From the basement to the stars
I like to tell new employees about the immense effort made by Paolo Trento and Piero Mannato to build Mandarina Duck. I’ve always been fascinated by the early pioneer adventures when our brand name was still Plastimoda.
Paolo and Pietro have been friends since their childhood together in Borgo Panigale (Bologna), where they had fun fishing in the river, playing tricks and taking refuge in their tree house. However, they also organized lucky dips and puppet shows for the other kids.
Years later, they began traveling to exotic places like Morocco or Turkey – very unusual destinations for that time – in their Fiat 500 (the original!). They always came back with enriched spirits and many adventures to recount. When Paolo (the youngest) finished his military service, it was only natural that they start a company together. Which one? The easiest! They decided to follow in Pietro’s father’s footsteps. Thanks to his electronic welding skills, he specialized in the production of transparent plastic holders for identity cards.
They had a lot of ideas but very little money. Paolo decided to sell his Mini Morris for 400,000 lire and Pietro invested other 400,000 lire, while his father gave them 100,000 lire. With a 500,000 lire deposit and 1,500,000 in loans, they rented the first premises of Plastimoda: the basement of a five-storey apartment building! That was on 18 April 1968.
They bought a welding machine, they became carpenters in order to furnish their office and they hired one employee, a former prisoner who turned out to be a very good person.
The basement wasn’t heated so they had to bundle up against the cold. It was like living in a Fellini film. They began inventing and creating new products, such as plastic beauty-cases, and exporting them abroad, particularly to ex-Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Hungary.
Back in 1974, after a trade fair in Frankfurt, they decided to produce women’s handbags. They designed a fashion collection, based on a linen/cotton mix, and, before producing it, showed it to some wholesalers. It was an unexpected success and so they felt ready to participate in the Mipel fair in Milan. It was a difficult undertaking because they were refused a number of times. The problem was that they weren’t well known in the fashion accessories market.
For their first time at the Mipel fair, they brought a collection based on plastic with leather trimmings and they set up their stand so that it could not be missed. They put up beach umbrellas and a market table, decorated it all with a mountain of fruit and displayed new bags on top.
Their products were well appreciated and, in the four days at the fair, they received orders for 36,000 pieces, which was actually an exorbitant amount that they had no idea how to handle. Thinking back to this episode Paolo remembers, “We had no money to buy the materials and no people to sew the bags. It was the end of June and we had to deliver everything in September, with a month of holidays in between.”
To be continued…
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