ABOUT

Established in 1945, Saporiti is a family based company that collaborates with architects and designer to produce contemporary furnishing. We visited their main office just outside of Milano. Saporiti creates projects that experiment with new materials and concepts of living. They are looking at the international market and producing projects that fit the lifestyle of all cultures today and more importantly in the future - designing for the future is an important research project that Saporiti is involved in through Contemporane A.
— find out more at www.saporiti.it

IDEAS

Main Points

• Collaboration across industries, and with other materials manufacturers
• Staying competitive by understanding not only market needs, but their wants and desires
• Educating the market
• Italian design in the face of a global market
• Saporiti's relationship with designers

HERE IS WHAT WE LEARNED

Saporiti is making some important changes in the structure of how they do business in order to remain competitive in a stronger global market. Rafaelle spoke of how the company is moving beyond simply innovating in form and material, and are instead concentrating on providing innovative "systems". They are engaging in far more international contracts with large organizations where the challenge is centered around providing a full furniture solution. In addition, they are doing some more "bleeding–edge" itegration of technology into their newer product lines.

They pride themselves on always keeping an open-mind to experimenting with other industries and material manufacturers.

KEY QUOTES

2:10 — Saporiti's process

"To be open, to not be afraid of doing experiment and going a little bit out of the ordinary" at least in the furniture or interior design industry. Rafaelle goes on to say a bit later, about Saporiti's process, that they get "inspiration from other industries" and that they go through this of process coming together through the designers/manufacture and other industries to create their products. Russ then explains that this is part of Italian design history, where people get together to make products "hey I have these and then you say, well I've got these and the furniture makers kind of put them together"

15:10 — Staying competitive

Ryan asks: How is it that Saporiti can be in the forefront of the industry, how they can stay competitive, innovative throughout the ups and downs of the economy?

Response: "...to understand and then combine the good design, the trend is the interface and the marketing and it is really difficult because sometimes you have beautiful projects, we feel they are very, very interesting, but we cannot do them because the market is not prepared it is not the market it is our approach to the market it is our seized network, it is our dealers, it is our collaborators we but we are distant?, sometimes in the past it happens where some projects were too early and developed and presented to the market so being successful is really a mix of the creativity and which of course is extremely important but also the approach to the market and its not always easy and also not always possible to combine them so the company has to balance this to the innovation and the creativity and the process of experimenting with new things..."

19:15— Innovation in contemporary Italian design

We then asked if Italy is more innovative right now, again it seems that is unclear but Saporiti feels that Italy still has this cultural nature that is still a benefit "...we have to look at the situation with a new approach because the situation has changed, the globalization is totally present and we have to face it in a new way with a very open mind that we had in the past as in a certain context which is now different"

The relationship between Saporiti and designers

Akash asks about the relationship between Saporiti and their designers when doing a project:

Saporiti Response: "well the fact is that the relation between the company, particularly a family company made of few people taking the decision and the designer is simple and complex in the same way. It is very simple because it is very straight, and it is complex because it is different from time to time, also the way a relation is born is different it can be in certain cases casual, it is casual I mean random there are occasions that we give a precise brief to a designer and as I explain it before when there is a project the briefs come from the project itself from the final client so we partner with Saporiti and the designer to offer the perfect product for this project"