B&B Italia aims to grow with large furniture contracts

Like two plates of a scale swinging up and down in search of a balance point, the furniture market's interest in residential and hospitality and large contract projects are often complementary: thus it happened that, during and immediately after Covid, sales of residential furniture recorded extraordinary growth, while demand in the contract sector plummeted, while now the situation seems to have reversed.

"The year 2025 is also confirming this trend, which was already observed in 2024, with a suffering in the retail sector and, conversely, a very strong demand in the area of large supplies for hotels, yachts, restaurants or prestigious condominiums," explains Demetrio Apolloni, CEO of B&B Italia, which is part of the Flos B&B Italia Group (formerly Design Holding), jointly controlled by Investindustrial and The Carlyle.

Precisely in order to intercept this growing demand, the Brianza-based company - founded in 1966 by Piero Ambrogio Busnelli and today one of the best-known brands in Italian design, with a turnover of 263.4 million euro - has decided to make a decisive return to investment pr strengthen the production of wardrobes and furnishing systems that, together with the high-end kitchen proposal of its subsidiary Arclinea, form a very interesting "package" to be spent on the international market, particularly in today's most dynamic countries, such as the Middle East, but not only.

If in fact the retail market, or at any rate the sale of individual pieces (albeit iconic and of great renown) is stagnating a bit everywhere, from Europe to the United States to China, vice versa the sector of large projects is in great ferment even in these markets, explains Apolloni, with important negotiations or construction sites underway, for example in Miami and London. So much so that, in terms of orders, the numbers for 2025 are better than for 2024.

"The most interesting aspect in our view, especially for a company like ours that operates at the top end of the market, is that in the past in the hospitality contract business, the price factor was a very relevant competitive element,' adds Apolloni. 'Now, however, we observe that brand value is increasingly being enhanced by international developers, and so the competition has moved upwards and is being played out on the offer of quality products, even when it comes to the structural elements of a building, which in this type of project are integrated into the architecture by the builders themselves, such as kitchens and wardrobes.