A further 2,500 square metres to expand the hand-made processing department. In Santa Croce sull’Arno, Art Lab purchased the adjacent spaces of the Ascot tannery, which has now moved to Fucecchio. And so, the company, specialised in customising leather (and more) for haute couture brands, gains a strategic area to respond to increasing demand.
Art Lab acquires Ascot spaces
“We took advantage of this opportunity, given the proximity to the building left by Ascot”. Ilaria Sassetti, at the helm of Art Lab together with Marcello and Dario Tatoni, and partner Andrea Balleri (who follows the financial side), tells us. “We will connect it to our premises probably with a tunnel,” she adds. The building, purchased just a month ago, is not Art Lab’s only real estate investment. “We bought other spaces around us, small warehouses of 1,000 and 500 square metres, from companies that were closing or leaving the business. We needed it. Now we are really tight, between goods arriving, products ready to be shipped and so many people working”.
The “leap”
The space needed is mainly to accommodate the department of handmade work: buffing, airbrushing, painting and drawing on finished products, or cut and unassembled leather. It is also thanks to this type of work that the Art Lab staff has tripled in a short time. “We are 100 people at work,” Sassetti concludes. “We have grown a lot in the last three years, but the real leap came last year and we made investments and, thanks to these, we have literally tripled in staff”.
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