For the cleaning of its bathroom furnishings, Almar chose a vacuum cleaning machine supplied by IFP Europe. The system allows the complete removal of contamination from the parts prior to the application of the aesthetic PVD coating.
The "Exporting la dolce vita" report, issued by the Confindustria Study Centre for its 2019 Summit, contains a detailed definition of the concept of BBF (Bello e Ben Fatto, i.e. "Beautiful and well made") that has been popular in the Italian luxury industry for some years now: "BBF refers to all those goods that represent Italian excellence in terms of design, care, quality of materials, and processes. These products can come from all production sectors, but they are especially related to taste and creativity. In this sense, BBF goods are the most easily recognisable examples of Italy-made products, as their characteristics are related to the Italian cultural heritage, traditions, landscapes, and works of art and they help shape the idea of Italian industriousness."
Many of the companies that have contributed and still contribute to the success of Italian-made products all over the world are family-owned businesses with strong ties to the geographical area where they were established and have started growing. Through the attention to detail and careful investments, these firms have been able to gain a share of the difficult-to-penetrate sector of high-end consumer goods.
Almar, specialising in the production of bathroom furnishings since 1969, is one of them. "This company was founded by my brother and me," says Marco Civelli, the owner of Almar Srl together with Aldo, "with its roots in the firm created by my father in the late Sixties, first dedicated to the production of moulds for the thermoplastic and Zamak sectors and then focussed on the construction of moulding presses. In 1996, I actually took over one of my father's suppliers, where I personally trained and specialised by learning about the entire production cycle of components for thermoplastic products, from design to the construction of moulds. This was the original core of our current company."
In 2000, Almar started its activity in the Gavirate (Varese, Italy) plant with a dozen employees working on the eight presses installed for injection moulding operations and in the tooling department for the construction of moulds. "Today we have 100 employees. Then, thanks to the creation and rapid development of our technical office," adds Civelli, "we began manufacturing parts fully devised by us, starting with small thermoplastic components and gradually expanding our product portfolio up to including brass and steel workpieces. Then we created an internal assembly and testing department to take full account of the production process inside our factory. We grew so much so that, at the end of the 2010s, we had to build a second, nearby factory devoted to mould construction and injection moulding.
In 2015, we insourced all metal sheet machining operations by equipping ourselves with technologically advanced systems for the treatment of stainless steel. Finally, two years ago, we installed a PVD machine for the application of the aesthetic coating to cope with the increasing demand for bathroom furniture components with special finishes such as, for example, golden and copper effects. This, however, raised the problem of part contamination prior to PVD treatment. We therefore started a search among cleaning system manufacturers to find the best solution for our requirements. After careful analysis, our choice fell on the KP MAX 600 system supplied by IFP Europe (Galliera Veneta, Padua, Italy), a company specialising in the design, construction, and installation of cleaning systems using modified alcohols and hydrocarbons."
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