The experience and workshop know-how of Del Vecchio and a core of trusted and qualified employees made it possible to independently develop their own production capacity. Further, their tendency in this period to experimentation and perfection of working methods and production techniques put the company at the leading edge of the industry’s technological evolution.

Right from the beginning, the drive for manufacturing efficiency led Luxottica towards total integration of the entire production process, giving it full control of finished product quality and thereby the power to win clients and keep them.

 

In 1967 Leonardo Del Vecchio made the strategic decision to widen scope and make complete pairs of glasses (even though still for others).

He had a two-pronged conviction: on one hand he believed that buying externally wasn’t conducive to experimenting new production techniques and procedures, and on the other that the only way to maintain constantly high finished product quality was to control the entire production process.

 

Del Vecchio knew that contract producers usually concentrate on certain parts because they don’t have an overall vision of the production of a given model and are therefore unable to make improvements to the process as a whole. This is why the work of a contract manufacturer, even if of excellent quality, does not enable a company to improve its organization or, consequently, its production. In-house, on the other hand, people are strongly motivated to improve because there is a continual search for solutions that favor process innovation and at the same time improvements in quality and organization.

 

Vertical integration of a company’s production system in fact creates a virtuous circle: total control of production makes it possible to research new technologies, which in turn enable the company to improve efficiency and increase revenues; the company grows and this stimulates investments and research.

 

Del Vecchio’s vertical integration strategy was decisive for Luxottica, in that it enabled the Agordo enterprise to maintain cost leadership in the industry and associate it with high product quality levels.

The process of vertical integration required massive investments, on one hand to extend production capacity and on the other to renew manufacturing technologies, all of which rigorously at the service of high product quality.