From 40 Square Meters to 220 Stores: How Oscar Farinetti Built Unieuro

Oscar Farinetti joins the company on Monday 9 January 1978. His father hands him a forty-square-meter corner where all the products with a plug are piled up. Twenty-four years later Unieuro has more than two hundred stores and passes to the British group Dixons. Never quiet. La mia storia (autorizzata malvolentieri) (roughly, “My story, reluctantly authorized”) is his autobiography.

Alba, in the province of Cuneo. Before electronics there is a partisan who commands a brigade of almost three hundred men and who, after the war, starts over with a pasta factory. He is Oscar’s father, and in the book they call him the Commander. He is the one who loads himself with debt for ten years to build the first hypermarket between Alba and Asti, and who gives his son the line that starts it all: you’ve studied, so you take care of this stuff here.

We retrace how that corner becomes Italy’s number one. First the bank rates, which in 1980 go above twenty percent and push the company into crisis: things only felt good after five in the afternoon, when the banks closed and stopped phoning to call in the loans. Then, in October 1984, a competitor opens five hundred meters away and sells to the public at the prices he pays his suppliers. It could have been the end of Unieuro: Oscar runs into his small office, puts his head in his hands, and in front of his partners fakes the courage while all he wants to do is cry. That rival will end up bought, and then kept alive for three years as fake competition.

At thirty-five Oscar convinces his father to sell the hypermarket and the coffee business, to bet everything on home appliances. The Commander, who had loaded himself with debt for ten years and had grown up with rationed food, can finally catch his breath at sixty-seven. Life is a film with a happy ending, Oscar writes. A happy ending, Dad, you earned it.

With that cash the real Unieuro is born. Then La Rinascente puts Trony, stores and brand, up for sale, and the price is too high for him alone: so he convinces the members of his buying group to each buy the store in their own region, and while the other bidders wait for the board of directors he shows up with a check for six billion six hundred million lire, a number he had never written in his life. He will sell the brand below cost to the same group, in exchange for the right to open Trony stores anywhere in Italy. By 1999 there are sixty of them, and revenue is approaching five hundred billion lire.

In July of that same year he decides it is time to change trades, and he has few doubts about the sector: food. The birth of Eataly is the next episode.