Since April 2010, when Tecno Spa asset changed having D. Academy, company controlled by Giuliano Mosconi, acquired 60% of the company’s shares,  the potential development of the company received a strong impulse. A new business concept, the strong will to develop innovative products, and many ideas for the company relaunch are becoming actual. Giuliano Mosconi is a determined enterpreneur and with a very clear vision of the way to follow, the confirm of the success is up to the market.

 

INTERVIEW

About one year is past since D Academy acquired the 60% of the total shares of Tecno. Could you give us an evaluation of the first year of activity?

I would like to delineate the first year of activity in a rather “loose”way. As you can see, Tecno today is a company different from the past; for several years the company had not invested neither concretely, nor in a conceptual way… As first thing I decided to change the company’s seat ; in September 2010 we opened the new seat in Mariano Comense, with the aim of making a quality change and giving a cut to the past history. This does not mean that we wanted to cancel Tecno’s past history , which is certainly an essential and very important element for the brand’s strength, but we only wanted to create a sort of gap with the habitat where Tecno had been living until today, a habitat full of successes but also of losses in terms of business.

Beside opening the new seat, which was the easiest operation, we are now strongly engaged to regain credibility on the market, being Tecno a very well known company always worth notice, but along the years it had somehow “got lost”.… From these points we started applying a new commercial strategy  including regaining visibility inside the point of sales and a more efficient presence on the national and international market by introducing new dedicated human resources. We have moreover decided to restart the “Grandi Lavori” activity commonly defined as “contract”. Approaching the “Grandi Lavori field” means being able to get in relation to the big facilities managers and architects focusing on finding out the project and on its development: these are two main elements for the company’s relaunch.

Through the last years several innovation programs and relaunch of Tecno have been declared and the market is rather disappointed. Compered to the previousely applied strategies what do you propose now in order to answer to the current requests?

When a company declares to start working in the contract field usually a sort of “deplacement” gets started to optimize costs and production times; in this way however the project capability  is put aside. We want to trace back that added value coming from the reactivation of our internal capability to dedicate to the Grandi Lavori and we want to restart from here to relaunch the company and evolve in the next months. A crucial point of the relaunch strategy relates to the international relations; Tecno has always had strong and important relations, mainly in South America where “Tecno Latino America” was active, having 250 employees. In the next months we will therefore be present also in this area with a new logistic and productive unit dedicated to such far-away markets. We want to get back to be visible on the market both through a high quality traditional national and international distribution and through a direct distribution dedicated to the “Grandi Lavori”.

This is what the commercial strategy  and presence on the market is concerned. Concerning the products for office furniture in which direction are you going to be competitive on the market?

Speaking about products I think that in the last few years the world office furniture has taken a too specific direction . The producers hostinately searching for functionality and costs control, have created products which are very similar and not differing from one another. With such logic there will no longer be space for innovation and doing so some Asiatic serial productive models might win.

Starting from such points, Tecno is no longer interested only in the office furniture field, but in a larger field “between home and office”: a world which is certainly more interesting, where restarting with innovation is possible and where Tecno in the past years worked with logic and passion. In such direction and in the respect of the productive tradition typical of Tecno we want to carry on developping our products.

We will certainly not abandon the office furniture world, we will keep on working in this field but we will do it with a different attitude. The working space will be for us a less technical one with a more precise research of the product, to which high quality esthetical contents can be applied.


Considering more specifically, Tecno has a historical “products portfolio” which can’t be denied and of high importance. How much will you count on news, as for example the recently introduced working system Beta Uno Punto Zero and how much on re-edition of historical products, which have always been your strength?

We will certainly re-edit on the market some historical products which are part of our tradition, but beside these we will also offer new products which can be used in a “transversal” way which will be able to interprete in a different way the residential and office world: quality products which can be placed both in the residential as in the working spaces in a very balanced way. With these new products which will be created thanks to the research and the design and with a strong technological content, we will find out our positioning on the market.

In terms of organization, to develop products we are taking back inside the company a number of competences which had been lost. We restarted the research and development called Tecnolab, to which we have given the task of studying and creating about ten new products. Moreover in this relaunch process, we have retaken the contacts with the big designers, so as to follow the path of the great Tecno tradition.

The idea of using products both in the home and in the office field has been used by many but the difficulties faced came from the sales logics which are completely different. How do you think you can handle these two different sales channels?

It is certainly difficult proposing products to be used in a “transversal ” way designated to the home and office if you do not have a trustful brand in both fields and today only very few companies have this credibility. Fortunately Tecno is amongst these and can boast an historical brand very well known which will help us being present in both fields.

In the end, what are you going to do to communicate all these new activities to the market?

The first event at the Caselli di Porta Garibaldi, was about the presentation of two installations: a fascinating journey of new products amongst historical re-editions and new ideas. Amongst the reedited products, the relax armchair P32 from ‘56, the managerial tables T69 and T 102 from ’63, the sofas D 120 and some others more. Beside the historical products, we displayed two fascinating news: the managerial system Shift by Foster+Partner and the sofa system Pons by Rodolfo Dordoni, both of them ideal for working as for living spaces.  Shift’s features are the fluent geometrical and elliptical shapes which overcome any rigid convention of traditional workstations; Pons is a modular structure very flexible which enables rearrangeble configurations , and is therefore highly adaptable to different spaces from waiting areas , to the lounge rooms, to the managerial space up to the home.

The other important event at the Triennale di Milano, told the history lasting nearly 60 years of Tecno” through an exposition and a book. The exposition installed by Pierluigi Cerri, laid the accent on three iconic pieces by Tecno which marked the evolution of the company and of the design.

The new book entitled “The subtle elegance of Technology”, by Giampiero Bosoni, is a very passionate tale running through the fascinating adventure  of innovation lived by the brothers Osvaldo and Fulgenzio Borsani, engineer the first and executive officer the other of the company which was founded in1953. These are the main activities started until now to communicate our plans to the market. Of course during the year there will be others …which will be developed trying to invest in the best way the sources at disposal. Unfortunately it is still early to see the results. We will have to meet again in one year.