Carlo Rivetti, Chairman, Sportswear Company
	The Rivetti family is one of the best known dynasties in the Italian textile panorama: it can count seven generations of entrepreneurs who have played an active role in the historic wool industry based around Biella since the mid 18th century. In the late Fifties, the family founded one of the leading European clothing manufacturers: the Turin-based GFT Group. Carlo Rivetti’s father, Silvio, was the founder of GFT. In the 50’s, GFT introduced in Italy the first ready to wear Italian men’s and women’s brands, Facis and Cori:  By studying the strategies and production systems used by major American companies in this sector, Silvio Rivetti laid the foundations for what became the leading European clothing manufacturer in the Eighties. The growth of GFT continued under the guidance of the cousins, Marco and Carlo Rivetti. They turned the company into the most important industrial partner for the designers who led the «made in Italy» revolution in the Seventies and Eighties. In those years GFT has been the first manufacturer to close license deals with fashion designers such as Giorgio Armani, Emanuel Ungaro, Valentino. This brought to the birth of the so called Made in Italy phenomena. In the mid eighties, GFT also decided to expand in the informal fashion business and became first partner and then the sole owner of Massimo Osti’s C.P. Company. In 1993 Carlo Rivetti and his sister Cristina decided to leave the family company before taking over the informal clothing branch of the group centered on C.P. Company in Ravarino, which was promptly renamed Sportswear Company, owner of the brands C.P. Company and Stone Island. Mr. Rivetti became President of the company. This marked the start of an entrepreneurial challenge based on the conviction that high-level sportswear today represents the most advanced and most innovative segment in the entire sector. Born in 1956, Carlo Rivetti graduated in economics at Bocconi University in Milan, where he lives with his wife Sabina and his three children.  He believes in teamwork, the importance of research and in a product that is the outcome of the combination of technology, function, quality and elegance.  He can rely on the expert skills of someone who has worked in this sector for years, coupled with the irreverent imagination of a man who has never failed to follow through his own choices, no matter how strange and unfashionable they might seem at the time.
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