KEEPING UP WITH THE BOGLIONES
Marco Boglione is a master of bringing faded brands to fresh relevance. His son Lorenzo has inherited that entrepreneurial spirit and works alongside his father to evolve the family business.
You can tell that Marco and Lorenzo Boglione are on the same wavelength by the way they exchange glances. Father and son are both dressed from head to toe in brands owned by their BasicNet group, which distributes in 120 countries. More beige-oriented Lorenzo, more technical-sportswear his father. Founded in 1995, BasicNet now controls labels such as Kappa, Robe di Kappa, Jesus Jeans, Superga, K-Way and Sebago, having resurrected them from bankruptcy and relaunched them on the marketplace. BasicNet acquires the brands, designs their garments (almost 8,000 per year), devises their marketing strategy and oversees their communication. Then, on its Internet platform, it takes orders from licensees who decide what to buy and how much to produce for each market. “To put it another way,” continues Marco, who quickly tires of listening to stuff he already knows, “we’ve never had time to argue because Lorenzo, his brothers and his sister, as well as their mothers, are all committed to our shared project: creating a big, strong, united and prosperous family.” Lorenzo is keen to point out that they felt under no pressure to join their father’s endeavour. “We were completely free to go our own way,” he insists. Marco modestly agrees: “I never thought they would end up coming to work with me.”
And yet today, 34-year-old Lorenzo is BasicNet’s vice president of sales, while his brother Alessandro is in charge of the Italian market. Their other two siblings – a son and daughter by Marco’s second partner Stella – are still studying. “The mothers of my children are great friends,” says Marco, proud of this masterpiece of relational equilibrium. “I never married either of them but I like to call them wives, although the best way to describe them is partners, in the true sense.”
For his part, Lorenzo has been a sidekick in his father’s affairs since the age of 14, when he was already persuading his high-school classmates in Turin to wear a 500-euro Kappa jacket. That particular piece of outerwear had been developed in collaboration with 3M, an American multinational that, back in the 1950s, had patented various spaceage materials, including the fluoroelastomer soles of astronauts’ moonboots. “That was the 4cento. I wanted it to be the world’s thinnest and warmest jacket. The American engineer who was working with us made a prototype with a ten-micron insulating sheet of the same material used to shield the Shuttle’s engines,” explains Marco Boglione. He paid 78,000 euros for that single sample, mobilising company funds with an effort that he today describes as “athletic”.
“Obviously I was the guinea pig,” chimes in Lorenzo. “At 14 he left me out in the snow with only a T-shirt and this jacket on. It was 20 degrees below zero, and he just stood there, spellbound, wondering why I wasn’t turning to ice.”
Marco Boglione bought the Kappa brand, along with Jesus Jeans, at auction back in 1994, following the collapse of the knitwear and hosiery factory Maglificio Calzificio Torinese, for which he had previously worked. The two brands had already made history in their own ways. The Jesus label was immediately controversial for its name, conceived by Oliviero Toscani after the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. But its ad campaigns sparked even greater furore, with slogans like “You shall have no other jeans but me” and “He who loves me follows me”, invented by Emanuele Pirella, superimposed over tightly denim-clad flesh. The Vatican’s Osservatore Romano newspaper was outraged, as were feminists, and a Palermo court ordered the posters torn down. Pier Paolo Pasolini was among the few to speak up in their defence with a letter published in the Corriere della Sera. Robe di Kappa, meanwhile, introduced military green into casual clothing, inspired by the anti-Vietnam army shirts worn by John Lennon. Kappa was also a pioneer of sports sponsorships, having kitted out the Juventus team and sprinters like Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses. “I worked on the acquisition day and night,” recalls Marco Boglione, “and after the result came through, my weary partner Daniela called me up and said, ‘Marco, you’ve been sleeping in the office for three months. Now you’ve got what you wanted, stay there.’ So I built a kind of hut that became my bedroom, and I moved into the company headquarters. I still live there today.” It was a very literal interpretation of the workshop-home concept. “We used to stay with him and sleep on futons,” recalls Lorenzo. “We would go rollerblading between the desks, and if any of the Juventus team turned up we would play soccer in the corridors. Those were fun times.”
This carefree upbringing gave Marco Boglione’s children a strong attachment to the family business. “I even did my degree thesis on our firm, and when it came to starting my career, all I wanted to do was try to improve this enterprise that I already felt part of,” says Lorenzo. That life choice was not a foregone conclusion, as his father explains: “After turning 60 and reaching one billion euros in aggregate sales, I told my kids I felt I was coming to the end of my race. I could sell up, give them their share and make them rich kids. Or we could keep going, reinvesting everything, with the courage to be poor entrepreneurs but running a thriving company. If anyone saw my bank balance, they’d think I’m crazy. But if you look at the market capitalisation of BasicNet, it all makes sense.” Lorenzo wholly subscribes to his father’s philosophy. “Wealth is our lifestyle, our intellectual freedom, what we do every day. Our most valuable asset is the fact of being entrepreneurs.”
Since entering the business, Lorenzo has overseen the relaunch of Sebago and opened up Kappa to a kaleidoscope of fashion possibilities beyond its ever radical “white shoe” style. “When Lorenzo announced the collaborations with Marcelo Burlon and Gosha Rubchinskiy, I thought he was going to ruin the brand for me. But when I saw the numbers I said to myself, ‘Wow, my boy, you’ve really blown me away!’”
BasicNet recently began work on its new headquarters in Milan. Housed in a large post-industrial building, it will include a showroom, event spaces, a restaurant and several lofts for hospitality. Meanwhile, Marco is preparing his next venture: an agritourism golf course in Sardinia and a new concept of ecotourism embracing the coast and the countryside, where luxury seaside cottages will coexist with farms incubated by a new start-up called Biru Agricola. “It’s a bit like what the Aga Khan did for the Emerald Coast, but designed for human beings of the future. Because if there’s one thing that matters more than knowledge, it’s imagination.”