Paris-based EssilorLuxottica, the world’s largest eyewear retailer and largest producer of corrective lenses, announced Monday the death of its president and said its board will meet “to determine the next steps.” .
Shy and secretive
Shy and secretive by nature, Del Vecchio spent decades carefully avoiding media focus.
During a rare conversation with a journalist this year, he was asked how he built his empire. “I’ve always strived to be the best at everything I do, that’s all,” Mr. Del Vecchio. Describing the unit that brought him to the top, he simply said, “I could never have had enough.”
In addition to a controlling stake in EssilorLuxottica, the share of Mr. Del Vecchio in Delfin also held stakes in Italian financial companies such as Mediobanca, Assicurazioni Generali and UniCredit.
Born on May 22, 1935, Del Vecchio grew up poor in war-torn Milan. Unable to care for his son, his mother, a widow five months before he was born, sent him to an orphanage when he was seven years old. He started working as an apprentice to a tool and dye manufacturer in Milan when he was 14 years old.
Mr. Del Vecchio moved to Agordo in the 1960s and began making spectacle frames designed by others. He founded Luxottica in 1961 with a dozen land workers whom he liberated from the village in an attempt to stimulate the local economy.
How Ray-Ban bought it
Luxottica began producing its own designs in the late 1960s and, in the 1980s, Del Vecchio began buying companies in the US. In 1999, he bought Ray-Ban for $ 640 million.
Del Vecchio said that in the early days of his career he “put work before everything else,” devoting little time to his children. “The factory became my real family,” he said, adding that he had made up for some of the time lost in recent years by spending time with his extended family in Milan or at his homes on the Côte d’Azur and island of France. of Antigua.
Mr. Del Vecchio’s ultimate goal, he said in what would be his last interview, was to push EssilorLuxottica into the exclusive club of companies valued at more than 100 billion euros ($ 153 billion).
He was the largest shareholder in the investment bank Mediobanca with a stake of just under 20% and one of the main investors in Generali, the main Italian insurer. Del Vecchio was a key part of a group of investors who tried, unsuccessfully, to oust Generali CEO Philippe Donnet during the first half of this year. At Mediobanca, it periodically clashed with CEO Alberto Nagel over strategy.
Del Vecchio said his skirmishes in the financial sector were the result of big thinking.
“You have to be brave enough to keep doing things, to move forward,” he said.
Bloomberg