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Home > Spotlight
DONATO LOSA: "CARTEMANI: A CHALLENGE I SET MYSELF AND WON"
Rome (Ign) - "Hygiene, comfort and safety". These are the secrets of Cartemani, the company established by Donato Losa, who is today its chairman, and which for over 20 years has been producing paper towels and bathroom accessories.
How did Cartemani start out?
"My company represents the successful tackling of a challenge I set myself above all," says Losa. "The initial idea dates back to the early 1980s, in an economically critical period for our country, in which businesses couldn't count on adequate funding. So I decided to start up on my own, setting up a small company producing paper towels. I had worked with an American company which exported these products to Italy and which had subsequently withdrawn from the market. The winning intuition was that believing in a sector that at the time was taking its first steps, but in which there was no security. The Cartemani strategy has always been that of occupying the territory: since our consumables are used by all productive activities, we had an extremely high number of potential clients to contact house by house or company by company. This is also the reason why our representatives are the result of an extremely careful selection process. Today they number 40 and there is no type of turnover. Alone they manage to serve and satisfy 15,000 customers".
And how big is the company today?
"We have been on the market 25 years and now invoice €12.5m serving only business clients. Every two days we perform 30,000 deliveries. We focus on reliability, targeted products and extra services, such as ensuring toilet facilities meet regulatory standards. We still have a low export quota, even if some contracts have given us a great deal of publicity, such as that for black toilet tissue, reserved for exclusive and fashionable clubs with bathrooms in dark colours or black. This is a creative idea which has allowed us to enter a profitable market. Today we have also begun to spend on advertising, seeing that we can afford to".
Also because you have become privileged suppliers of many VIP customers, haven't you?
"Cartemani supplies Harrods and exclusive hotels such as the 60 Thompson Hotel and The Double Seven. Recently we won a contract put out for tender by the Scala Opera House in Milan to supply personal hygiene accessories for the bathrooms. Between dispensers and distributors, 1500 new items were installed in the bathrooms. For the Scala we specially designed a line in steel personalised with the theatre's logo. There are at present around 4000 Cartemani accessories in use at the Scala".
Do you have any new products in mind to further growth?
"Today we already sell through our Internet site www.cartemani.it gold-plated dispensers, which are proving to be very successful. In the future, we intend to produce other dispensers with a patented rip-top system, completely made in Italy, and another coin-operated series, which we expect to do very well".
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