Your first showroom has to be your own

The mood becomes a shop

The company mood creates the brand image, which is extended to distribution as well. Having your first store of your own lets you test your marketing: everything you've studied has to be put to work, and through feedback from consumers and from sales you'll understand what works, what to improve, what to scrap or add.

The first showroom lets you create your sales funnel, because if you only sell business-to-business you never have contact with private customers and you can't do it. This way you have the data of the private customer to follow up in person and on paper and, above all, you can ask the end consumer for testimonials, which our competitors can't do because they go through traditional distribution. And through traditional distribution they can't do it because the customer and their data belong to the store.

Investors and the multiple

The first showroom is also essential for attracting investors and creating a business model. Naturally, if I want to open twenty stores around the world, there has to be one I start from: every marathon starts by tying your shoelaces and sprinting the first five hundred metres.

You can attract investors with a scalable model, saying that besides manufacturing you are a brand with a certain number of stores in certain world capitals, attracting a certain kind of person. Listing or selling a manufacturing company is one thing; a company with a brand, its own distribution and particular stores at the high end is another. The multiple goes from 4 to 12, and investors pay you for that. In 2025 funds in Italy paid on average 11.6 times EBITDA, but only for companies with a brand and their own channel.

At least the first showroom has to be your own. Even if you build a franchise chain: it lets you test and copy and paste for your franchisees.

You show them what you've done, where your marketing is tested with reliable data and without a manager in between. You test the sales funnel, you bring the prospective franchisee the sales data, the conversion rate. Otherwise, without a store of your own, that's data you can't guarantee to anyone.

The location: parking underneath

The store has to be in a location that is strategic for the brand, in line with the positioning. With “Kitchens and Baths direct from Milano” it made sense to open the first showroom in Milan, and it worked better than expected, because it was in line with the positioning we had started telling three years before the opening.

As soon as we saw the location we signed: in the Quadrilatero della moda, on the corso Matteotti side, on the second floor. The stroke of luck is having the multi-storey car park under the showroom, which reassures customers like the Swiss and the Germans. The alternative was via della Spiga: a very prestigious image, but pedestrianised, not well suited to our business. Our customer does their research and comes specially, and in that bracket, especially the Swiss and Germans with their mindset, if you don't guarantee them parking for their luxury car they don't come. They won't leave it in the street. In Rome we replicated the same mood in Parioli, with the door closed: you ring the bell. In New York it would be different: nobody has parking and nobody cares, people get around by Uber.

A client who ran a high-end American car brand told me that the first thing he did on arriving at the company was move the offices from Detroit to New York: luxury has to be infused with the city. That applies to a car maker and it applies to a kitchen factory in Brianza.

The plan was this: Milan and New York owned, because a brand has to breathe the air, and you don't grow in a warehouse; Modena through an acquisition, which was a problem and we turned it into an asset; Paris as a franchise; then Brussels. Milan worked beyond expectations, but after three years of sowing, from 2014, before the harvest. Anyone who opens a showroom and expects sales in the first year hasn't understood that the showroom closes a marketing journey that started years earlier.

The same mood, in every city

We took the style of the Milan showroom to Rome. Our art direction recreated the mood through the materials and colours of the floors and walls, and the products on display are very similar, to give the brand a consistent language. Remember the photos of the black kitchen in the catalogue? In the store you find the same model, the same floor, the same partitions, the same colour. The customer finds what they saw in the catalogue, in the video, on social media. That's how the customer experience becomes unique and consistent between online and offline.

Vuitton does it, with stores that are all the same around the world, in light colours, because they respect the brand identity and the website. And a mood replicated in several cities is bound to become a distribution and business model. Each store then has its own website, a subdomain with the name of the city, with the showroom video, the working method explained step by step, the store's testimonials, FAQs and appointment booking. The customer reads the answers to general questions online, and the appointment is shorter.

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