Comfort king

Pasquale Natuzzi was an entrepreneur even in his teens. He tells Veenu Sandhu about spotting opportunities, staying independent, and building his global leather furniture brand.

For a man who made his name selling sofas, Pasquale Natuzzi doesn’t believe in sitting. The 70-year-old “King of the Couch” or “King of Comfort” would rather spend his leisure time riding his mountain bike (“I can ride up to 20 km,” he says), hiking or sailing with his wife Antonisa after whom he’s named his boat, deep-sea diving or skiing near his mountain home in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. That is, when he’s not country-hopping, which he does 200 days a year.

The man who started out in his father’s shop (he was a “cabinet-maker”) now sells leather furniture and upholstery through 300 Natuzzi stores across the world, and 350 retail partnerships.

In 2009, when the world was still struggling to find its feet after the economic crisis, Natuzzi’s company had a turnover of €5.15 billion. Natuzzi says the credit goes to his mother. “She advised me, ‘Stay away from banks and lawyers.’” So this group chairman, chief executive officer and product strategist says he has never approached a bank. “Never, not even when I was starting out... When the meltdown happened, our net financial position was so strong that we could support our suppliers by extending internal credit to them.”

The Natuzzi story began 54 years ago in Italy. “I was 16 years old, though officially the Natuzzi Group was founded only three years later in 1959,” he says. He and his sibling worked with their father in his furniture shop. “My father was a family-oriented man and he wanted the same things for all of us, same clothes, same car, same house.”

Natuzzi wanted to go his own way. “I told my father I couldn’t work with him any more, and started my own little shop.” At 19 he set up a workshop in Taranto to make sofas and armchairs for the local market. In the next decade, he expanded his business to industrial scale. And by the 1970s, he was selling in Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The turning point came in the early 1980s, when Natuzzi visited America and spotted opportunity sitting on a leather sofa. For Americans, a leather couch was a luxury. Natuzzi turned it into a “people’s sofa” and sold this democratised furniture for as little as $999. He brought colour into leather, 120 shades at last count. The Natuzzi mark on USA was truly acknowledged in 1993 when Natuzzi became the first foreign furniture company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

By 1997, Natuzzi realised that “the world was changing and we had to change with it”. The company was still growing at a double-digit pace, making 11-12 per cent net profit. But China was bombarding the world with made-in-China products. Natuzzi got the dragon on his side by setting up a factory there. Soon, he was selling to the Chinese in China. Today, Natuzzi has 11 factories in Italy and one each in China, Brazil and Romania. And 90 per cent of the group’s turnover is generated outside Italy, in 123 countries.

Natuzzi entered the Indian market in February 2010. He plans to create a network of Natuzzi and Italsofa stores. After Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, he’s looking at Hyderabad, Kolkata, Gurgaon, Coimbatore and other cities, for a total of 70 points of sale by end-2012. These will include exclusive Natuzzi stores as well as franchisees. They will offer sofas priced at Rs 2 lakh onward.

At 70, Natuzzi says his life is on a roll. And he doesn’t plan to hang up his boots any time soon.