The brand that came home: in 2015 Lorenzo Osti bought back the C.P. Company his father invented

The orphan of Baricella

September 1944, province of Bologna. An Allied bombing raid kills Marino Osti. His last child, Massimo, was born on 17 June of the same year in Baricella, twenty kilometers to the north: he is three months old ¹². In the family telling that distance stretches: Massimo Osti was orphaned "at a year and a half." It is not a lie, it is how domestic memory works, keeping the fact and losing the calendar. His son Lorenzo, speaking of his father, sums him up in a single line: born poor, orphaned, and with a brother lost in boyhood ²⁴.

Out of that fatherless house comes the man who will invent two of the most copied Italian brands in the world, sell them, fail with a company that carried his own name, and die in 2005 owning nothing of what he had created ²⁰. Thirty years after the first signature before a notary, his son buys one of those names back. This is the story: how a brand is built, how it is lost in two stages, and what happens when the value of a name detaches from the company that makes it and keeps walking on its own.

A name taken from a comic strip and a lawsuit lost before it began

In 1968 Massimo Osti opens a graphic design agency in Bologna, CD2, with Lucio Festi and Giorgio Sgorbati: the archive curated by the family records it, and no other source tells the story ². It is the trade he will carry with him forever — first draw, then dress. Two years later comes the company that will make the garments, OM Diffusion, in Crevalcore ². In 1971 the brand arrives: it is called Chester Perry, and the name is a tribute to no one. A friend, Corrado Zannoni, suggests it, taking it from the imaginary factory in the comic strip Bristow, which in Italy ran in Linus: a paper company, comically bureaucratic, becomes the label stitched into a real collection ⁴⁵⁶. The 1971 date is confirmed by four sources independent of one another ¹³⁵⁶.

The game lasts seven years. In 1978 two British brands notice that the invented name is made out of pieces of theirs: the name of Fred Perry and the surname of Chester Barrie. They sue jointly ³⁴⁶. Osti loses the name and gets an acronym out of it. Chester Perry becomes C.P. Company: two letters that belong to no one and that today are worth more than the whole phrase. The Ministry of Culture record on business archives logs the change with the same date and the same two plaintiffs ⁴. In 1982 the second brand is born, Stone Island, and the first collection comes out in Tela Stella ¹².

Here lies the invention the market will copy for forty years, and it is not a logo: it is the order of operations. The garment is built finished and then treated — dyed, resined, faded — so that two identical pieces come out different. Lorenzo Osti sums it up by saying his father did not invent streetwear but sportswear. The dates hold; what holds them up, no, is not all of the same weight. The founding of the brands has third-party sources and a public record; the private origins — the design agency, the two partners, the evening course — have only the archive the children run.

Who owned what, from 1971 to 2021

The part of this story that gets lost in the retelling is the chain of ownership. It is not a notarial detail: it is the real movement, because the two brands born from the same hand end up in opposite worlds. The starting point is simple: until the early 1980s the brands sit inside Osti's companies. Then an industrial partner comes in, the Gruppo Finanziario Tessile ⁸. GFT takes 50% in 1983 and the remaining half in 1991 ⁷. In 1993 it lets the two brands go, and they pass to Carlo Rivetti: Sportswear Company is born ³⁷.

For seventeen years the two names travel side by side. The fork comes in February 2010: Carlo Rivetti and his sister Cristina sell C.P. Company to Enzo Fusco, through FGF Industry, with the handover effective for the spring-summer 2011 season ⁹⁷. From then on the two roads never touch again. Stone Island stays with the Rivettis and grows until 7 December 2020, when Moncler announces its purchase: 1.15 billion euros in cash and shares, 70% bought from the Rivetti family and 30% from the Singaporean fund Temasek, with the deal closing on 31 March 2021 ¹⁸⁷. C.P. Company, by contrast, turns over twice in five years: from Rivetti to Fusco in 2010, from Fusco to Tristate Holdings in November 2015 ⁹¹¹¹². And it is in that second handover that an Osti reappears.

A sale in installments told as a single gesture

In the story that circulates, the sale to GFT is a single act and it has a date: 1984. In the documents that date does not appear, and neither does the single act. The Turin group comes in with half the capital in 1983 and completes the purchase eight years later, in 1991 ⁷. In between there are eight seasons of work in which Osti designs for a company that is half his and half somebody else's. It is a difference that changes the meaning of the story. A founder who sells everything in one day leaves the stage; a founder who sells half and stays at the table for eight years is doing something else — he is buying industrial capital with his own brand, which is exactly what a small Bolognese workshop needs to get into the world's stores.

The exit, too, has a cause shifted out of place. The story says that in 1993 Osti leaves because GFT goes bankrupt; in 1993 GFT lets the brands go but is not bankrupt ⁷. Its real crisis comes later, and lasts ten years: the fight for control between Citibank and Gemina in 1995, the death of Marco Rivetti in 1996, the transfer of operations to HDP in 1997, the final closure in February 2003 ⁸. Laid one on top of the other, the two chronologies do not show two independent slips. They show a single effect: memory compresses eight years of gradual sale into one gesture, and props the 1993 exit against a catastrophe that would arrive ten years later.

His own name, and the lesson that costs the most

Out of the brands he had invented, Massimo Osti does the most natural and most dangerous thing: he founds a company bearing his own name, Massimo Osti Production, based in Carpi ¹². It works immediately. The archive speaks of sales of around 25 billion lire a year; in the family telling the figure is 20 ². In both versions the point is the same: people liked the product. And in both versions the company shuts down after three years. The archive puts it in a phrase worth reading twice: the closure comes "regardless of its commercial success" ². Wikipedia places the business between 1995 and 1998 ¹.

Here is the term that holds up the rest of the piece. Revenuethe total taken in from sales in a year, before any costs: it tells you how much you sell, not how much you keep was growing, and the more it grew the more the company lost, because every treated garment cost more than it brought in. It is the lesson the son says he learned watching from the outside, and one that would come in useful twenty years later, when it fell to him to sign off on the numbers. In the meantime the illness arrives. Massimo Osti dies in Bologna on 6 June 2005: the articles of the day say 59 years old, the encyclopedia record counts 60 ²⁰¹. He no longer owned either C.P. Company or Stone Island.

November 2015: the name returns to Osti orbit

On 11 November 2015 Enzo Fusco's FGF Industry sells C.P. Company to Tristate Holdings, a Hong Kong-listed company ¹². Lorenzo Osti takes the helm of the brand, having never worked in fashion: he came from a web agency founded in June 1996 with some schoolmates, Echo ²². On the price, the sources do not agree on a figure. FashionUnited writes 19.2 million euros ¹¹, Money.it 19.6 ¹³, WWD says the amount was undisclosed ¹². None of the three cites the corporate filing with the exact consideration. The industrial starting point, on the other hand, reads clearly, and it is not the one people remember. The 7 million euros in revenue is the figure Enzo Fusco gave for 2010, the year he himself bought: "When we bought it, revenue was around 7 million... by 2014 we had reached 12" ¹⁴.

Twelve million in 2014 is also the figure Pambianco and Il Sole 24 Ore report on the eve of the handover ¹⁵²⁸. Earlier still, under Rivetti, the brand had passed 20 million before falling below 15 at the time of the 2010 sale ¹⁰. Buying for about 19 million a brand with 12 million in revenue means paying a little more than one and a half times turnover. It is the revenue multiple that explains why the deal looked reckless at the time to anyone looking only at the income statement.

Seven years later the arithmetic is different. One industry reconstruction puts revenue at 117 million euros in 2022 ¹⁶; Pambianco was already headlining "over 100 million" in early 2022 ¹⁷; Lorenzo Osti, when he tells the story, says 120. None of these figures is a filed set of accounts we were able to read. The public accounts that do exist are those of the parent company Tristate, which in 2017 notes C.P. Company's first full year without breaking out its revenue ²⁵.

The yardstick the reader is missing sits on the other side of the 2010 fork. In 2017 Temasek paid 345 million euros for 30% of Stone Island ⁷: that price valued the brand at 1.15 billion, which is exactly the figure Moncler would put on the table three years later ¹⁸¹⁹. Two brands born from the same hand, in the same province, fifteen years apart. In December 2020 one is worth a little over a billion euros; the other, five years earlier, had been bought for less than twenty million.

What the man who bought it says

Lorenzo Osti has a thesis about how a brand is built today, and he repeats it: money must never be the goal, it is the consequence of the right choices, and it pays to follow a personal passion rather than a market analysis ²¹. He also argues that C.P. Company never sought to sell an aspirational lifestyle, but to tell an identity through the product — "I had zero experience in fashion," he says of the moment he took charge of the brand ²¹. On the 2015 purchase, his judgment has changed along with the numbers: at the time the price struck him as excessive for a company with little revenue; today he considers it the winning decision of his life ¹³.

From the notebook: six things found along the way

The factory that never existed. Chester Perry was not an English tailor: it was the fictional firm in the strip Bristow, a paper company full of paperwork and office managers. Osti stitched his first jackets under that name, and for seven years thousands of people wore a drawn bureaucracy on their backs ⁵⁶.

Two plaintiffs, one name. In 1978 Fred Perry and Chester Barrie did not come together by chance: one claimed the first name, the other the surname. The lawsuit that had to extinguish the brand lit a stronger one, because C.P. Company is the acronym that can no longer be taken away from anyone ³⁴.

The Singapore fund that had already written the price. In 2017 Temasek bought 30% of Stone Island for 345 million euros. One division is enough to see that the stake valued the whole brand at 1.15 billion: the very same figure Moncler announced on 7 December 2020 ⁷¹⁸.

An archive you can visit. Massimo Osti's papers, samples and prototypes are not locked in a warehouse: the Bologna archive has opened its doors to visitors, and the Ministry of Culture has a public record of it among business archives ²⁹⁴.

The biography written in-house. Many of the private dates in this story trace back to a 2012 book edited by Daniela Facchinato, Osti's wife and the mother of Lorenzo and Agata, the same people who run the archive ²⁷¹. On the founding of the brands there are four independent sources; on the private life there is a family telling its own story, and that too is information.

The drawing we didn't make. We wanted to set the two volumes of the Stone Island headquarters in Ravarino in section, at the same scale, with dimensions: lengths, heights, the mezzanine cutting the taller volume. We could not verify those measurements, and a technical drawing with invented dimensions is not a figure, it is furniture: so it isn't here. The same goes for the section of the Mille Miglia jacket with the goggles on the hood — without a pattern there is nothing to draw.

What remains

The strange fact of this story is that the brand outlived everything that made it. It outlived the company that had registered it, the Turin group that had bought it in installments, the business bearing the founder's name that closed in three years, and the founder himself. It changed hands four times without asking permission from anyone in the family that invented it, and each time it was worth more. Then, in 2015, a man brought back home for some twenty million the name his father had sold piece by piece thirty years earlier. September 1944, a three-month-old child in a house in Baricella. November 2015, his son signing in Hong Kong to take back two letters of the alphabet. In between there is no straight line, there is a name that learned to walk on its own — and the question left open is whether it has come home, or merely come back to market.