Bulgari is going from strength to strength. The Roman luxury label, bought in 2011 by LVMH for €4.3 billion, has opened in Valenza, northern Italy, in the heart of the country’s Piedmont jewellery manufacturing district, “the world’s largest monobrand jewellery production site,” only eight years after opening “Europe’ largest manufacturing site” there. The new facility consists of three buildings that are 100% powered with renewable energy, and is set to generate 500 new jobs by 2029.

The facility was inaugurated with great fanfare on April 16. It is a vast three-floor building plus a basement, extending over 33,000 square metres and nestling in the Piedmont countryside. The façade is covered in black and gold-coloured plates, immediately reminding visitors they are entering the world of Bulgari. Some of the brand’s iconic jewellery is showcased at the entrance, and a series of large-scale pictures of Bulgari’s finest creations and campaigns are hung on the walls of the long, otherwise featureless corridors, interspersed with windows overlooking the workshops.

Bulgari, led since 2013 by Jean-Christophe Babin, used to operate two sites in Piedmont. They were both long-established and distant from one another, and had been bought by Bulgari over the years from some of its sub-contractors. In 2017, Bulgari decided to bring together all its various trades under one roof. 

Bulgari kept growing at an increasingly faster pace, reaching a revenue of €3.6 billion in 2023 according to analysts’ estimates, and the site, which seemed oversized at the time, soon proved too small. The idea of enlarging it was first seeded in 2020, and a major expansion plan was announced at the end of 2022. Two new buildings for 19,000 square metres in total have now been added to the existing 14,000 square-metre facility opened in 2017.

The futuristic site, designed by Italian architectural firm Politecnica, is organised around a central building, where all the manufacturing units’ employees converge, moving along a suspended exterior walkway which is linked at either end to each of the two factories, both adopting the same architectural aesthetic. The two factories each feature a central courtyard.

Entrance to the two factories is strictly regulated, and visitors must pass through metal detectors under the watchful eye of the security staff. The manufacturing sites are split between facilities dedicated to producing metal components – between 6 and 7 million pieces per year – offices, like the quality control department, and about 20 workshops, where artisan jewellers are busy each at their own brightly lit workbench, working with a microscope or with magnifying glasses. Some “tens of thousands of jewellery items” are produced each month in Valenza.

“The site consists of ‘islands’ where 20 to 25 jewellers work, each island taking charge of virtually the entire manufacturing cycle for a single product. Each team is pretty much self-sufficient, in a way that more or less replicates the set-up in an independent company’s workshop, but the teams are supported by a centralised logistics system for components, materials, and methods, common to all islands,” said Babin, speaking to FashionNetwork.com. One of the islands specialises in creating the high jewellery items of the Alta Gamma collection, while one-off items are made in Bulgari’s high jewellery atelier in Rome.

The central building is home to “canteens, recreational facilities, and two jewellery schools:” The Bulgari Academy, set up in 2017 and offering a highly specialised training programme for new employees, focused on artisanal techniques specific to the brand, and a new school, the Scuola Bvlgari, which will open in September, catering to classes of 80 students per year. It is “the first training school in this field that is open to the public, and the first-ever to be incorporated within a jewellery manufacturing site,” said Bulgari.

Scuola Bvlgari extends over 1,000 square metres in the central building, the site’s true beating heart. The school has been set up and is run in partnership with TADS (Tarì Design School), the goldsmithing training centre operated by the Centro Orafo Il Tarì in Marcianise, near Naples. Its mission is to teach industry skills and expertise, training its students both in traditional techniques and in those that utilise the latest, most innovative technology.

“We’re running two parallel schools in order to be able to train up to 150 students per year, knowing that we will deploy 900 jobs at this new facility, of which 400 have already been created. We will therefore hire 500 new artisans by 2029,” said Babin, adding that the number of employees at the Valenza factory has increased from 370 in 2017 to 1,128 today. They belong to 31 nationalities, 55% of them are women, and the average age is 39.

“Our production capacity will double by 2029, and will have quadrupled since 2017. Over the same period, between 2017 and 2029, we will have grown our staff from 370 to 1,600-1,700. We will therefore have created more than 1,200 new jobs, a huge number for Valenza, which has a pool of 6,000 industry experts,” said Babin.

Bulgari is not the only jewellery brand to have established a strong presence in Valenza. Cartier, owned by Swiss group Richemont, which recently opened a factory in Turin, has also embarked on a major manufacturing project in this bastion of the Italian jewellery industry. Italian brand Damiani is also present in Valenza, among others.

In Valenza, jewellery is produced according to its construction type, using both traditional methods and more modern industrial ones, often employing highly sophisticated CNC tooling machines, also used by Swiss watchmakers, and 3D printers. The site looks extremely futuristic in places, with ubiquitous screens that serve as dashboards to track the machines’ work and to communicate with employees. For example, to invite them to participate in the “suggestions programme,” a kind of ideas contest to “minimise waste of precious materials.” Elsewhere, an automated machine is used to supply craftsmen with the tools they need. 

“Valenza’s speciality is what is known as ‘everyday jewellery’. Jewellery made using precious materials, often with diamond pavé, semi-precious stones, small sapphires and rubies, retailing at prices that range from €2,000 to €80-90,000. Beyond these pricepoints, we enter the high jewellery segment, which we produce in Rome,” said Babin.

Bulgari’s objective is to bring back in-house some of the production stages which were outsourced in recent years for lack of capacity, by incorporating crafts that previously were entirely outsourced, such as gem-setting. Babin wants Bulgari to be familiar with all the industry’s crafts, and for all of them to be practised at least partially in-house, so that the brand can acquire an even more in-depth knowledge of the jewellery industry.

The Bulgari site in Valenza is also distinctive for its sustainable design. It has been built using innovative technologies and low-impact materials to achieve LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) Gold certification, an extremely rigorous sustainable construction standard. “It is also the first and only factory in the world 100% powered by renewable energy, half of which is produced internally,” said Babin.

One hundred geothermal probes descending to a depth of 200 metres have been installed in the fields bought by Bulgari around the facility, and more than 4,100 photovoltaic panels have been installed on the roofs of the central building and car parks, providing 50% of the facility’s energy needs. “The other half comes from fields owned by local farmers, whom we helped equip with geothermal probes and solar panels. From them, we buy the energy we need to ensure that 100% of the power used by the facility is produced locally and in a totally renewable way,” said Babin.

In order to promote biodiversity in the surrounding area, Bulgari has also reforested with native plant varieties an 8,000-square-metre plot of land outside the complex, and has built leisure areas for its employees and Valenza residents, as well as collaborating with a local bee-keeper to install ten hives, home to approximately one million bees.