Maurizio Vitale 's brash ways
"I decided to name my product after the biggest revolutionary in history," says Maurizio Vitale, 38, president of a booming Italian sportswear company called Maglificio Calzificio Torinese. The product, Jesus Jeans, has become a symbol of entrepreneurial audacity since it first appeared in the early 1970s. Its success, moreover, helped to transform Vitale's company from a staid maker of socks and underwear into one of the fastest-growing and most aggressive firms in Italy. Vitale's sales jumped from less than $7 million in 1970 to $65 million last year.
Vitale now is moving quickly into the U.S. market. The American track and field team will compete in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics in Kappa Sport-brand attire made by his company. Kappa was also a sponsor of this year's New York City Marathon. A Kappa warehouse in North Carolina distributes the firm's products throughout North America.
Even the Soviet Union is doing business with Vitale. Earlier this year the Soviets began turning out Jesus Jeans in Moscow under a licensing agreement. Vitale had won the contract, which calls for 10 million pairs of pants to be produced through 1985, in competition with two U.S.-based clothing giants, Levi Strauss and Wrangler. Moscow is paying Vitale about $1 million for the license and technical aid.
Vitale's family-owned concern, head quartered in a two-story stucco factory in Turin, was founded in 1916 as a manufacturer of men's socks. His parents fled to Switzerland in 1943 to escape Fascist antiSemitism, but returned to Turin after World War II to rebuild their shattered plant. When Vitale left school to join the company full time in the late 1960s, he immediately set out to diversify it. "In this world," he says, "it's very important to understand things 15 minutes before somebody else."
Noticing the popularity of blue jeans in Europe and the U.S., as well as the growing number of youthful so-called Jesus freaks, Vitale combined the two enthusiasms into a single product, and thus created Jesus Jeans. To advertise the new pants, he used billboards displaying curvaceous, jean-clad female bodies and slogans like-"Thou shall have no other jeans before me," and "He who loves me, follows me." The attention-grabbing campaign quickly spurred sales, despite protests from church leaders that the ads were blasphemous.
In 1978, Vitale started his Kappa athletic-wear line of products and began sponsoring Juventus, Turin's internationally known professional soccer team. It was the first Italian soccer team to have a commercial sponsor. The Kappa name became so widely known through the Turin team that Vitale was soon able to sell licenses to produce the clothing outside Italy. The athletic events he sponsors now include marathons in London, Paris and Athens, as well as in New York City. In addition, such track stars as Edwin Moses and Sydney Maree run in Kappa clothing and appear in the firm's advertising.