[LINK] "This Fashion Magnate Is Reviving a Medieval Italian Hill Town"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg Markets Magazine's Devon Pendleton reports on an Italian fashion mogul's attempt to revive a small Italian hill town, among other things.

Italian fashion magnate Brunello Cucinelli takes time out from meetings with designers of his 2016 winter collection to discuss work—and why people shouldn’t exhaust themselves doing it. It’s a drizzly mid-September morning in Solomeo, the 12th-century hamlet where the 62-year-old CEO has located both his home and the global headquarters of his namesake fashion house.

Atop the cypress-forested hill is a medieval castle that Cucinelli has restored for his living quarters and a school. Nearby is a library open to employees featuring Cucinelli’s favorite thinkers, including Kant and Ruskin. Farther down the hill, artisans weave $3,000 cashmere sweaters from the undercoats of rare Hircus goats. He asks the 1,000-member staff to knock off work at 5:30 and not to send business-related e-mails after that to conserve their creative energies. “People need their rest,” Cucinelli says. “If I make you overwork, I have stolen your soul.”

Cucinelli calls his employee-centered approach humanistic capitalism and traces it to his teenage years. He watched his father trade the family’s life on a farm for more money in a factory, only to come home exhausted from a dark cement-making plant where colleagues mocked his peasant clothes. “It was very repetitive, hard work,” he says. “Very often, he’d be humiliated.”

Cucinelli insists on balance at his company. That includes a 90-minute respite at 1 p.m., when workers break en masse for lunch that costs a few euros in the subsidized canteen. On this Monday, they’ll dine on steak, pasta, and local produce bathed in Cucinelli’s own olive oil. His Brunello & Federica Cucinelli Foundation extends the philosophy to funding projects that make the world more livable. “Restoring a church or maybe restoring a hospital,” he offers as examples.