Bonaveri Magazine

As one of Italy’s largest fashion houses, Max
Mara is a name known across the world,
synonymous with luxury, style and quality.
Inspired by a passion for tailoring passed down
by his mother and great grandmother, Achille
Maramotti founded the brand in 1951 in the
Italian city of Reggio Emilia.
He began with a line of high-end coats, which
were inspired stylistically by French haute
couture but made using cutting-edge industrial
tailoring techniques. In this, Maramotti had
discovered an exciting new area of fashion. His
methods created more styles, cuts and colours
than ever before, allowing him to reach a far
wider audience. His clothes gained immediate
and overwhelming recognition, and within a few
short years the brand was opening new lines
under the umbrella group of Max Mara.
Today Max Mara is one of the largest fashion
houses in the world, and the Max Mara Group –
with 9 brands and more than 5,000 employees,
operating in 105 countries worldwide – is the
biggest clothing company in Italy. More than
60 years after Maramotti made his first coats,
the brand remains at the forefront of fashion,
producing beautiful clothing in almost every
category imaginable, from the classic to the
experimental.
Our interest is to also understand about the
approach to storytelling when the product is
face to face with the public: in windows.
The Max Mara approach to store windows is
a crucial part of the brand’s choral narrative:
runway shows, advertising, on and off-line
communications, all the channels are synched
and speak the same language.
Each of the Group brands have their personal
expression in their line of points of sale.
All originates from the product: the fashion
designers and the creative director are the
story tellers and the starting point from which
the visual merchandising team, together with
their experts and consultants, draw inspiration
to create the narrative in the store windows and points
of sale. Within this ecosystem, the store windows and
the visual image inside all points of sale act as the
scenic transposition of the fashion content.
The product is always at centre stage for Max Mara.
Therefore the perfect visual image must exalt and
pay homage in primis to the product and act as the
mouthpiece for the narration that the brand wishes to
transmit to the consumer from season to season.
The store window tells the story of Max Mara. The set
design starts from the mood board of the collection
and therefore requires four changes connected with
the four principle seasons.
the brand remains
at the forefront of
fashion, producing
beautiful clothing
from the classic to
the experimental.
The store interior leads the customer through a large
space divided into various shops each dedicated to
the principle brands and their collections while the
seasonal palimpsest varies according to the different
thematic areas, collections and focus. There are also
cross-sectional categories and dedicated areas that
show for example, all coats, or the businesswoman
as seen by the Max Mara sartorial project or assorted
cross-sections of all other collections.
The quality of the product is also the quality of the retail
spaces as well as the quality through which the sales
personnel takes care of the clients. The atmosphere
is determined by the particular aesthetics combined
with the savoir faire of the staff in introducing the
client to the brand new entries for each seasonal
palimpsest.
One of the key elements to focus on to understand
the success of this brand is the distinctive nature of
stores as pillar elements in the communication with
the client.
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