VALENZA, Italy — Even though some of its work spaces had been used for a few weeks, Bulgari’s new jewelry factory here was still a work in progress earlier this month.

The floors of creamy marble and gleaming walnut in the reception area were still covered, and leather armchairs were being moved into a conference room. The marble and wood were from Italy, as were the chairs from the Italian maker Poltrona Frau, because Bulgari, which is headquartered in Rome, considers its Italian heritage to be one of its major strengths.

It has a point.

On March 17, the jeweler officially opened one of the largest jewelry ateliers in Europe, more than 150,000 square feet, in Valenza, north of Milan. In the next three years the company plans to nearly double the number of employees here, to 700 by 2020. There were 390 when it opened earlier this year.

To help train new workers for those slots, the Bulgari Jewelry Academy opened at the factory earlier this month. Now 21 students, selected from jewelry schools throughout Italy, are attending the four-month program to learn Bulgari’s trade secrets.
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Coverage of jewelry and the jewelry business, from The New York Times.

The new manifattura was necessary “because our two production sites in Valenza and Solonghello were saturated and couldn’t be expanded any further,” said Jean-Christophe Babin, Bulgari’s chief executive. The new factory will “expand the brand’s manufacturing capacity and supply the volumes required to respond to the growing market.”

One of Bulgari’s tenets is to respect the past while innovating for the future, and the extensive new factory does that.

The location alone speaks volumes. The company said it chose to expand in Valenza because the city, along with Vicenza and Arezzo, is one of the primary centers of Italian gold work. Bulgari also uses local residents who work from their homes for tasks like making chains and setting gemstones.

The new factory was built on the site of the Cascina dell’Orefice, which translates as “the farmhouse of the goldsmith,” the 1800s-era home of the man known as Valenza’s first goldsmith, Francesco Caramora. His old farmhouse was rebuilt with the addition of a wing that looks just like what its name suggests: “We call it the ‘Glass House,’” said Nicolò Rapone, senior operations director for Bulgari Jewelry. The building will be used for offices and gatherings.

A corridor links the Glass House to the main factory building, which, on a quick glimpse, looks like a metal mesh rectangle. Perforated aluminum panels encircle the building about 20 feet from the facade, so workers can look out on the surrounding green countryside but no one can look in, for security reasons.

The panels were treated to change color depending on sunlight and the angle from which they are viewed, but on a warm, sunny March day, they seemed to remain charcoal gray. The name BVLGARI is spelled out in huge glistening letters across the front with the company’s signature ancient Roman “V” in place of the “U”; earlier this month, the letters “weren’t quite visible enough,” Mr. Rapone said, so workers were busily polishing away.

Mr. Rapone, who oversaw the 18-month construction process, knows every corner of the new facility. One of the company’s directives was to be kind to the environment and to the employees.

The factory is built around the Roman domus (or home) model, Mr. Rapone said, in tribute to Bulgari’s Roman heritage. It has a courtyard (measuring 6,460 square feet), a primary feature in traditional homes, to encourage workers to enjoy fresh air and socializing, although on this particular day employees on breaks were clustered around the espresso machines on each floor or gathered in adjacent smoking rooms.

The new site also features a cafeteria where employees can have free lunches, created with produce sourced locally. There’s a free shuttle to take workers into the city center, incentives for car pooling, and even a shower for those who bike to work.

Workers are issued uniforms, indigo polo shirts and cotton trousers. They are held up by buttons, no belts or zippers, because employees are required to go through metal detectors each day to make sure no gold is going out the door with them. Two security guards monitoring 36 screen views of the factory also help ensure no materials leave the building.

There is also an extensive air filtration system, a network of silver ductwork suspended from the ceilings, designed to capture gold dust. And, on the floors, mats cover a suction system to grab the gold that may have collected on shoes. Watching a worker file a gold bracelet shows just how much of the fine powder can be created.

“You would be surprised how much gold we can collect,” Mr. Rapone said. “Kilos worth. And at $40 a gram, that can add up.”

Gold is Bulgari’s stock in trade, and a room filled with huge metal ovens prepares it for production, remelting the sheets that arrive at the factory and mixing them with other metals, like silver or copper, to create white, yellow or rose gold.

The gold then is cooled and splintered into tiny chips. Plastic bins with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of chips then are lugged to an adjacent room, where the chips will be melted and poured into plaster molds.

This is the “lost wax” room, where a dozen or so workers carry out a process that, Mr. Rapone said, “is exactly the same as Benvenuto Cellini had in the 1500s.”

Today, the reptilian-like scales that will slither along the curvature of a Serpenti bracelet are being made, as ultimately gold is poured into the spaces surrendered by melted wax. However, Cellini did not have the benefit of today’s goldsmiths: A computer screen showed not just the rate and level of the poured gold, but also its temperature.

More rooms — three floors’ worth — are filled with giant industrial machines, some, Mr. Rapone said, that “were developed by us to make our products.” For example, one machine creates the U-shaped tube, sparkling with an engraved diamantatura finish, of the house’s tubogas jewelry. “Before, that was all done manually,” Mr. Rapone said. (Tubogas, a traditional Italian jewelry style, looks much like a coiled tube and sometimes is called “snake chain.”)

Bulgari has hired engineers from Germany to Japan to program the machines to perform their tasks.

The top floor is where all the bits and pieces produced on the lower two floors are transformed into complete items of jewelry. The pieces to be assembled, like the gold Serpenti scales, arrive rather unceremoniously gathered in plastic bags.

Some of the tools used by the 23 artisans go back to Cellini’s times: a bulino, or chisel, for engraving; a long wooden cabran for filing; a tenagliolo a collare, similar to a pair of pliers, to stretch wire. These ancient tools stand side-by-side with computer screens that relay all manner of plans, messages and information (“We are a paper-free company,” Mr. Rapone said).

Bulgari’s one-of-a-kind jewelry will continue to be made in Rome; its accessories in Florence; its perfumes in Lodi, in Italy’s Lombard region; silk in Como and watch mechanisms in Switzerland.

But Valenza will produce the main jewelry collections: Serpenti, Diva’s Dream, B.zero 1, Parentesi, MVSA, Monete, Save the Children and BVLGARI-BVLGARI. And all the machinery, Mr. Rapone said, will just help “the workers to exactly reproduce the art of the designers.”

Source: nytimes.com