BRAND IDENTITY: TRADITION VALUES AS FUTURE ASSET. SALVATORE FERRAGAMO CASE HISTORY

Abstract

The Salvatore Ferragamo Company, founded in 1938 by Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence, is very well known for creation and production of ladies shoes but has a leading role in the whole international luxury market. The company history is ancient and started before 1927, when Salvatore Ferragamo, leaving California, came back to Italy and got to Florence. At that time, Salvatore Ferragamo was already famous in the United States for having created the craftmade footwear for the American actresses. Called ‘The shoemaker of the stars’, Salvatore Ferragamo, very well known at that time, decided to come back to Italy to live and work in Florence , because of its great artistic and handicraft tradition. Since the beginning, the founder was significantly inspired in his work by the local culture. Palazzo Spini-Feroni, which is the company headquarters, is also a symbol of the city history and of the Italian traditional lifestyle.Since the founder’s death in 1960, Salvatore Ferragamo’s wife, Wanda Miletti Ferragamo, and their six children, headed the company. They have extended the Company business getting to complete collections lines either for men and women from “head to toe”, enhancing the distribution in more than 90 countries.The Company is nowadays one of the most important luxury group in the world, resulting from a perfect combination of tradition and innovation, of territorial anchorage and global projection, of handmade craftsmanship and ability to communicate and market-making, of technology and entrepreneurship.The values the founder believed in and the Company heritage, testified by the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo activities, further of being very important at intellectual and social level for Italian culture, represent an important asset of the brand identity. This is the ground on which it has worth to establish the brand’s challenges since the past and it is possible going onwards. This is a perfect example of a “Renaissance” case in fashion and marketing field.