render the metal sufficiently plastic to respond to be worked.
Giuliano and Silvio soon realised that the fashion market would focus on superior standards of quality and would look to ever specialist professional external organisations: this is the direction in which they made their investments. The decision would be rewarded in the 1980s which would witness uninterrupted growth in production and commercial success. The big change, however, happened in the 1990s when Euro Stampaggi transitioned from being a large artisan company to become an industrial powerhouse.
Thanks to the continuous updating of production technologies and the acquisition of new skills and abilities, the Euro Stampaggi Group today comprises seven companies, over three hundred employees and an expansion of production towards new technologies such as zamak die casting and metal injection moulding (MIM). All this is done within a process of continuous improvement and balanced, sustainable growth that aims for excellence, whilst leaving unaltered the small artisan company’s founding philosophy of care and attention.