A brand is a tree: roots, trunk, branches

A little history first

The word luxus was born in ancient Rome. Later, in Italy and France, we lived through the historical period that shaped our strong calling for luxury: the Renaissance. Native Americans and Asians didn't have the Renaissance, and neither did countries such as Russia, Germany or the rest of Northern Europe. That is why Italy and France, whatever the costs of doing business, have this calling.

After the Renaissance came the artisans and with them product heritage, the idea of how a quality product is made: the workshops making shoes, furniture, belts. Hermès started out making horse saddles. The twentieth century brought the compromise between craft and manufacturing, with mass industry, and in the 1970s and 1980s Italian designers exploded and Milan became the centre of fashion, thanks to public relations work. The idea of a group managing several luxury brands, however, was born in 1987 in Paris with LVMH: only a few years ago.

The roots: uniqueness

What the mass market calls brand identity, luxury calls the uniqueness of the brand itself. A brand has to be unique, so to create your brand's uniqueness you need to start asking yourself these questions:

• Why was the company, the brand, the workshop created?
• What did it set out to bring to the market?
• The year it was founded.
• The geography: where the company and the brand were born.
• The know-how, the craft: what you are masters of and where your excellence lies. If we are on the market, there is something we excel at, otherwise we wouldn't have customers.

The big difference between a luxury brand and a mass-market brand is that the luxury brand is not born to meet customer needs, let alone from market research. When P&G created Vicks VapoRub it presumably had market research behind it on the needs of customers with that particular problem. In luxury this isn't done, because this segment has different codes.

I don't create a product to meet the needs of the market: I create it from the answers to the questions I asked myself first.

The answers we gave ourselves

To help you create your roots, here are the answers we gave ourselves at RiFRA. Why was the company created? To bring the best of the Brianza tradition and Milanese design to the world, which we try to blend together. What did it set out to bring to the market? We have always been known for the quality of our product and the reliability of the company. Year founded? 1930 and 1970: in 1930 my grandfather started working wood and in 1970 the company was established, so I couldn't use the time factor. Geography? Monza and Brianza, Milan. Know-how? Joinery and finishes.

On geography, when I posted it on Facebook, a huge debate broke out: is Monza and Brianza a brand? Perhaps to Italians, while in the rest of the world it is little known. The Italian cities and regions that are brands can be counted on one hand, and Milan is one of them. That is why Milan is in the payoff, even though we make the kitchens in Brianza.

The collections grew out of these answers, and our key was to open a single category: kitchen and bathroom. I take the same design, divide it into collections and run bathroom and kitchen in parallel. I sell the kitchen first, which is what brings the customer into the showroom, and then the bathroom with the same design and the same material. As a customer you get one delivery, one invoice, one style. We explain this during the negotiation: “Surely you don't want a guest to walk into the bathroom, after admiring the kitchen, find a cheap cabinet and think that's where you decided to save money!”

The difference between an excellent product and a brand

This is where the SME that makes an excellent product differs from the one that has managed to become a brand. In the first case we have a no-name company that develops a high-level product because it is Italian and knows how to do things well. A company like this has little margin and little profit, because without a brand the price has to be tied to quality: higher quality, higher price, but the ratio stays the same.

What makes the difference is the creative direction that works on building the brand. As well as a product of the highest level, I need a person, who at the start can be the company's founder, to handle creative direction in developing the brand. The brand, in turn, lets you raise your margin.

The art director defines the style of the collections, gives the brand a soul, puts the products in context. They can be in-house or external. If I have a small budget and some aesthetic taste, maybe I do it myself. If they are external, they must bring visibility to the brand and not the other way round, or you risk them setting up on their own and becoming the brand. What matters is that they set a style direction reflected in consistent images and videos with the same atmosphere: that is how you create the brand's mood, which is then carried into the marketing and the ads. Minotti with Rodolfo Dordoni and Rimadesio with Giuseppe Bavuso are two examples in my sector: quality production, like everyone in Italy, plus a strong creative direction that creates a consistent narrative in every photo and every video.

The trunk and the branches

From the roots you move to the trunk, the brand's code: the goal is to turn the roots into visual and sensory elements. It is built from five elements: brand name, brand logo, brand payoff, web presence, store design. For the book I analysed 200 luxury brands and these five points are the result of that analysis. I cover them in a separate article.

The branches are the products: the final expression of the roots and the trunk, what turns the brand experience into handing the customer a physical product, or a service, in exchange for money. The product has to be consistent with the brand's narrative: I can't tell one story and deliver something else. If the product isn't consistent, it destroys the groundwork done beforehand. And it is in the branches that the price is set, which is the other article in this series.

From my book Direct from Milano and my classroom courses. Figures and examples updated to September 2026.