Ideas and values, innovation and sustainability, tradition and passion. Essepigi is fifty years old and we had the pleasure of interviewing Luigi Patregnani, owner of the Marche-based company, to wish him well and tell this beautiful story. An opportunity to tell the past and look to the future…
Clear ideas, values that have been handed down over the years and that have accompanied different generations, people, men and women who have written the pages of a history full of choices, innovation, changes. Talking about Essepigi today does not only mean telling about a beautiful industrial reality that has developed and continues to grow, but it also means telling a beautiful story with many chapters written and many more yet to be written. A story that began in 1956, when Sergio Patregnani together with his brother Gino laid the foundations of this adventure that walked into a changing world, in a different Italy, between the hills and the sea of the Marche region, between Urbino and Fano, in a district rich in history and tradition for the world of wood, furniture and mechanical engineering. “Essepigi are the initials of my father Sergio and brother Gino,” said Luigi Patregnani, now owner of Essepigi, the company in Orciano di Pesaro specializing in the production of numerical control machines for the processing of wood-based doors and panels. “A story that began with a single machine, a theme song, has become a rich season of successes, joys and satisfaction that have brought us this far“.
From one machine to an industrial organization, from a handicraft mentality born of its time to numbers and projects of a large company based on clear ideas, as we have said, on feet firmly planted on the ground, and on a way of living work as a passion rather than a duty. “When Essepigi was born, the first machines were sanding machines,” explained Luigi Patregnani, “functional machines, which, however, also responded to the aesthetic canons typical of the mentality of the craftsman who not only wants a machine that “works”, but that is also beautiful. Then, over the years, we turned to cut-off saws, which we presented in 1974 at the Hanover Fair. A success that laid the foundations for the future and its revolutions, with the first electronic positioners on machines, a first concept of automation“.
What is Essepigi today?
“Today Essepigi is a solid company, which has been able to continue to evolve over the years, to renew itself, laying the foundations of its growth on specific keywords: innovation, flexibility, customer care and – over time – sustainability and automation. We are a well-known company in Italy, but also abroad, in markets from which seventy percent of our turnover derives.
We have ample room for growth and in the coming years we will continue on a path of expansion, looking for new markets to explore and strengthening our presence in those where we are present, but we believe we have the opportunity to do more.
At the moment we are achieving the best results in the markets of northern Europe, Scandinavia, Estonia, Great Britain and Belgium. Without forgetting the domestic market, of course, where in the past two years we have had a lot of satisfaction, also thanks to the tax benefits deriving from the super bonus for renovations“.
“Covid-19”, super bonus, restart… How have the past few years gone?
“Taking into consideration the past three years, immediately after the pandemic, we can consider ourselves very satisfied. These were particularly positive years in terms of orders and revenues. We have grown, we have accumulated a lot of work and this trend has also been positive for the second half of 2023. Of course, these are years whose numbers must be considered from the point of view of tax incentives, plans for Industry 4.0 and the many resources put in place to push the recovery, but they have been – I repeat – very positive years. Surely next year will be different from the last ones, we are obviously in a more uncertain phase, it’s not so clear what will happen. And yet, I can honestly say it, we are quite serene. We’ve been piling up orders over the past year, and more requests are coming in. We can’t complain…”
As you mentioned, the industry is going through a situation of uncertainty, between conflicts, record years and less clear prospects. How does a company deal with such a situation?
“I make a necessary premise: there are no recipes or easy answers to these questions and not even universal answers. I can tell you about our experience, the choices we have made to have the greatest possible stability. At Essepigi, we have chosen not to stop, to keep investing in innovation and in ourselves, in technology, in human capital. Because we have always been convinced that the strength of a company is precisely this constant evolution. Like everyone else, we have faced difficult times, such as after the 2008 crisis, when the market came to a very clear halt. We didn’t stop then, we certainly won’t stop now.
In terms of products, we are sure that having a wide portfolio like ours is certainly a significant advantage. We have worked and innovated to be able to bring production almost entirely in-house, in order to be able to offer our customers a totally “home made” product. Choices with a view to quality, certainly, but also to the possibility of not depending too much on external partners. We have developed flexible solutions, completed and renewed our range. In short, in these moments it is very important not to stop and to move forward.
Moreover, as Xylon readers will know, the game is no longer played “only” in the construction of technologies, but also in the after-sales service that a company is able to offer to the customer, in the bond of trust that it is able to establish. And we – I am proud of this – have a qualified, responsive service that can respond to every possible need and request. An aspect on which we are constantly working and which we try to refine year after year. It is also a sustainable choice: having machines that are repairable, well-maintained and last a long time certainly has a positive impact on the environment“.
Innovation, then…
“Exactly. We are always designing new solutions. What are we working on? We have opened several projects. In particular, we are working on a machine that can execute routing, drawings and is able to process doors and panels on both sides in a single pass before painting. You see, up to this moment almost all technologies work on one side at a time, with the consequent loss of time and energy. With our solution, we aim at optimizing the entire production cycle, positively impacting costs, times and revenues.
But that’s not all. We have also patented new devices to be able to continue processing by overcoming the irregularities and curves of the panels, offering the best possible quality and eliminating defects. Another solution that we are sure will be very popular on the market, since it allows you not to use aggregates, but to process the panel directly with the machine. An evolution that changes the last 30 years of processing…
The new machine should be ready in time for the next Xylexpo, which we will attend in May. Then, in the following months, we will place the new machine on the market.”
Fifty years behind him, a great deal of experience. Has the world of woodworking changed and what are its trends?
“The industry is always changing. The ways of working change, the needs of a company change. Every era, every decade has its own needs. While years ago we worked to increase performance, product quality, production capacity, trying to process as many pieces per minute as possible with the same quality, now our customers are looking for increasingly automated solutions. Machines that can reduce the use of labor, an increasingly rare commodity that is becoming an even more widespread problem and difficult to solve for the country, given the decline in the birth rate, the change in the interests of the new generations, and the composition of society. Finding skilled staff is vital for a company, being able to automate allows you to optimize human resources.
I believe that we are facing a period of transition that is changing the way we understand industry: we are moving towards an automated factory, in which the fundamental role will be entrusted to robots and the ability of humans to exploit their full potential. At Essepigi we are ready for this change, to have a management system directly in production, working with barcodes, automating everything, starting from the robotic loading and unloading of the pieces, with bridges that we produce ourselves.
We have become good at doing everything “at home”, at completing the cycle directly at home. And we are sure that, even if it is not easy, this predisposition will always offer us a competitive advantage over the competition.
Another very evident trend is the search for sustainable solutions. Sustainability is an important value for us. We have invested in photovoltaics to reduce energy and economic waste, going in a precise, clear direction: trying to make ourselves autonomous, not only from the point of view of production, but also from an energy point of view. Then there are many other “green” actions: from the elimination of plastic where possible, to heat pumps powered by photovoltaics, and the reduction of emissions.
And we have also launched a program that allows us to measure the consumption of our machines to monitor what the environmental impact of a product actually is in the manufacturing phase. We are also working a lot on a system that allows us to recover the energy, becoming an extra generator for subsequent processing“.
One last question: do you reproach yourself for anything in these fifty years?
“When you grow up you always hope not to have regrets and not to reproach yourself for anything, but I am convinced that looking back you always find something that, with hindsight, could have been done better, differently, taking a risk that you preferred to avoid but, in retrospect, makes you think that you could have taken a chance. Like when in 2005 we could have entered the business of PVC windows, with all the advantages we have seen over the years. There are always some doubts, but I am proud of what we have done over the years. Essepigi has grown with knowledge of the facts, in a sensible way, evaluating the steps to be taken one after the other, aware that a company is not only made up of numbers, but of people, and that every risky choice has an impact on all the families of Essepigi. We have done our best and will continue to do so“.
Satisfaction for the first fifty, best wishes for the next ones.
by Francesco Inverso
essepigi.com
Essepigi was founded in 1973 as a transformation of a pre-existing company, founded by Sergio Patregnani, and active since the Fifties in the construction of carpentry machines: spindle moulders, combined with five processes, then belt sanders. With the development of the nascent furniture industry, Essepigi began to produce two-blade cut-off machines for cutting ornamental frames and copings.
Continuous investments in innovation, service and marketing in the main European markets have led the company to have a stable 70 percent of its turnover in foreign markets.
A growth that has led Essepigi to expand, with a second contiguous production unit to host the testing of large plants as well as a new machine assembly line; currently the activity takes place on a total of over 5 thousand square meters covered.
Today Essepigi has a wide range of standalone machines for the processing of doors and door frames (jambs); combined machines with high productivity and flexibility; and robotic production lines, both for doors and door frames, which, integrated with the factory management system, anticipate an unmanned automatic factory starting from the semi-finished product up to the complete packaging.
