Spanish Outdoor Furniture Firm Kettal Takes Majority Stake in Italy’s Driade

MILAN — Nemo Group, which acquired Driade successful October 2024, has sold a bulk involvement successful the Italian furnishings location to Spain’s Kettal Group.

Nemo Group volition stay a number shareholder, ensuring the continuity of Italian craftsmanship and serving arsenic a span to Driade’s history, values, and taste roots, the steadfast said Tuesday.

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The company’s office volition stay successful Italy, the steadfast added.

The presumption of the woody were not disclosed.

Spain-based Kettal is simply a planetary person successful the outdoor furnishings industry. Going forward, Kettal and Nemo volition enactment unneurotic to relaunch the famed marque with a much “Mediterranean-centered imaginativeness of design,” stated Driade.

Driade was founded successful Milan successful 1968 by creation manager Enrico Astori, decorator Antonia Astori and Adelaide Acerbi, who led the brand’s representation and communication. Avant garde designers Enzo Mari and Nanda Vigo were important astatine its inception: Mari with the Sof Sof seat and Vigo with her furry Blocco seat.

Achille Castiglioni, Alessandro Mendini and Philippe Starck are besides among its roster of collaborators. Fabio Novembre was appointed creation manager of Driade successful 2019. Kettal’s main enforcement serviceman Alex Alorda said his purpose is to heighten the firm’s competitiveness connected a planetary stage.

“This is not a elemental acquisition but an authentic collaboration calved from communal respect and the content that existent innovation arises from the gathering of antithetic cultures and competencies. Driade deserves to reclaim its spot connected the planetary plan scene,” Alorda said.

Kettal started successful 1964 producing aluminum camping cogwheel successful Catalonia, Spain, but shifted its absorption to make functional and stylish outdoor furniture.

When Nemo Group, a lighting institution that owns Nemo Lighting, bought Driade, it was the archetypal clip the steadfast had ventured into the furnishings world.

Prior to the acquisition, Driade was owned, on with historical lighting shaper FontanaArte, by Italian Creation Group.

FontanaArte, which Nemo Group’s CEO Federico Palazzari astir coveted, traces its origins backmost to 1881 with Luigi Fontana, who started making interval glass, oregon sheets of glass, for the operation manufacture successful Milan. In 1931, his steadfast Luigi Fontana & C. appointed Gio Ponti its creation director.

Palazzari said that Kettal is the close spouse to heighten Driade’s estimation successful a caller epoch of modern design. “Our existent competitors are geographic and taste barriers, and truthful our existent extremity is to make synergies to beforehand a civilization of design.”