Prada Group’s Lorenzo Bertelli: “From the very beginning, my father believed in the importance of owning our own factories.”

Lorenzo Bertelli, 37, the eldest son of fashion designer Miuccia Prada and industrialist Patrizio Bertelli, is set to take up his new post as executive chairman of Versace once the deal with Prada is finalised on December 2. In April, Prada agreed to acquire Versace from US-based Capri Holdings Ltd. for about €1.25 billion ($1.45 billion), the largest acquisition in the Prada Group’s 112-year history. The brand brings a distinct aesthetic to Prada’s portfolio and paves the way for the creation of a larger Italian player, potentially better placed to compete globally with rival luxury groups.

Meanwhile, from 2019 to the end of 2024, the Prada Group has invested a total of more than €200 million to enhance the company’s industrial infrastructure. In 2024 alone, the Milan-based company invested about €40 million in vertical integration, progressively bringing certain stages of the production process in-house and building strategic capabilities.

FashionNetwork.com discussed all this, as well as supply chain compliance and Made in Italy, with Lorenzo Bertelli himself and Andrea Guerra, CEO of the Prada Group, during a meeting in Scandicci in Florence, Italy, at the state-of-the-art facility dedicated to the full-cycle production of bags and leather goods for Prada’s Women’s and Men’s lines, which also produces items in fine leathers and carries out certain special processes at customers’ requests.

FashionNetwork.com: What new investments in the production chain does the Prada Group have in the pipeline for 2025?
Andrea Guerra: We have never stopped investing, and we will continue. In the near term, in Milan we will expand and deepen our work on fine leathers. The workshop will become far more sophisticated. The second major investment, planned over the next 12 months, is a new leather-goods plant in Piancastagnaio [in Siena], which will be cutting-edge in terms of sustainability and will bring together a number of our workshops in the area.
In Umbria, we will create a new knitwear production hub in Gubbio, which will complement the site we already have in the region at Torgiano (Perugia), where there is also an Academy project. Torgiano houses at least seven or eight highly specialised production processes, and wherever we have a similar kind of production, we have established an Academy.
And that’s not all: we will invest to increase the production capacity of the Northampton plant in England, we will expand the Foiano della Chiana (Arezzo) plant, and we are preparing other developments in the Marche region related to footwear. Acquiring new suppliers, however, is not on the agenda.

FN: What checks have you implemented over the years to minimise the risk of problems such as those some fashion players are having with their subcontractors?
Lorenzo Bertelli: First of all, aside from our group- and very few others in our industry- from day one the fashion show goes hand in hand with the factory. When you meet managers who come from other companies, factories and industrial matters are often unfamiliar; they don’t even see them as part of their remit, because they don’t consider them within the scope of their responsibilities. And this has led to many of the difficulties you read about in the newspapers. I say this because from day one my father believed in owning factories. In fact, my parents’ story is: one person more dedicated to design (Miuccia Prada, ed.), and one more dedicated to factories (Patrizio Bertelli, ed.). It’s our story- culturally embedded and in our blood. In our Milan offices, we don’t talk about business without talking about factories and their impact on production. I can assure you that many managers working in other companies simply don’t concern themselves with factories.
Along our growth journey, we fought many of the battles that may be creating problems for other players in the sector today- not because we were better, but because we tackled them earlier- and therefore we have more experience in trying to keep the supply chain as clean as possible. We were almost frowned upon at the time, because people didn’t understand why we would embark on something laborious and costly when the work could easily be delegated to others with higher value added and greater margins. And it is a constant battle: you have to carry out inspections and audits of suppliers continuously.

FN: Is only about 50% of your supplier list shown on your site? Why not 100%?
LB: In terms of compliance, we are not legally required to disclose all levels of the production chain. Until recently, disclosure was required only for tier 1 of the supply chain, not tier 2 or tier 3; so, depending on how one builds the production architecture, it’s easy to appear ‘cleaner’ if you have a few very green tier‑1 suppliers who then have many subcontractors that are not… We work almost exclusively with tier‑1 suppliers and very few tier‑2s.
One, because no minimum percentage is required in today’s sustainability reports; if the reporting rules change one day, we’ll be happy to disclose 100%.
Two, because there is also a competitiveness issue: why should we give an advantage to competitors who might go and gather information on our supply chain?
Three, because, although all our suppliers are fully compliant, we chose to disclose only those we are particularly proud of.

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FN: How much of the Prada Group’s production is internalised?
AG: We don’t disclose that information. From our point of view, production is totally internalised, in the sense that we have the ability to steer our entire supply chain from A to Z, and we have shortened it dramatically. I believe our level of in-house production is the highest in the industry.

FN: In your opinion, are prices in the fashion and luxury industry too high?
AG: In the post‑Covid period, some of our competitors thought it was possible to raise price levels continuously without, in some cases, delivering the necessary value in the product. I believe that was one of the contributing factors to this industry’s recent downturn. I think many companies and brands are reflecting on this today.

FN: How can Made in Italy be conveyed and protected?
AG: We have been, are, and will remain very strong on Made in Italy. Italy’s problem is not the ‘Made in,’ manufacturing or innovation, but sales: the ability to tell the story, to do marketing, to have a role with the consumer, to know how to run stores everywhere in the world. Italian companies have always been extraordinary at making, but unfortunately not equally good at selling.
Companies like Prada, which decided to move into the end‑consumer world more than 30 years ago, are an exception compared to the majority of Italian businesses. I always give this example: if I go to a French or Anglo‑Saxon entrepreneur and ask ‘Tell me about your business,’ they will take me to one of their stores, one of their restaurants, one of their hotels. If I go to an Italian entrepreneur and ask ‘Tell me about your business,’ he will take me to a factory. That’s the difference. Here, the tradition of the store, the restaurant, and the hotel has always been family‑based, but we haven’t taught the new generations- or we have done so only very little, or perhaps we have only just started- how to manage the consumer as the landscape evolves.
Today in Italy we probably produce 80% of luxury, but Italian companies account for not even 20% of this sector’s revenue. That’s where we have lost out and need to improve, considering this sector as a linchpin of Italian industry.