Word: districters
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...pine monument is not some avant-garde artistic statement. It's an oversize acknowledgment by the community of the industry that brought immense prosperity to Manzano and 10 small burgs around it over the past half-century. Known as the "chair triangle" (il triangolo della sedia), this district every year produces as many as 40 million chairs of all shapes and sizes--typically of beech and oak wood--for offices, homes, hotels, cruise ships, hospitals and restaurants around the world. Locals like to boast that the district in its heyday made 1 of every 3 chairs sold. The demand provided...
...Chinese can coexist and flourish, building on their respective strengths. Several Manzano chairmakers are already looking to China as a market where they can both buy and sell. "Nobody can stop the Chinese anymore," says Lucio Zamò, one of the few remaining successful manufacturers of office chairs in the district. Zamò has been able to cut expenses by building chairs using imported Chinese aluminum bases, which cost 40% less than Italian ones...
...flexibility of such clusters is sometimes held up as a model by experts on economic development such as Harvard Business School professor Michael E. Porter. But the system has proved vulnerable to an onslaught of international competition. About 90% of the firms in the district have fewer than 20 employees, while just a dozen have more than 50, according to a study by Professor Roberto Grandinetti of the University of Padua. Local bankers say all but a few are sorely undercapitalized and lack the resources to build their business to a global scale. And virtually no one has much experience...
...inspired: he is trying to create his own brand and a sales network with fellow entrepreneurs. Two of the four firms he hoped to team with have since dropped out, but Piani doesn't need to look very far to see that he needs to do something. The Manzano district as a whole is working on a strategy that might help all the chair manufacturers: creating a certified hallmark analogous to the one used by the ham producers of San Daniele, 12 miles away, who make a famous prosciutto. To qualify, chairs would have to be made locally and meet...
...even as they talk about focusing on Italian manufacturing heritage, officials for the bigger firms are dealing with reality and shifting production out of the Manzano district. Luigi Cozzi, for example, has relocated his wood treatment to Romania, where his firm, Idealsedia, now has 300 workers--50 more than it has in Italy. Such cost-cutting moves are a matter of survival. Natuzzi, a major Italian sofamaker headquartered in Santeramo, still makes high-end products in Italy. But less expensive sofas aimed at price-conscious North American consumers are wholly made at a factory Natuzzi operates in Shanghai. The company...