FURLA_90 YEARS OF BEAUTY

Ninety years of beauty and Italian culture. Constantly evolving, as women’s taste has throughout the decades.

A family business turned into a global fashion and lifestyle brand. Sharing with the world the Italian ideal of elegance, the sense of color, the freedom via modern design, the highest quality in leather and the highest standards of quality control.

The original store opened by the founder, Aldo Furlanetto, in Bologna, is still operating today in via Ugo Bassi: same address, bearing witness to the history of a company that grew from one single store (1955) to 400+ dedicated stores today (half of which are directly controlled by the company).

Furla’s history is made of vision, family bonds, and imagination: Aldo Furlanetto was a staunch believer in the possibility for success of a company deeply committed to excellence – in accessories, in fashion – for its customers. A company whose name would become a synonym for quality and reliability. For this reason, Mr Furlanetto used to travel all over Italy, all over Europe, looking for the best leather and the most beautiful objects of his time.

In the 1970s then, when his sons Paolo and Carlo and daughter Giovanna took over the family business, a new era began for the company, the era of exponential growth. A revolution that transformed Furla in what it still is today, looking forward to what it will become in the future. The first collection of bags became an overnight success thanks to the precision of its design and the vision of a new customer, a contemporary woman looking for new, cutting-edge materials. The world – and fashion – had evolved: therefore Furla created, from day one, since the 1970s, classic Italian leather, handmade by artisans, but also new materials such as nylon and rubber due to the company’s commitment to research and development of new technologies, new possibilities.

Giovanna Furlanetto and her brothers’ strategy was clear: an Italian network of stores owned by the company linked to a network of franchises – a revolutionary strategy back then, especially for Italy – to guarantee the family’s strict control on the retail structure.

Furla’s priority has always been the product’s quality: a vision of fashion as freedom, based on the attention to the most minute details, typical of Italian artisanal tradition.

The result? Two million bags sold in the year 2015. One every sixteen seconds. More than 517,000 Metropolis bags sold since 2014. Numbers that, by themselves, impressive as they are, cannot fully explain Furla’s success. The credit goes to the collections of bags and accessories in luxurious leathers but also in cutting-edge materials, the attention to Italian style, to innovation, R&D and technology, a logo that immediately became recognizable and sought after. And credit is also due to a close – and very Italian – relationship between fashion and culture.

The company’s heart beats inside an Eighteenth Century villa in downtown Bologna, in the Milan headquarters only a few steps from the Duomo, and regional headquarters fully operative in New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo.

90 years of authenticity, in numbers and spirit: a story told in images by the great photographers for Furla’s campaigns: to illustrate Furla’s world, define its heritage, and dream its future.