Cerruti Baleri

In 1984 Enrico Baleri founded Baleri Italia, a company manufacturing quality furniture with a high design content. The path towards a personal interpretation of the design process led to the creation of a company that, since the beginning, developed products with strong formal and functional qualities and a commitment toward research, development and talent-scouting. This activity brought to the discovery of new talents and added to the continuous technological experimentation that made Baleri Italia an innovator in materials and manufacturing techniques and product solutions. While collaborating with successful designers such as Alessandro Mendini, Angelo Mangiarotti and Denis Santachiara among others, Baleri Italia has launched many new talents such as the young Philippe Starck, Hannes Wettstein and Luigi Baroli. In 2004 Nino Cerruti became a majority share-holder of Baleri Italia with the objective of developing a new industrial project that could also benefit from his long and successful experience in the textile and fashion businesses. In a short time this process developed into the complete acquisition of the company, the creation of a new managing group, with a new art director and a renewed internal team. Formal and functional research, as well as talent-scouting, continued to be the core activities of the company as shown by the collections presented since 2005 which introduced the work of new talents such as Jeff Miller, Arik Levy, Ilse Crawford, Alberto Colzani and Xavier Lust. These products are witness of an evolution from the past, through the introduction of ?new? materials, such as wood, and a careful attention towards colour and fabric, that is evidenced in a large and renewed collection that features, among the rest, several fabrics by Cerruti. In 2009 the company becomes cerruti baleri, natural landing point to confirm, also through the brand, the principles of continuity and evolution that since 2004 characterize its activity and from now on will become even more radical. If product, research&development and talent-scouting remain indeed the strongest points of its strategy ? as demontrated by the most recent collaborations with the architects Leonardo Perugi e Benedetto Quaquaro ? new assets such as material, language and working group strongly come in foreground. The formal gesture (design) is no longer a plus but a condicio sine qua non. It is no longer a sufficient distinguishing element. On the other hand the use of materials such as solid wood, marble, hide leather and fabrics become extremely significant as they express timeless and ecological values. Valuable materials combined, creative intelligence and quality manufacturing define our products and are the true protagonists of our collection. The products (complementi), through their function, but also through the messages of irony, playfulness and surprise they convey, speak to a fast-changing society, where one?s home, social conditions and even affections change more frequently and where as a consequence one develops close and lasting emotional relationships with objects. The product of the collection are never burdened by a cerebral approach. Their irony, playfulness and surprising intelligence are the perfect expression of a certaine joie de vivre. Cerruti baleri has defined its own language through a deliberate use of visual communication, video, light, text and sound, best expressed in our showroom, in our events and especially in our new website. To use these languages in a strategic way we created a team that, in addition to the internal staff, includes professionals from various disciplines with whom we developed a lively and on-going dialogue. We moved from the typical client-to-vendor relationship to that of a creative workshop where cerruti baleri is the director. This network of collaborators form what we ironically call the cerruti baleri universe. In 2010 Cerruti Baleri, true to its nature of editor, creates edizioni, a line that is parallel to but separate from the design collection. Edizioni becomes the natural showcase for the work of Maurizio Galante, Ilse Crawford and Maison Martin Margiela. The inspirational element behind the choice of the edizioni is to be found, aside from the values expressed by the designers themselves, in the very emotional appeal of the products. Through its editorial sensitivity and its industrial know-how cerruti baleri transforms such creative visions into products that fully comply with the basic criteria of functionality, production and surprising beauty. The history, the people with their different activities, the products, the collaborations, make cerruti baleri an authentic and young company.