Artsana Portugal is a subsidiary of the Italian Artsana Group which in our country represents leading brands such as Chicco, Control, PIC Solution, and additional emerging brands like Recaro, Boppy and Neobaby.
Chicco is the company’s most iconic brand, and its history helps us understand the brand’s DNA and the company’s family culture.
Artsana Group and the Chicco brand founder Pietro Catelli is the helmsman of an enchanting journey through the power of creativity and perseverance. His dream of starting a family widened the horizons of an extraordinary man and brought the Chicco brand into every home where there is a baby – generation after generation.
Catelli had a happy but very difficult childhood due to the upheavals of World War I and the poverty they lived in. He grew up in Como, Italy and was determined not to be poor but to be “always good” as his mother had asked him before she passed away. A tragedy that scarred him deeply but at the same time gave him the strength to move on and succeed in life.
Against his father wishes – who dreamed of seeing his son in a secure job with the railway company, Pietro goes to work with a German pharmaceutical manufacturer. In the first year he learned all the departments of the company, and in the following years he travelled all over Italy selling thermometers, syringes, and needles.
His entrepreneurial spirit and his captivating personality allowed him to win customers all over Italy and thanks to his friendliness and competence he became close with the whole pharmaceutical circle.
After five years in the army during World War II, Pietro returns home and decides to found Artsana with his sister. Their strategy was to combine German quality with Italian design, thus making a difference.
The following 10 years the two siblings worked hard and by 1956 they were already marketing more than 50 products born mostly from Pietro’s imagination to solve small problems. For example, it was his idea to sell cotton in a bag that would close by interlacing a small thread in the opening. A practical idea that has lasted until today.
His first child Enrico, whom everyone affectionately called Chicco (in Italian Kee-Ko), was born in 1958. The first time he held his son in his arms Pietro felt that his future was in that baby. That child meant that he had finally built a family in his heart.
Thanks to his extraordinary capacity for invention, Pietro realized that when a baby is born, inexperienced parents need help. And the needs that both he and his wife felt at home as new parents was the emerging fountain of ideas for new products.
As Chicco regurgitated milk Pietro began to conceive a teat with a hole through which he could drink, and the first baby products began to appear in the laboratory where syringes and needles were made. Within a few months the first Chicco brand products had been designed. The nickname of the founder’s first child became a registered trademark and one of the 10 most well-known Italian consumer brands worldwide.
In 1960 the brand becomes global and with more than 900 products for babies and toddlers turns itself into a sales world-leader providing for all children’s needs in light and heavy childcare, toys, shoes, and clothing.
Pietro Catelli passed away in 2006 leaving as his legacy a company that currently employs over 8,500 people in 120 countries and knowing that he fulfilled his mother’s last wish: to always be “a good man”.
