Fedrigoni

In 2018 Bain Capital took a 90% stake, and several acquisitions followed. Ritrama, a competitor in self-adhesives, was acquired in January 2020. Together with Arconvert and Manter, it made Fedrigoni’s pressure-sensitive labels business the third-largest in Europe, behind Avery Dennison and UPM Raflatac. But the business now held brands that had been competitors until that moment. Each still traded under its own name, “part of Fedrigoni Group”, with layers of range and product names underneath.

The brief asked for a name, an identity and a brand book for the combined business, flexible enough to take in future acquisitions. We began with the labels business after the merger with Ritrama, then we went up to Group and across to the Paper division. We built a framework for every brand that joined afterwards.

More acquisitions followed. By 2023 Paper had added Guarro Casas and Zuber Rieder, and created Éclose. In 2024 Fedrigoni asked us to help reposition their Graphics division, previously identified with Ritrama, under the Fedrigoni brand.

My core task was to define Fedrigoni's brand strategy and architecture relationships, encompassing the main Fedrigoni Group brand, its Paper (including B2B and B2C brands) and Self-Adhesive Units, and Distribution. While consumer brands (such as the much-loved Fabriano) retained equity in their original identity, we recommended streamlining the brands in the Self Adhesive division under the same design language as the main Fedrigoni brand.

I interviewed leaders across the group, from the CEO and the heads of marketing, communications and people to the general managers of Fabriano, Cordenons and the businesses in the US, Asia and France. Through workshops with the leadership team I then distilled what we heard into the core of the strategy: unmatched heritage and continuous innovation, a promise to elevate customers’ brands, and one idea to hold it together, Elevating Creativity. I then built a messaging hierarchy with stories for paper and self-adhesive that speak to their respective customer bases while connecting to the overarching idea.

For the identity, Harry Pearce’s team took its cue from something Fedrigoni already had. Graphic Thought Facility had just set FEDRIGONI in capitals for the Paper Box, a collectable sample box, using a redrawn version of Aldo Novarese’s 1968 typeface Forma. The team saw that it could carry the whole brand, and it replaced the old Peignot logotype: bold, confident and unmistakably Italian.