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THE SAINT AND THE SPINNERS

While some in the luxury industry struggle, a cashmere business built on utopian principles and social reform continues to shine. Lee Marshall reports

Solomeo is a cute hilltop village like so many in Umbria. Perhaps a little neater than most, but otherwise true to type, with its war monument, its single shop which also functions as bar, newsagents and tobacconists, its castle, church and cluster of stone houses, its sweeping views over a rolling landscape of olive groves and vines.

It’s only when you peep through the door of one of those village houses that you real-ise something else is going on here. A group of women are intent on sewing and darning – but they’re not clustered around the fire. Instead they’re seated at wide modern tables, examining their work through illuminated magnifying glasses. And the pieces they’re working on are not old socks but high-fashion items in cashmere and lambswool. Another door leads into a room almost entirely occupied by a huge industrial tumble dryer; behind another, where the main bedroom should be, is a bright, state-of-the-art office. At the top of the village, two hefty stone villas house a pair of discreet outlet stores, one for men, the other for women.

Welcome to the world of Brunello Cucinelli, Italy’s cashmere king, and the man famous in the country for relaunching the model of enlightened entrepreneurship that many people assumed had passed away with Adriano Olivetti. The Piedmontese typewriter manufacturer demonstrated in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s that experiments in industrial philanthropy and corporativism, like those of social reformer Robert Owen, could be combined with – indeed could actually lead to – increased profits. But after his death in 1960 Italy entered a new, grimmer period of industrial conflict, and Olivetti’s utopian dream of a factory in which both workers and bosses were stakeholders seemed a thing of the past.

It came as no surprise when Cucinelli was awarded the 2009 Imprenditore Olivettiano prize for enlightened entrepreneurship – an award set up and administered by the Olivetti Foundation. For in some ways the Umbrian farmer’s son has gone even beyond the man he acknowledges as an inspiration. Ever since Owen’s New Lanark enterprise, factory-villages run on humanistic principles have been part of the industrial landscape. Olivetti himself designed workers’ housing estates in the company town, Ivrea; while the Vokswagen city, Wolfsburg, is another famous model town in which workers’ home and factory life are integrated with Teutonic efficiency. But Solo-meo must be the first example anywhere in the world of an existing village being turned into a company headquarters, with factory, offices and retail outlets incorporated into the fabric of the Medieval borgo.

It helped, of course, that, like many Italian villages, Solomeo had suffered from a severe population drain to the cities after World War II, so that when Cucinelli began to buy up and restore the old castle and surrounding houses in the mid-1980s he wasn’t evicting little old ladies (there are still plenty of those around, though these days they mostly choose to live in more convenient, modern houses around the edge of the village) so much as bringing life back to a semi-abandoned rural community. In all likelihood, if these houses hadn’t been turned into the Cucinelli headquarters they would eventually have been bought up as second homes, which, as in many other Tuscan and Umbrian hamlets, would have lain empty for most of the year. In fact when Cucinelli bought Solomeo castle in 1985, there was already a plan afoot to convert it into 40 luxury apartments.

Apart from a few light fittings and cables, very little has changed inside the 16 restored village houses that together make up Cucinelli’s ‘factory’. He describes himself as “simply the caretaker” of a place “that for centuries people who lived before me called home”. He also believes that working in a village that was built on a human scale, and built to last, is good for the soul: “The inner aura you get from working in the borgo is completely different from what you would feel if you worked in an industrial shed… plus here nobody clocks in or out, and there’s a company restaurant where women from the village cook for the employees.”

The 500 on-site employees of Brunello Cucinelli SpA are paid 20% more than the national wage negotiated by their unions, and every three months, they all take part in a company meeting where everybody, irrespective of rank, has the right to offer criticisms and make suggestions. And in that company restaurant – emphatically not a canteen – workers can tuck into a two-course lunch that might include local specialities such as tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms or veal involtini, all for a fixed price of €2.60.

The cashmere business, of course, is well tailored to the kind of experiment that Cucinelli has launched in Solomeo. Like many other high-end fashion houses, the company farms out the actual production of its men’s and women’s lines to a galaxy of specialised weavers and textile firms, most of them in Umbria and Tuscany. The skilled tailors and seam-stresses in the Solomeo village workshop do just three things: make the prototypes of each model; check the merchandise when it comes back from contractors; and repair minor faults.

One could also argue that it’s the healthy profit margins of a successful cashmere business that allow Cucinelli to be a generous boss. The company posted turnover growth figures of 19.73% and profit growth of 22.61% even in the 2008 financial year, when demand for luxury goods had already begun to dip. Brunello Cucinelli was still expanding its workforce in 2009, at a time when most others were freezing hiring or laying people off.

But Cucinelli himself would claim that his concern for worker welfare actually contributes to this healthy balance sheet: “We might be good at accurate, on-time deliveries, at promoting the brand, meticulous in the artisanal work we do here, the hand-sewing, the checking, and good at responding to the new needs of the market – but we can’t manage or control creativity. And yet so far we’ve always been good at creativity too.”

And the fact remains that while other luxury entrepreneurs prefer to plough their profits into fleets of Ferraris or private jets, Cucinelli chooses to sink a large proportion of his own income into the restoration and embellishment of Solomeo. The latest addition to his New Renaissance citadel is the Teatro Solomeo, a 230-seat theatre inspired by neoclassical models such as the Farnese theatres in Parma and Sabbioneta. Seven years in the making, the new theatre forms part of a €3.5m ‘Forum of the Arts’ project that incudes an open-air arena, a gymnasium (or formal garden) and an academy, where traditional craft techniques will be taught.

Cucinelli doesn’t shy away from the philosopher-prince mantle that such grandiose flourishes suggest. In fact, he embraces it with sometimes worrying readiness. At the company’s September 2009 general staff meeting, Brunello talked about the financial crisis as “a historic opportunity to reconsider man’s ideal home, a home in which ethics and profit can never be separated, because they are a single entity”. He also gave all his employees copies of three books: the meditations of Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius; a selection of Barack Obama’s speeches; and a distillation of his own reflections on life, art and business.

Presenting his autumn-winter collection at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York in October, Cucinelli was true to form, scorning mercantile talk of cut and colour to launch instead into a eulogy of his native Umbria, a place where “the work ethic of the Benedictines merges with the spirituality and the simplicity of Saint Francis”. At the inauguration of the Teatro Solomeo, Cucinelli talked of his mission “to improve mankind through the redemption and the ascertainment of human values along with those of art and spirituality”, and the brochure produced for the occasion went even further, presenting Cucinelli as a God-like figure who is “Apollonian, due to his instinct for beauty, and Dionysian, due to his instinct for creativity…, he is alive today but he could have been born in mythical times, seemingly lost in the past, when the poor were able to become saints and heroes”.

Luckily, Solomeo really does seem to be a congenial workplace, and the Teatro really is bringing drama and music to a remote village that would otherwise have to go to Perugia for its cultural kicks. But in the end, you have to remind yourself, it’s all about making clothes that people want to buy. Unlike the Umbrian holy men he evokes, Cucinelli’s sainthood will last only as long as he sells those sweaters.

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January 2010

Spotlight, Luxury

THE SAINT AND THE SPINNERS

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