Editorial: Telling the stories of specialists
With this issue we are inviting foreign retail operators to have a look at the Italian retail phenomenon. Thirteen years ago, when the first issue of Display Italia Magazine was published, several magazines were reporting about retailers and the brand industry, but they rarely mentioned shopfitting and contract display design specialists.
On the one hand, this is because they were not being regarded as key players, and on the other hand, because some of the supply issues were covered by confidentiality, a motivation, the latter, still in place that prevents these companies from coming to the fore. Therefore, our work from the beginning was journalistic in nature. To this day, it takes place behind the scenes from where the industrial design experts operate and whose best practices we tell about in the retail channel.
It should be known that Italian specialists operate in a context of great qualitative and economic value. First and foremost, they too achieve their added value according to the Made in Italy culture. Now more than a style, an actual way of being that embodies entrepreneurial ability, making Italy an exceptional country in the eyes of the whole world. Second, Italy’s contract and shopfitting display design specialists in the coming years will see themselves cast in a very interesting
context. According to the Strategic Retail 5.0 report by The European House – Ambrosetti and Community retail 5.0 published on December 15, 2022 and drawing on more than 50 million observations addressed to more than 500 thousand Italian companies, it is already quite remarkable how much the sector contributes to the formation of GDP in our country: as much as 13.7 percent. We are talking about a figure that is close to 451 billion euros and is based on the total turnover of the specialized retail sector, which generates an added value of 101 billion, and in 2021 employed 2.6 million people (food sector excluded). And on the investment front, that is, the elements that serve as the driving force to achieve the goals of the future, over the course of a year in Italy a sum of 9.7 billion euros was spent, about 10 percent of the total.
Beyond these impressive figures, the phenomenon that is under the microscope of retail operators right now is the development of Italy’s e-commerce infrastructure. The German web publication Statista, specifically, recently published a study according to which in 2022 the digital retail market in Italy was worth 45 billion euros and will grow by 15 percent annually until 2025. If these estimates are confirmed, this would be an increase in turnover of 184 billion euros for the entire retail sector. Numbers that reflect a range of opportunities to be seized in the Italian market and nonetheless a sector that is growing steadily in both its physical and digital segments. It is obvious that, if economic growth is strictly dependent on the high skills of the operators in a given market, Italian retail design specialists find themselves operating in a challenging and highly competitive business environment. As for us, we can only continue to tell the stories of our country’s specialists: many examples of the above can be found in the following pages.
