More than just a successful entrepreneur. Mauro Saviola is first and foremost a man who believed in the power of his idea and has tenaciously chased up to see it achieved.
A story of passion and strong intuition, where the professional skills and life events were intertwined with one common thread: the boundless love for wood. Hence the birth of a business built in total harmony with the environment.
"I was born in a poplar"
Mauro Saviola learns to work the wood when he is a child, in the workshop of his father Alfredo, in 1949. We are in war, deep poverty pushes everyone to fend for a living and Saviola's workshop strives to build brooms. With the arrival of the cleaner Saviola must fall back on trade in wood and coal for heating. Again, however, progress plays a trick on small business, where wood stoves are supplanted by butane gas, which brings the heat in homes eliminating the demand for firewood.
Now comes the right idea: Mauro Saviola sees during a trip to Germany, a plant that uses branches and transorm them into wood chips. It will be the way of its future. Ordering an equal, even if the cost of 350 million seems an insurmountable obstacle. With the help of a brother and a cousin and the commitment of some bills, he manages to start his project.
Mauro Saviola starts producing the first panels made from the branches of poplar and gets a significant success. The only problems are related with the urea, which is supplied by Montecatini and Nino Rovelli, chemical giants but playing with the rise in prices. After a similar experience with Austria, which also senses the deal, Saviola in 1968 in Viadana builds a factory to get the glues and in 1973 opens the Sadepan Chimica SRL, the largest producer of glues for wood in Italy with low formaldehyde. The chemical plant will know over the years a rapid development, becoming the first domestic supplier of melamine and urea resins. The last of the chemical plant was opened in December 2003 in Genk, Belgium.
Meanwhile, the technologies evolve, research continues unabated, profits increase and gradually comes to today's reality: an industrial system composed of 20 companies spread between Lombardy, Veneto, Tuscany and Marche, with operations in Argentina, Belgium, Germany and more than 1700 employees.
After forty years of intense activity, Mauro Saviola Group is now the undisputed leader of the Ecological Panel for furniture. Mauro Saviola has led it for fifty years with wisdom, courage, tenacity and passion. He died aged 70 in 2009, leaving sons Alessandro and Alfredo the task of leading his group.
