‘Luxottica’ is the world’s leading eye-glass manufacturing company which makes some best known brands like Ray-Ban, Persol, and Oakley. Its founder Leonardo Del Vecchio is the second richest man in Italy and the and the 61st richest in the world, as per the latest data from Bloomberg.
Leonardo Del Vecchio’s career is an authentic Italian-style success story. The youngest of four boys, fatherless and entrusted to an orphanage at a young age, he began work at fourteen in a small company that manufactured frames, all the while attending evening classes to learn design.
In 1958, he opened his own eyeglass frame shop in Agordo, Veneto. Three years later, this shop had about ten employees and became Luxottica. Leonardo Del Vecchio was twenty-five.
It took a full decade for the small company to start producing on its own and another to get a foothold in the US market. The business began to take off in the early 1970s when Luxottica shifted focus to making its own eyeglasses frames, and then boomed in the 1980s when the company went after the US market.
The group is today a giant quoted on both the Milan and New York stock exchanges that generated more than 9 billion euros ($9.5 billion) in sales in 2015 and counts some 80,000 employees throughout the world.
It has a stable of top brands including Ray-Ban and Oakley sunglasses, while also manufacturing frames for luxury brands such as Chanel, Prada and Versace. Luxottica also owns the Sunglass Hut chain of retail shops.
Then came the big twist, a merger with Essilor, the world’s biggest corrective lense producer and a pioneer in the field of ophthalmic optics technology. On 1 October 2018, the new holding company EssilorLuxottica was born, resulting in combined market capitalization of approximately €57 billion.
