Advanced technology and artisanal passion. And, most of all,
people, who make the difference. The story of a company set up seventy years
ago and with its headquarters in Formigine (Modena), which now boasts 50
professionals and a turnover of 8 million Euros. For Fare Insieme, Giampaolo Colletti interviews Paolo
Golinelli, sole administrator at Golinelli
di Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Everything started in a garage, just like in the most
iconic American entrepreneurial stories. But this one also includes hundreds of
kilometres covered on a bike covered by tireless father Guglielmo Golinelli as
far back as 1951. At the time, this passionate and ambitious
twenty-one-year-old Emilian went from Medolla, north of Modena, to Formigine,
south of Modena. Forty kilometres of bike rides and dreams hidden in a closet
that would open up in time. “Dad started from zero to build this successful
company. At the time, printing machines were operated by pedals, they were not
electrical. A machine which is now considered historic but which, at the time,
was a concentration of innovation within the productive process. Despite
everything, paper is central and has always been from Gutenberg onwards, even
though the market nowadays is somewhat split. Over time, we have made investments
to ennoble our product, which is changing because information can now be
collected from various parts of the world quickly, promptly and via multiple
channels,” explains Paolo Golinelli, sole administrator of Golinelli srl. The
company's headquarters is located in Formigine, a town of a little over thirty
thousand people three kilometres from Maranello, five from the Sassuolo
ceramics district and ten from Modena. The town is part of the Union of
municipalities of the ceramics district, and ceramics has a lot to do with this
story. But let's proceed with order. The company, which has recently become a
B-Corp, employs 50 professionals for a pre-pandemic turnover of around €10
million. “With the pandemic, we dropped to €7 million and ended 2021 with €8 million.
I am proud of this data. The virus has rewritten the way we communicate -
another way for people to interact has added to constant ongoing technological
innovation,” stresses Golinelli.
People,
technologies, service. The ceramics district, as we mentioned
above. The company provides a multi-platform narrative to this sector, working
for Graniti Fiandre, Marazzi, Mutina. Then there is the automotive segment,
which reaches out to the whole world. Golinelli prints for brands such as
Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati and BMW and, thanks to its French office, works
for Citroen and Peugeot. Then there are the global luxury names including Louis
Vuitton, Roger Vivier and Bell & Ross. “We try to give our clients some
piece of mind - you entrust us with a task and, in addition to doing it within
the deadline, we offer a made-to-measure service. After all, we are the tailors
of paper: we keep doing things well, trying to make the world more beautiful,”
says Golinelli. So the company extended its services, offering other
complementary solutions. Advanced technology and artisanal passion, in a
balance that reflects the evolution of the graphic industry. For Golinelli,
technology and people are essential, but man puts that little something more
into it, that attention to detail. As printers, the company provides the
pre-press service - working on colour with coherence and vision. A service that
acquires an intangible value for clients. “With this spirit, we created other
services: especially for the ceramics segment, we design the catalogue for the
new series, or the briefcase of paper products containing all advertising
elements as a sort of treasure chest. We dedicate a lot of time to research, experimenting
countless combinations of paper, technologies and special finishes. We
constantly invest to reduce environmental impact by using renewable energy, FSC
and carbon-free paper and reducing chemical components and production waste to
a minimum,”reports Golinelli.
The time
machine. The manifesto of this local yet international company does
indeed look to the future, but capitalising on the past. Because there is no tomorrow without understanding what was
done yesterday and without working
hard today. Thus Golinelli History
was born in 2008. “Based on our experience of processing files, we started an
activity to digitalise historic business archives, enhancing the history of
small and large businesses. For Maserati, we have been scouring their archives
for over ten years taking drawings, letters, sketches and digitalizing
everything, transforming paper into files. Or we make old and worn
transparencies contemporary. For Barilla, we digitalize old documents,
including the board of directors’ deliberations that tell the history of the
company. Extraordinary documents that leave their mark in time. We let the past
live once again,” explains Golinelli.
A true creative workshop of projects and products, where
ideas become visual languages, shapes, marks, colours. “Our skill is to develop
visual solutions in a new manner. We take care of processing and organising
content, bibliographic research, layout and graphic style down to printing.
From art exhibition catalogues to photographic collections, from history to
information - we accept challenges for state-of-the-art results,” stresses
Golinelli.
Welcome to a time machine.
This is how the company, who has celebrated its seventieth anniversary, looks
back while looking forward. “Nowadays there are innovations on the market that
are scary. Communication has changed, this is why we need to interpret the
market with all the innovation possible but in an objective, lucid way, without
anxiety. And basing ourselves not so much on corporate decisions of the past,
but rather on their interpretation, trying to understand that period of time.
The steps to take in the future become increasingly hard to take. Things are
more banal. Nowadays, people want everything and they want it now, and the
first thing they look at is price. But our objective is to become seekers of
value, focusing on the attention to and the care for detail.” Value seekers - a definition reminiscent
of the past, but which strongly projects us into the future.
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
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