Casadei
www.casadei.com

The Casadei label is synonymous with an all-Italian success story, marked by the milestones achieved thanks to great passion and self-sacrifice. The brand can trace its origins back to 1958, when Quinto and Flora Casadei founded the first embryo of what was to grow into a company of international reach.

And we have to admit that the instinct of Quinto Casadei-currently at the helm of the footwear and leather facilities of S. Mauro Pascoli in the province of Cesena-proved strong and true when he decided to expand his small crafts laboratory, in which he had already started to produce dream footwear of sophisticated workmanship for a select female clientele.

This entrepreneurial and pioneering spirit enabled Casadei to go beyond Italy’s borders in long-ago 1964, already revealing the chief talent of the men of this company: a vocation for anticipating styles and trends. A vocation transmitted in its entirety to the second-generation top management, Cesare Casadei, burnt by the sacred fire of art, who joined his father Quinto’s company a good 20 years ago. Cesare Casadei grew up among the fragrance of leather and the energising flavour of research applied to high technology, his daily challenge. Today, Cesare is the driver and creative spirit of Casadei, in addition to refereeing its commercial outcomes, while his cousin Fabrizio manages the maison’s financial affairs. Season after season, Cesare is the sharp and sensitive interpreter of a tenacious and unflagging impulse to continuously renew and reinvent the family company’s DNA, crafting shoes for women who the creative and business mind defines as “original, self-confident and alternative, yet always and inevitably the stars of the galaxy in which they live.” Whose key feature is an irrepressible, acclaimed femininity of stunning shoes, true objects of precious design, 100Made in Italy from exclusive and hand-finished materials, imprinted with the skilled workmanship that is the domain of irreplaceable craftsman. And it is precisely this constructive, Made in Italy know-how that is still the vital essence of this dynamic company, firmly anchored to its roots of manufacturing excellence, always looking to the future, fully immersed in the global present.

In this ongoing osmosis between tradition and modernity, Casadei has found its ideal growth terrain, testing new commercial strategies aimed at gradually expanding distribution, oriented to an increasingly targeted internationalisation, and at heightening the label’s visibility and brand awareness, both through communication and by opening new product diversification pathways. Indeed, the company has plans to launch a new line with a more experimental and niche positioning compared with the flagship line, in tandem with the launch of a new men’s footwear line, which is anything but classic, through to a sharper focus on the bags division, already part of the collection, but not as rich as the marked identity of Casadei’s core footwear business. Hence, the bags project currently is in full stride and is expected to generate favourable results.

Casadei currently exports 70 per cent of production, mainly to the United States, Russia, Japan, the Arab Emirates and Europe, while Italy accounts for the remaining 30 It can count on prestigious own-brand stores located in the main international marketplaces, supported by a well-diffused outlet network in the world’s most attractive and compelling geo-markets.

Management’s goal is to empower and entrench its footprint in the core markets, such as the U.S., where Casadei already has a showroom on New York’s Fifth Avenue and plans to open a store in one of the Big Apple’s major shopping thoroughfares. In Italy, Casadei is reaping satisfying rewards in terms of sales results and image feedback from the Romagnola company’s flagship store in via S. Andrea, Milan, a target destination of ever higher inflows of wealthy Italian and foreign shoppers.

“I have always recognised that communication not only drives the growth of the company, but is also an infinite well of stimuli, which capture my inventiveness, attracting it, ahead of others, to new creative dimensions and so enabling my artistic streak to grasp and enhance the essence of the shoes that I design and make in my workshops to the best”. With this statement, Cesare Casadei enthusiastically attests to the centrality of the advertising image in the creative parabola of this unique Italian story, which has voted to exalt the quintessence of feminine seductiveness. “In fact, my shoes—affirms Cesare Casadei—are like a mirror that reflects the personality of each woman, who finds in these her most authentic expression and, likewise, her sublimity; she only needs to be able to interpret her own spirit and mood through what I make for her: this is my highest ambition and something of a mission”.

And naturally the images photographed for the Casadei advertising campaign by the greatest and most high-flying photographers in the international arena-chronologically, from Mario Sorrenti to Nick Knight, from Mario Testino to Javier Vallhonrat, to Raymond Meier-while moving away in some aspects one from the other, are, nevertheless, coherent links in the imagery, the precise fruit of a focused and unitary direction, which always tends to extrapolate the univocal message from each shot, that of a metamorphosis of the female cosmos, which nevertheless remains faithful to itself, regardless of the shifts in styles and fashions to which it is subject.

Reiterating once again, as if there were any need, Cesare Casadei’s highly modern approach to fashion communication, enables us to read between the lines of the new and intriguing Spring/Summer 2007 advertising campaign, on which he worked closely with the brilliant illustrator Fran�s Berthoud, as the Spring/Summer 2006 and Fall/Winter 06-07campaigns, who comes with the backing of a long roll call of experiences with the most prestigious international fashion magazines. A project without precedents, a turning point for Casadei.

“With Berthoud I wanted to create a more cosmopolitan image, removing any reference to the female anatomy not strictly linked to the silhouette of the shod foot, aimed precisely at giving it full prominence, by using new graphic codes and a more stylised view of the image, of the purity and clarity of the svelte shape of the shoe, the real fetish of these images”, explains Cesare Casadei, who has once more hit target with a communication that leaves its mark, maximising the visual impact of his creations, true objects of desire.