We are all very aware of brands and some fashionistas wear them as a badge of honour, but, quite often, we don't know the stories of companies behind specific products even though we may actually wear them every day. Luxottica, is one of them.
The biggest holding manufacturing and selling eyewear and ophthalmic lenses, the company was in the news in the last two days as its founder and chairman, Leonardo Del Vecchio, died yesterday at 87 in Milan.
A self-made man, Del Vecchio was born in Milan in 1935 from a family that originally came from Puglia. His father died five months before he was born, and his mother had to go to work to support her children. She therefore asked an orphanage to take him in, so that he wouldn't have been exposed to bad company while she was at work.
He remained at the orphanage till the end of the secondary school and, at 15, Del Vecchio started working for a company producing medals and trophies. The owners of the factory convinced him to enroll in the evening courses at the Brera Academy and study design and incision.
At the end of the '50s Del Vecchio moved to Agordo, in the province of Belluno, where he opened his first venture, selling spectacle frames.
In 1961 he turned it into a company, Luxottica, with 14 employees. At first, the company mainly produced eyewear parts for other manufacturers, but, in 1967, while continuing to manufacture parts, the company launched its first line of branded glasses. Four years later, Luxottica only focused on its own lines of eyewear; in 1995 the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and, in 2000, also on Milan's.
In the meantime, Luxottica's portfolio expanded to include proprietary brands such as Ray-Ban, Persol and Alain Mikli, but also licensed brands including Giorgio Armani, Burberry, Bulgari, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, Valentino and Versace, just to mention a few one of them.
In 2018, Del Vecchio promoted the merger between Luxottica and Essilor of France (that mainly focused on lenses), creating an eyewear colossus, EssilorLuxottica S.A., publicly listed on the Paris Stock Exchange and boasting more than 140,000 employees and sales in more than 150 countries.
Del Vecchio was into innovation and collaborated with Google in 2014, creating Google Glasses, and met in 2019 Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg. Last year, Del Vecchio met again with Zuckerberg to discuss visors and smart glasses for the metaverse, but also launched in collaboration with Facebook, Inc. the first RayBan Stories, smart glasses that can record videos, take pictures, make phone calls and play music.
The second richest man in Italy, Del Vecchio was considered an enlightened entrepreneur: when he turned 80, he gave as a present to 8,000 Italian employees 40,000 shares (for a total value of 9 million euros). But this wasn’t a new practice: in 2011, for Luxottica’s 50 anniversary, employees were given shares worth 7 million euros.
His legacy, stands in two lessons: first and foremost, he treated the company as his family and his employees with respect, something that many modern entrepreneurs focused on becoming richer and richer simply do not do. The second lesson comes from his biography in which he stated that Italians are great artisans and artists, but the secret to success stands in pushing forward and be braver, launching your own ventures, for example, and never stopping at the first successes, but keeping on pursuing innovation.