Compasso d’Oro Lifetime Achievement Award for Anna Ferrino

“A very intense emotion and, above all, a surprise”. Anna FerrinoCEO of Ferrino Spa, has recently received the Compasso d’Oro Lifetime Achievement Award, the highly coveted recognition awarded by the ADI (Association for Industrial Design) considered the most authoritative world design award and established in 1954 by Gio Ponti. The surprise is legitimate, in very few cases ADI had paid its attention towards companies of this type and never until now had the Compasso d’Oro for lifetime achievement been awarded to an entrepreneur not strictly linked to design.

Anna Ferrino has been recognized as a leading figure and undisputed protagonist of Italian design culture, thanks to her continuous commitment and passion demonstrated over the years, expressed in a career built on two pillars: culture and sport. A path – the award mention states – that starts from afar, within the tradition of family businesses understood as the ability to transmit values ​​before economic ones.

“For us, design is an integral part of everyday life”says Anna Ferrino. “Seven designers work in the company whose task is to harmonize the different needs typical of each individual product, from the tent to the backpack. In the foreground there is always the product performancewhich must be functional and ergonomic but also respect the durability and repairability criteria to which we adhere”, continues the Piedmontese entrepreneur. “All this is combined with the current trends reinterpreted according to our style. I personally don’t draw, but I am always present in this part of the production process. As for the colors, we will never give up our traditional orange. Yellow and red will also continue to be important: In the mountains, they are synonymous with safety”.

In his 154 years of history Ferrino has had a profound impact onevolution of products for leisure and mountaineering. It’s impossible to count them, so we asked Anna Ferrino which are the ones she is most attached to or of whom she is most proud. “The tent is my favorite product. For me it has always meant many things at once, since I was a child: intimacy and sharing, isolation and freedom. It is no coincidence that its evolution over time has always been influenced by sociological and economic transformations. My heart takes me to the first house tents of the 70s, for many it was like realizing the dream of a villa in a holiday destination.

Then, but only chronologically, I think of the famous red tent created for and with Reinhold Messner: I was very young, fascinated by the charisma and professionalism of that mountaineer, capable of great feats but also of giving very valid suggestions. The mountaineering tent”, goes on, “It requires responsible and careful design, since it is not just an object, but a real survival capsule. In designing these objects our great are fundamental experiencethe meticulous one selection and of test on materials and in the wind tunnel, the analysis of tests in the environment and the reports of previous expeditions, the development work in close collaboration with the most famous mountaineers who have always found in Ferrino a high-altitude tailoring at the service of their businesses”.

Not just curtains, though. “I am proud of the work done by the company, and this time I put a lot of my own into it, with backpacks equipped with airbags and respirators. For me it was much more than a simple innovation to propose to the market, but being able to underline our active role in terms of safety. We always consider ourselves responsible for the success of every undertaking or excursion.”