The Materials: Why recycling leather waste built Vivolo’s success – the-spin-off.com

In 1977 Luciano Vivolo, an Italian entrepreneur born in Irpinia then adopted by Bologna, who had the idea to recycle leather waste and build his fortune.

He discovered that leather waste was the ideal material to create elbow patches that in just a few years would have made a name for themselves in the national and international fashion industry.

After that he and his wife Marianna forged ahead and, with the support of their four children, gave birth over the decades to Vivolo, a dynamic company that was highly appreciated in the fashion industry and became a leader in the leather trimming segment for apparel, footwear and leather goods.

Today the company counts 100 employees, 85% of whom are women, help supply the world’s leading fashion houses producing eight million items a year, made one by one in-keeping with the company’s high-quality standards.

Luciano Vivolo inaugurated his company’s new ultra-modern headquarters in San Lazzaro di Savena near Bologna, in 2023, but active as early as 2020.

A group of highly qualified professionals accompanies the client at all stages, through a dedicated consultant from conception to production.

The company also hosts an archive of creations spanning almost half a century of fashion history and provides that inspiration which, through the continuous search for exclusive raw materials, original designs and innovative techniques help anticipate fashion trends and materialize in perfect executions.

The company produces its unique leather trimmings and accessories according to top quality, GRS, FSC and Oeko-Tex-certified items.

Vivolo places environmental ethics at the center of its business. In 2023, its photovoltaic panels produced 109,746 kWh, allowing significant savings in electricity purchased from the network.

Underground cisterns collect rainwater, a well to self-supply watering without absorbing anything from the water plant.

The vertically integrated supply chain allows the company to be able to design and adopt efficient, transparent processes and circular economy solutions to valorize waste: in this sense, the company strives to achieve an increasingly responsible supply chain, to provide its partners with concrete answers and cutting-edge solutions, from the choice of raw materials to the disposal of scraps.

Vivolo also develops dedicated projects in collaboration with schools in order to give a new life to waste materials, thus raising awareness of how to reuse and recycle production waste among the new generations.

For many seasons Vivolo has also been carrying out the Impronta Zero project, an ever-evolving series of capsule collections made with minimal environmental impact, using organic, recycled, recyclable, compostable, vegan, animal free, eco sustainable and solvent free materials.

Vivolo is also constantly involved into creatively transforming its industrial waste into an added value of revolutionary scale, while it continues to explore and research always new and challenging solutions.

Season after the season, the company produces from small leather goods to footwear, from bags to clothing, and develops new creative, technical, material and chromatic proposals that are always innovative, including its most recent s/s 2025 collection offering hot-printed or digitally printed leather labels for denim and classic pants, lace finials, and 3D printed accessories, along with colored silicon and recycled material accessories.

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