Thirty years ago, Italians began discouraging their children from entering the design and craft industry. Ippolita Rostagno, whose dual citizenship offered her the good fortune of growing up in Florence and later studying in the United States, has been traveling back and forth between the two countries for many years. As time advanced, she noticed more and more empty design shops in Florence. As a jeweler and founder of the jewelry brand Ippolita, she was concerned.
“There’s been a generational gap here where the kids have been discouraged to go into the family business, so crafts are dying,” Ippolita Rostagno said during an interview for American Essence. “This type of work is about experience and little to do with book learning. If there’s a 30-year gap, it’s hard to fill that, so I went into a panic about it. I couldn’t get Italians to be in the same panic as me, though. It was a perspective issue; they were too close to it.”
“As I tried to get attention to this problem, talking to those in cultural institutions and economic and political appointments in strategic areas, I couldn’t garner consensus. Those who should care about this, in political positions, needed to be sensitized,” Rostagno said. So she decided to go to business school and create a curriculum about why crafts matter.
Soon after this, she noticed the artisans’ declining numbers. It had become a real crisis. She switched gears and went the American way, which, to her, meant thinking about how to boost the Italian craftsmanship industry as a commercial enterprise first and ensure that it would be customer-oriented.
“The industry will only survive if it evolves. I wasn’t interested in doing a vanity project, or putting together an exhibition on why craft matters. I wanted to help keep these people in business,” she said.
Saving Italian Craftsmanship
In 2015, she co-founded the brand Artemest, an e-commerce platform promoting Italian crafts. She thought about what people wanted and how to give it to them. Being bi-cultural, she’d long understood that Americans have an ingrained deep appreciation for anything Italian, for the quality of life there that’s missing in the United States.
“There is a ripe audience, I thought, and I live in the luxury world, commercially speaking. I understand the commercial dynamic of trying to make a product that’s relevant to them instead of something that’s just pretty or just expensive. The important key role has been helping these artisans evolve their product line.”
Art and craft counter the speed of the internet in the dynamics of the economic system, Rostagno explained. She had to figure out how to bridge the gap between them. The artisans know how to do what they know how to do, period. She had to bring the rest to the table: product development, marketing, and storytelling.
“The internet happened and isn’t going away, so we have to know how to utilize it. I didn’t understand why an e-commerce company didn’t already exist for luxury craftsmanship,” Rostagno said. She had to do something about the crisis. She quit her day job and returned to Italy.
She wasn’t sure there were enough Italian artisans still in the business for her idea to be viable. If the rest of Italy was like Florence, she thought, there wouldn’t be enough critical mass to fully develop the project. Thankfully, there were. However, they couldn’t understand what she was proposing at first.
“They have this attitude that time and work are the same thing. If they’re talking to you, they’re not working, so they don’t want to talk to you because you’re wasting their time. I developed a script to build credibility in their eyes so they’d listen.”
Challenges
After she successfully explained her idea to the artisans, she had to tackle building the website, which was no simple feat. It took a year to make the website functional. One challenge was getting 45,000 categories of goods through Italian customs when there were 400 different codes for ceramics alone.
“When you look into the logistics, you realize why it hadn’t been done before. I knew we needed to remove all of these complications and show the results to the artisans and see what happens when they have access to the customers,” Rostagno said.
She had to ensure precise detail and attention to assortment, selecting only the products that could be marketable. An artisan could show her a collection of 50 objects, but she’d only find a few viable. Since artisans create objects for multiple purposes and reasons, they struggle to differentiate among them to find the marketable ones.
When Rostagno visited the artisans, she’d have conversations with them about how to modify their products to better suit the needs of the market. Frames, for example, might be entirely the wrong sizes, and she’d have to guide them. “People don’t have photographs anymore. We have to do something that’s relevant to how people want to consume today. Make it 6 feet tall,” she said. “We’ll put it against a wall in a loft and it’ll have a completely different life.”
The positive side of commerce motivated the artisans to create more and create differently. They began developing new things. She started to see an evolution in their product line after joining Artemest. The stimulating dynamic of a commercial venture ignited their creativity in a way they wouldn’t have discovered if Rostagno hadn’t launched the company. In fact, craftsmanship and artists have always struggled with the notion of a price tag.
“One of the things that upset me terribly in the beginning of my career—in that exchange where people say, ‘How much is it?’ there has to be a real relationship between what the thing is and how much it costs. You can’t just say, ‘Well, I made it so it costs a million dollars,’ because that’s not realistic,” she said.
Rostagno developed a backbone against getting her feelings hurt whenever someone would ask about the cost of a piece of jewelry she made. She began to realize that the people asking recognized the heart and soul she’d put into her work, or they wouldn’t have asked about the price. To respond to the gasp coming from people once she’d given the price—a rather high one, to be sure—she knew what to communicate so they could understand.
“Let me tell you how it’s made.”
By the end of the story, people would be more surprised that the price was so low. The story behind an object defines the value.
By early 2019, the website featured more than 500 artisans selling products from furniture to flatware. Today, the company presents a 50,000-strong product catalog of luxury craftsmanship. Her efforts have proven so successful that last year, in 2020, Artemest opened its NYC Designer Lounge in Manhattan, in collaboration with David Mann, founder of MR Architecture + Décor.
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
