Sorelle Ramonda has opened fifty stores after starting from a remnant-cloth stall in 1954

A woman, some cloth remnants, a henhouse

In the years after the war, at Rosà, in the province of Vicenza, a woman left alone with her children goes from house to house with remnants of cloth and comes back with chickens and chicks. There is no price list: the price is whatever can be swapped that day, and the bookkeeping walks into the house on its own legs. Her name is Amelia Ramonda ³⁹. Seventy years later the surname hangs over fifty stores across northern Italy, Rome and Austria, with roughly 1,200 staff ⁴⁹. The family still owns all of it, has never listed the name on the stock exchange and, when someone knocked to buy a majority stake, said no.

Two figures circulate about this company that appear to rule each other out: turnover of about 300 million, repeated by trade and local press from 2023 onward, and a set of filed accounts that for 2024 stops at 80.0 million ⁷¹. They do not contradict each other. They measure two different things, and this issue exists above all to explain which. Then there is the part that is moving now, and that is why the story is not a photo album: the digital division, run by a grandson who bears his grandfather's name, takes in almost 3 million a year and closes at a loss ⁵¹⁵.

The dates with a document underneath

The family's account traces everything back to the 1930s. Sources independent of the company start later: they place Amelia's business at Rosà in the 1950s and set 1954 as the year the count runs from ⁹³. It is a difference worth twenty years, and no public document settles it. The year 1954, on the other hand, has a precise fact attached to it. Maria Ramonda marries, moves to Alte Ceccato — a district of Montecchio Maggiore, then a village on the road to Verona — and takes over a small shop ⁹. The portal that reconstructs Italian business histories dates the founding to the same year, but places it at Rosà, together with the children Ginetta, Maria and Giuseppe, known as Beppo ³.

Two different local papers, on the occasions of Ginetta's and Maria's deaths, told the same chronology without drawing on the company: sixty-eight years of presence at Alte Ceccato, the start with the mother, the shop of 1954 ⁹¹⁰. It is the kind of confirmation family sagas usually lack, and here it exists. That first shop, in press reconstructions, measured thirty square meters ⁶. A room a little over five meters by five: the floor area of a studio apartment, which is also the only physical measurement in the whole story for which a source exists.

The move: the shopping mall before shopping malls

The choice that made the difference was not the cloth, and it is easier to understand today than it was then. In a Veneto of specialist shops — the shirtmaker, the knitwear store, the menswear shop — the family put many different brands under one roof at provincial prices. It is the multi-brand store taken to where the labels did not reach. The measure of that choice can be read in a third-party figure: in January 2023 a trade publication describes the network as fifty stores carrying more than 1,200 brands ⁷. An assortment like that is closer to the clothing floor of a department store than to a boutique, and it requires a buying machine few family retailers ever build.

The expansion came by addition, one store after another, without leaps. There is no public birth certificate of a strategy: there are the openings, and the fact that seventy years on the shares are all still in the family. One corporate confirmation, oblique as it is, does exist: the Austrian subsidiary is recorded at the Firmenbuch — the Firmenbuch — as 99.80% owned by a family holding company and 0.20% by Giuseppe Ramonda in person ⁸. No financial investor appears in the record.

How they chose where to open

Giuseppe Ramonda, who in the third generation handles marketing and e-commerce, says there was never a structured plan behind the openings: an opportunity came along — a vacant unit, the right rent, a town that was growing — and they took it. The lesson he received from his father, he says, was to act without too much analysis up front. It is a retrospective account from someone inside the company, and no document confirms or contradicts it: no board minutes, no filed business plan. It stands as family testimony, with the weight family testimony carries.

Opinion reported as such, not verified by the editorial team.

Eighty million and three hundred million

In January 2023 a fashion trade magazine writes that the group is worth «about 300 million euros» in turnover ⁷. A portal devoted to historic companies speaks of more than 300 million, sixty stores and 1,400 employees ³. An interview with the Vicenza daily raises the bar to 350 million, with 1,200 employees and 115 family members involved ⁴. The Registro Imprese, for Sorelle Ramonda S.p.A. alone — VAT number 00142970243 — describes another scale. Revenue of 78,497,574 euros in 2023 and 80,007,121 in 2024, up 1.92%; net profit falls from 802,896 to 557,216 euros, 30.6% less ²¹. In 2025 revenue comes to 77.1 million ².

The company has share capital of 6.5 million and total assets of 62.1 million; the employees on record range between 469 and 500 depending on the source and the year ¹¹¹². The Austrian subsidiary brings with it 14.0 million in assets and a profit of 356,465 euros ⁸. Adding up what is public does not reach 300 million, and no group consolidated accounts can be found. The gap to be explained is worth between 220 and 270 million.

The bridge between the two numbers

The distance between 80 and 300 does not need a suspicion to be explained: it needs a perimeterthe list of companies that go into the count when someone says «turnover». Changing the perimeter changes the figure without a single receipt changing at the till. The chain, as the people who run it describe it, begins with purchasing: about 200 million of goods bought every year to be resold. On those goods comes the markup, put at two to three times cost ⁵. That value falls inside the range documented for the sector: in apparel retail the typical markup runs between 2.2 and 2.8 times, with gross margins between 55% and 65% ¹⁶.

Two hundred million of goods marked up two and a half times becomes five hundred million in ticket prices. But a clothing store does not take in the ticket price: on average half of what it sells goes out at full price and the rest on sale or promotion ⁵, and unsold stock erodes the realized margin further ¹⁶. The number that survives that passage is the order of magnitude the company describes. What can be read at the Chamber of Commerce is a different slice: the revenue of a single company in the group, the one that carries the historic name. Statutory accounts are under no obligation to report the sales of the banners that sit outside their perimeter.

One asymmetry remains that no source resolves: 200 million of purchases against 300 million of revenue would mean a ratio of 67%, whereas the international benchmarks for apparel indicate a cost of goods sold between 30% and 55% of revenue ¹⁷, and analyses of the sector's gross margins place casualwear between 50% and 65% ¹⁹. Even the two reported numbers, then, probably belong to different perimeters.

A hundred and twenty owners, fifty of them behind the counter

The family tree of this company cannot be drawn: the names, the dates and the branches are missing, and reconstructing it by eye would mean inventing it. It can, however, be told. At the top is Amelia. Below her, according to the family account, eight children — a number no outside source confirms, and of whom the archives name only Ginetta, Maria and Giuseppe ³⁹. From there the family widens until it becomes an organizational fact. The family members involved are about 120 according to the internal account, 115 according to the interview with the local daily ⁴: identical order of magnitude, figure that wobbles. Of these, some fifty are said to work in the stores, behind the counter like everyone else.

The ratio is what counts: within a workforce of 1,200-1,300 people, roughly one employee in twenty-five is also an owner. It is the structure that makes the refusal to sell a collective choice before a financial one, because no single shareholder can carry away a block. The chairman, according to the family account, was born in 1939 and is the last left of his generation. In the interview with Il Giornale di Vicenza, the headline they gave him is a single sentence: he misses his sisters ⁴.

The hundred million turned down

In the documentary Chapeau, released in September 2025, Giuseppe Ramonda tells of an offer that arrived from an investment fund: 100 million euros for 51% of the company. The answer, in his account, was that «we will never sell» ⁵. The local press picked up the episode, adding that the bidder was Chinese ⁶. The available sources stop there: none names the fund, the date of the proposal or the existence of a negotiation, and the interview with the Vicenza daily — the longest the family has granted in the past two years — makes no mention of it ⁴. It is the account of the person who received the offer, relayed by third parties, and it should be read as such.

Fifty stores that are a radius, not a chain

Seen on a map, the network does not have the shape the number suggests. Fifty stores bring a national chain to mind; here they are a circle widening out from a single point, Montecchio Maggiore, with one long spur as far as Rome and three stores beyond the Austrian border ⁴⁷. The most recent sources speak of fifty banners, those from 2024 of sixty: the network breathes depending on the year and the perimeter ³. The historic headquarters remains the center of gravity in the accounts too. The Montecchio store takes in between 5 and 6 million a year according to the testimony gathered by PMI.it ⁵: on its own, about one fourteenth of the revenue the S.p.A. filed for 2024.

The Austrian part is the least talked about and the best documented, because the Vienna register publishes what stays private in Italy: 14.0 million in assets, 4.7 million in equity, 356,465 euros of profit at 31 December 2024 ⁸. Three stores, accounts that close in the black. Of today's store there is no public survey: neither a floor plan nor a declared floor area for the Montecchio site. The scale drawing that would set the room of 1954 against the present-day store therefore cannot be made — and in place of a stopgap what remains is the one measurement a source genuinely supports.

The division that grows by losing money

In the building at Montecchio there is a room where clothes are photographed all day long. It is the marketing and e-commerce division: thirteen people according to the internal account, about two hundred garments uploaded to the site every day, fifteen thousand a season. None of these numbers appears in a public document; what is on record is that the division exists and that Giuseppe Ramonda runs it ⁶. The channel is worth almost 3 million euros a year and closes at a loss ⁵¹⁵. It is an admission that runs against the interest of the person making it, and no source contradicts it.

The explanation lies in two percentages that live on the same garment. In the stores about half of what is sold goes out at full price; online the share of sales on promotion reaches 85-90% ⁵. The same dress, out of the same warehouse, yields far less if the customer finds it with every competitor's digital window alongside. Then comes the tail of costs. In fashion e-commerce, returns can absorb between 20% and 30% of operating margin, at a handling cost of between 4 and 20 euros per item ²⁰. Italy fares better than the rest of Europe — the fashion return rate is 16%, the lowest on the continent ²¹ — but return logistics remains the tap the margin runs out of.

The floor moving under the fifty stores

The digital channel loses money inside a market that is narrowing, and this is the part of the story that does not depend on the family. In the first eight months of 2025 Italian output of textiles, clothing and leather fell 6.6% against 2024, with exports down 3.4% ²⁴. That is the factory, not the store, but the store follows it a few months later. On the retail side the numbers are just as blunt. In 2023, 5,080 fashion stores closed, some ten thousand jobs, out of a network of 170,828 outlets; in July 2024 sales in the segment were down 8.1% on the year before ²⁵. Between 2019 and 2021 the shutters pulled down in fashion had numbered more than 11,150 ²⁷.

Widening the view to all of retail, the 2024 count is 61,634 closures against 23,188 openings: 2.7 stores closed for every one that opens ²⁶. The general retail statistics for the same period stay flat in volume ²⁸, which means the same quantity of goods is being sold in fewer places. For those selling online the pressure comes from the cost side as well: among the difficulties cited by Italian digital fashion operators, the rising cost of advertising comes first, flagged by 63% ⁴². Buying visits costs more every year, and the discounted garment that accounts for 85% of sales has to pay that bill too.

Notes from the notebook

There is one figure in this story that travels on its own. The Montecchio store, in the testimony gathered by PMI.it, takes in 5-6 million a year ⁵. In the retelling that figure has become fifty-six million: which would be 70% of everything the S.p.A. filed for 2024 ¹. A single store does not make up two thirds of a company with fifty banners, and the arithmetic is enough to stop the rumor before any verification. Then there is the American candy man. In the summer of 2024 a fitness YouTuber sells his sour-strips brand to Hershey; the press release does not say for how much. The price surfaces months later, in a way no press office would have chosen: inside the annual report Hershey filed with the SEC, 75.5 million dollars ³²³³. The founder is called Maxx Chewning, the brand Sour Strips, and it had started in 2019 ³⁴³⁵.

The bible of creator anecdotes has a second chapter, the one about Logan Paul's drink. The valuation of «more than three billion» that has circulated since 2023 comes neither from a funding round nor from a set of accounts: it is the low end of an estimate for comparable companies, 3.1-8.4 billion, average 5.5 ³⁶. In 2023 global sales were heading toward 1.2 billion dollars ⁴¹. The collapse recounted right afterwards is real, but it has a precise perimeter. The 70% drop is the British subsidiary alone: from 112 to 32.9 million pounds in the accounts filed at Companies House ³⁷⁴⁰. In the American market the decline recorded is 42% ³⁸; for 2024 as a whole some readings indicate 48% ³⁹. Three true numbers, three different boundaries — exactly the problem of the 80 million and the 300 million, in another industry.

The background statistics that accompany these stories also have an archive version. On young people supposedly preferring travel to clothes, the closest survey is American and says something else: 33% of Generation Z lists clothing among the expenses to cut, and only 55% expected to travel in 2025, down from 61% ²⁹. On the balance between life and work, Italian surveys range between 59% and 80% depending on the question asked ³¹. And on young people who would like to work for themselves, the GEM Italia 2025-26 report measures an activation rate of 11%, which however counts those who actually start a business, not those who think about it ³⁰.

One last note, the most domestic. A business news portal attributes to the group about 1,400 employees, of whom 77% women ¹¹. It is a workforce figure, not a sales one, but it says something about the company: in a store where most of the assortment is womenswear, the person selling it is almost always a woman. As it was seventy years ago, when behind the cloth remnants there was Amelia.

What to watch now

The grandson who today sits over the digital division takes in three million a year and loses them, inside a company that in seventy years has never put its shares in anyone else's hands. The grandmother sold at full price because no other price existed; the channel meant to carry the banner into the coming decade sells at a discount almost nine times out of ten ⁵. Three things will be verifiable, and all three are on the calendar. The first is whether consolidated group accounts ever appear: the moment they exist, the 300 million stop being a story and become a line item. The second is the trajectory of the S.p.A., which after 80.0 million in 2024 fell to 77.1 in 2025 ².

The third is the smallest and the most interesting. It is not the group's turnover: it is the first year that division of thirteen people breaks even. The day it happens, the digital window will finally have the same income statement as the thirty-square-meter room at Alte Ceccato — and it will be the first time in seventy years that something in this family has been opened without knowing in advance that it pays for itself.