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Home > Spotlight
TREND: PINO BISAZZA'S SUCCESS STORY, THE MAN WHO RISKED EVERYTHING TO INTRODUCE INNOVATION IN MOSAICS
Pino Bisazza is a man who risked everything and started again from scratch. With his two brothers he used to be one of the three partners of Bisazza Mosaico, a historic firm based in Vicenza that manufactures glass mosaics for floors and panelling. At the end of 1999, after having spent more than twenty years in his family's firm, he developed a different strategic vision and decided to go it alone. He founded Trend (www.trend-vi.com) in the same city of Vicenza in early 2000, and created a reference point for the industry with its production of glass mosaics and agglomerates in glass or quartz and granite grits. Mr Bisazza, therefore, choose to diversify from glass and took a new route in January 2003 by acquiring control of the Orsoni furnace in Venice, a historic company that has been producing for 115 years gold leaves and coloured enamels. In 2004 the story continued with the acquisition of a Southern Italian company: Le Chiance in the region of Apulia, which added stones to Trend's range of material and products.
President Bisazza, I hope that the recent successes of your company - 63,1 million euros turnover in 2006, 24,4% Ebitda margins and 700 employees after just a few years - have not managed to erase the memories of the two decades you dedicated to your family's firm?
There is a human and professional legacy which will always be there. Yet launching my own company gave me the freedom to pursue a pre-determined objective: shifting the focus towards the needs of professional clients, i.e. architects, thus targeting the higher end of the market. In order to make this possible I had to innovate products and services, placing them at the centre of a different business model. Architects are creative persons and they need flexibility for their products, allowing the maximum degree of personalisation for interior decoration.
Your business model, therefore, places great emphasis on sales and after sales services. What specific strategies did you adopt in this field?
We created 'ateliers' where we can assemble our products according to our clients' demands. At the moment we have five of these sites, all of them outside Italy in order to ensure the best results in terms of service and costs. One is in Bulgaria, one in Russia, two in the States and one in Malaysia, and we plan to open more before the end of the year. These 'service points', focused on their respective geographical areas, allows the company to provide in one to three weeks whatever designs our clients indicate to us, creating a series of unique pieces.
While your entrepreneurial initiative was based on the idea to concentrate on the needs of your professional clients, your strategy would probably not have succeeded had you not paid attention to developing your products at the same time. What were the main innovations introduced by Trend?
We branched out from glass mosaics to explore new materials, even if most of them are still glass-based. We decided to 'contaminate' traditional mosaics by inserting stone elements, with great results. We also played with dimensions, developing larger mosaic tesserae compared to the conventional square size, 2 cm long. Furthermore, we applied the traditional methods of glass colouring, used for glass panes in Cathedrals, to develop new glass and panelling materials.
Did you relocate your production abroad?
We have two glass manufacturing plants in India, while our US affiliate in Florida produces agglomerates in glass or quartz and granite grits for the local market. As far as the Middle East is concerned, our production remained in Italy because those markets demand special materials, such as the 'golden mosaic'. This is manufactured exclusively in Venice by the Orsoni furnace, which goes back to the 19th century and is famous for its golden leaf mosaics and enamels that can reproduce in an almost unique fashion antique materials on the basis of its craftsmanship tradition. The Orsoni furnace is an official supplier to the Vatican and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
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