Italchimica, Silicon Valley A Km0:
“We started from our garage, now let’s build a green future”
Our History
To find companies that have really started from their home garage and that, in less than twenty years, have become the first one in their target market, it is not necessary to cross the ocean. It is not even necessary to go beyond national borders, for that matter. The clear example is that one of Italchimica, company based in Padova founded in the garage of the Fioretto brothers in 2001 and which today is the most important Italian company of professional detergents and cosmetics.
Silicon Valley
Made in Padova
A result that few would have bet on when it all started: “If I think back to the early years it seems truly incredible what happened”, says Alessandro Fioretto, CEO and President of Italchimica. “In the beginning, no one imagined growing up to these levels. In the early days, my brothers really did everything. In the morning the formulas were mixed, in the afternoon the bottles were filled, in the evening the products were delivered. And when I talk about mixing, I mean manually working with a huge wooden oar in my garage.”
“It was a central time because we learned a lot and laid the foundation for what we have become today. At first, achieving these results might seem like a dream, we decided to daydream and we built a reality that today has 164 employees and that, despite the crisis we are all experiencing, has ambitious plans for the future.”
“We have grown because we have worked hard and well, but above all because we have always listened to the market ”continues Fioretto. “We innovated in an industry where it seemed impossible to do so, because everything was stuck in a set of standard behaviors. We listened to people to understand the needs of those who used our products. We put ourselves in our customers’ shoes. This may seem simple today, but twenty years ago the situation was very different, especially in the field of professional cleaning.
How to innovate a stuck sector? Listening to customers
Nobody paid attention to the actual customer, that is to say who was using the products. We reasoned in terms of market volumes and prices, since your contact person was usually the purchasing manager of a company, or perhaps a hotel. With my brothers we took care of everything. And when I went to deliver our products, I liked to chat with the staff who then used them. It was precisely the advice of the many “ladies Mary” I met in those years that gave me ideas. I understood that solving people’s problems is essential.
User Experience
and customer at the center
In the early 2000s, professional cleaning companies often had people who were not very familiar with Italian, so we understood that we had to create an easy-to-use product. An understandable product. So, we were the first to change the labels of the detergents: just a thousand instructions written in small print that nobody read or understood. All replaced by clear and simple icons, mini infographics that allowed you to immediately understand how to use the product. It didn’t matter what language I spoke or didn’t speak, the message arrived at its destination.
Today we talk a lot about user experience, ease of use, putting the user at the center. We fully embraced this philosophy, innovating in a sector that until then was hyper traditional “. “Today infographics and colored icons seem even prehistoric: the labels of our professional products are in fact equipped with a personalized QR Code, just frame it to watch the video tutorial that explains how to best use the detergent”.
