One hundred years of fragrance
In 1923, in Alessandria, Luigi Paglieri and his son Lodovico created the cologne Felce Azzurra, an unprecedented success that immediately rivalled the French perfume sector, until then the undisputed market leader. Achieving one excellent result after another, Felce Azzurra has become, to all intents and purposes, a true trademark, and is now the company’s leading brand. The fragrance, the recipe for which remains a secret handed down from generation to generation, continues to characterise all the products in the range. To celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Felce Azzurra, the company has planned a year full of celebrations, with special events, a limited-edition label for the most iconic products, and a celebratory postage stamp.
The goodnight fragrance
The new company vision aims to draw on its heritage and unique knowledge of the world of perfume to lead the Felce Azzurra brand into a new dimension, that of well-being. To this end, Felce Azzurra has created Fiori di Luna - Essenza Rilassante (relaxing essence); a full range of products characterised by a unique fragrance that uses the innovative Dreamscentz™ technology, which helps improve the quality of sleep. Felce Azzurra is the first brand on the Italian market to use this new technology.
Felce Azzurra Bio
With Felce Azzurra BIO, Paglieri introduced a new certified personal care line made with a high concentration of natural ingredients.
Genuinely organic products developed in line with ICEA Cosmos Organic standards. 100% natural fragrances and 98.8% ingredients of natural origin to respect the skin's natural balance.
Dermatologically tested formulas FREE from SLES/SLS, petrolatums, acrylates, silicones, colourants and EDTA.
Tradition has a new look
The year 2016 marked the beginning of a new path for Paglieri brands, most notably with an important relaunch for Felce Azzurra. By innovating tradition, our new products are more modern, sophisticated and elegant thanks to our ever-increasing focus on quality and changing trends. Supported by fresh and engaging communication, the launch of the Felce Azzurra Personal Care and Household Care ranges caught the eye of new consumers and reinforced the loyalty of our existing customers. These two ranges consisted of bath and shower products and detergents and fabric softeners respectively.
Felce Azzurra looks after your home and laundry too
Paglieri continued to evolve over time without ever forgetting its original mission to respect and care for the consumer. It embraced innovation and expanded to guarantee our clothes and homes the same respect that it had shown our bodies for over 90 years. The Felce Azzurra laundry and home fragrance line was born.
For the little ones
Friendly raccoon SapoNello is the face of the play-based learning project of the same name created by Paglieri for Italian primary schools. The initiative began in 2010 with the aim of introducing children to hygiene and fragrance as well as the concept of water as an important resource that shouldn't be wasted. SapoNello products care for young skin and make daily hygiene a fun activity with delicious fragrances and extremely delicate textures.
Mon Amour, love your laundry
In 2009, a new brand joined the Paglieri family: Mon Amour, the brand that loves your laundry. With its eye-catching graphic design, bright colours and highly scented formulas, Mon Amour offered a multisensory experience to consumers who quickly came to love the fabric softeners and detergents.
Cléo
Paglieri experiments not only with its formulas but with its ingredients too, making an original breakthrough with Cléo Bath Milk when a food ingredient - natural milk proteins - was used in a cosmetic cleansing product for the first time ever. This anticipated what would become a huge cosmetics trend.
The swinging Sixties
In the early 1960s, Paglieri Profumi definitively moved into its own production plant so as to be increasingly competitive and keep up to date with growing market demands. Today, the plant occupies approximately 76,000 m2 on the outskirts of its home city. The brand found an effective solution to the distance of the plant from employee homes by organising a highly modern shuttle service for them. In an act of great foresight, the box factory was closed to open a company producing plastic capsules and bottles.
First TV appearance
Immediately grasping the important opportunities offered by new forms of communication, Paglieri invested extensively in early Italian television. The brand’s communication expanded to include TV adverts and features on historic advertising show Carosello with personalities from the worlds of music and cinema (Alberto Lupo, Quartetto Cetra), who helped to familiarise viewers with Felce Azzurra products.
The economic boom
At the end of the war, Paglieri rented an actual factory in a leafy residential area. Approximately 400 employees worked on the manufacture of products with evocative names such as : "Paradiso Perduto", "Fruscio di Veli", "Acqua Gaia", "Fauno" and "Tabacco Ambrato" (Paradise Lost, Rustling Veil, Gaia Water, Faun and Amber Tobacco). Employees also had access to what were very special working conditions for the time: a nursery for small children and an extended lunch hour so that everybody could enjoy lunch at home. With great foresight, the first IT system was launched and soon became the pride of the small company.
Gran Premio
The now firmly established Felce Azzurra line was joined by Gran Premio, the revolutionary fragrance for women with its highly unusual and original green note, as well as other innovative products such as Curaderma, the moisturising cream to be applied directly to wet skin after bathing.
Long-term entrepreneurial vision
During the Second World War, Paglieri Profumi became a joint stock company and, despite the hardships of the time, made another highly entrepreneurial decision. Given the elevated costs of packaging, the company opened its own box factory, a small plant that would cover the need for boxes and packaging for a few years. It was later destroyed by bombs.
Paradise Lost
At the end of the war, Paglieri was a vocal advocate for rebuilding Italy, recognising and giving voice to the widespread mood for wellbeing and light-heartedness. This saw the creation of products with highly evocative names to conjure up images and emotions: “Paradiso Perduto”, “Tabacco Ambrato”, “Fior di Loto”, “Fiori degli Esperidi” (Paradise Lost, Amber Tobacco, Lotus Flower, Flowers of the Hesperides).
The turning point
The 1940s marked a decisive moment in Paglieri history: consolidation of its image. Boccasile’s La Donna Coi Fiori (Woman with Flowers) dates back to this period, still today an iconic and timeless symbol of Paglieri products. Fun fact: the original nude version was soon adapted with the addition of a modest veil over the breasts, resisting the march of progress and more liberal trends.
Palazzo Paglieri: forging success
In the early twentieth century, Luigi Paglieri built Palazzo Paglieri, an imposing building and the first in Alessandria to be constructed in reinforced concrete and feature a lift. As well as providing a home for the entire family, Palazzo Paglieri also had a small factory built into the courtyard in the 1930s. It accommodated approximately 40 workers and a semi-automatic production line. But the truly winning formula in those years had entirely different ingredients: invention, innovation and initiative.
Velluto di Hollywood
Velluto di Hollywood (Hollywood Velvet) was a brainchild of Paglieri innovation. It was an exceptional powder that could be applied with a wet or dry sponge depending on skin type and the level of coverage desired. It was an unprecedented success that embodied the allure of nascent American cinema and its divas.
Brand new communication
An impressive black and white advertising campaign, inspired by Hollywood femmes fatales, was published in the most important women's magazines of the time. Elegance and beauty were the keywords behind an effective communication campaign, at times functional and descriptive and at times evocative and aspirational, that was instrumental in the product's success.
The birth of a legend
The vicissitudes of the First World War made way for a very prosperous period for Paglieri. The 1920s saw a move toward large-scale production of perfumes and colognes, such as Oil and Water of Marengo, sold in perfume shops. The year 1923 was very special: the Felce Azzurra Eau de Cologne was born. The product enjoyed unprecedented success, even challenging French parfumerie, undisputed industry leader at the time. In the wake of this success, Paglieri released the talcum powder of the same name in 1926, which would forever define that era and remains a unique and inimitable product to this day.
A story that starts a long time ago
Back in 1876, Lodovico Paglieri inherited his father's small shop on Via Mazzini, in the Piedmont town of Alessandria. The shop sold cosmetics, wigs and fragrances and Lodovico had an idea to start producing products under the Paglieri name in a small laboratory that was very centrally located in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. It turned out to be a fantastic idea: as year after year, Paglieri perfumes and cosmetics achieved immediate success with a very demanding and refined female clientele. The experience gained in the first decades laid solid foundations for the new and broader horizons of the later years.
