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What if Giorgio Armani were for sale? he is asked, and he's unsure. "Giorgio is Giorgio," he says. "I might buy a bike company." Or maybe a quirky drinks company, he adds, and when you consider the Art Deco hotel he developed in Miami or the venue for that day's lunch, it doesn't sound like idle chatter at all. The farm was purchased on a lark; then Rosso got interested in the vineyards and the olive trees, and he brought in specialists because, he says, as long as you're going to have a bit of fun, you might as well try to have a top-quality wine. "I like to put my hand into other things. I don't want it for money. I want it for the pleasure to do something different."
From his place at the table, high on a hill, he gestures to Diesel's many installations in the valley below. "Over here" is headquarters, a hangar-like building in a light-industrial district just outside the town of Marostica. He swings around and points in the direction of a cutting-edge Diesel shoe factory that has just been completed, replacing an arrangement with a licensing partner. "It was a risk because we stopped our license worth $190 million in shoe sales to do it ourselves," he explains. The warehouses holding the company's reference archive, with 13,000 pairs of jeans and other items of clothing, are out of range, but one can just make out the villa where the design teams work.
The CEO has never shortchanged creativity. Diesel employs 100 staff designers and graphic artists and allocates a significant portion of its marketing budget to an array of projects promoting up-and-comers in music and design. Everyone questioned who has worked with Rosso mentioned his ability to spot and keep talent as one of the main qualities that explains his success. He has been known to circulate an e-mail on a hot summer day at headquarters to invite hundreds of employees to his nearby house for a pool party.
Rosso has grown fond of his country life and his house wine. And that's why, he says, he throws water on speculation he's maneuvering for a public offering. "If I do 2 billion [euros] in sales instead of 1, maybe I'll be more prominent than today, but maybe I won't even have time to do this lunch. And this makes me very sad," he says. "We have only one life. I want to enjoy my time with my family, my children, my friends. I don't want to only work."
The investment bankers who chopper into the Veneto to sell him an ipo or a major acquisition have heard just about everything, but he laughs, saying he managed to catch a group by surprise recently. "The Dalai Lama told me not to," he recalls telling them. "I say to the Dalai Lama, 'Why do I work like a crazy?' And he knows—not maybe all the details—and he says, 'You have to stay, and you have to work. Because the way that you work is very different from the others, and people need that. Maybe you can be an example for others."