THE 50’s, 60’s and 70’s

In 1954, the three brothers strategically sold their shares of the family business, the “Lanificio Rivetti”, and invested time and resources to launch the FACIS label on the domestic market. With this idea in mind, they launched the Company’s first, popular advertising campaign, created by Armando Testa in 1954, showing a little fellow running with a suit in his arms, along with a slogan that became very popular at the time:Rush home and wear it, it’s a FACIS suit. The FACIS label, which was circular at the time, became a synonym for “men’s, ladies’and boys’ ready-to -wear clothing items”. The little running fellow became so popular that it appeared on the label in 1955. In the meantime, FACIS had become a synonym for “Men’s, young men’s and boys’ ready-to-wear clothing item”. The innovative idea of the Rivetti brothers was not based solely on a successful advertising campaign, but on a revolutionary production and distribution concept. The starting point of this new concept was a “revolution of size”, which quickly increased, going from less than twenty to around one hundred and twenty. And these were not theoretical and standard sizes; on the contrary, for the first time they reflected the physical characteristics of the Italian people. Salesmen and shop owners were, in fact, involved in an impressive anthropometrical survey carried out on the Italian population, measuring a sample group of around 25,000 people located throughout the national territory. As a result, the clothing items were realised according to a much wider range of physical models compared to the past. Another innovative factor of the strategy was marketing. At the beginning of the’50’s, in Italy, the clothing market, and any other consumer goods market for that matter, was not homogeneous. The Rivetti brothers decided to define a personal market strategy by which their products would have to be sold at the same pre-established price conditions, no matter where there were sold. To do this, they opened a large chain of stores called Marus throughout the national territory which soon became very popular. Throughout the sixties, FACIS became, as started in the slogans that accompanied the label “the largest Italian fashion house for ready-made menswear”, a leading position that continued throughout the seventies.