Riccardo De Silvestro

Tell us about your journey at Visottica Comotec.

My professional experience in Visottica Comotec began in 2003 as manager of the project to launch the Dongguan facilities in China. After that, in 2005, I relocated to HK to lead the Sales Team. I came back to Italy in 2007 and after a period of a few years working for another company in packaging, I was welcomed back to Visottica Comotec in 2013, where I currently hold the position of commercial director for Europe and the US.

What do you love most about your job and about the company?

What I like the most about my job is having the chance to meet people and interact with them. For me, interpersonal relationships are a fundamental part of both private and working life. My past experiences and the role I play today allowed me to confront myself daily with colleagues and clients coming from different parts of the world, with ideas and visions sometimes convergent and sometimes distant from mine, but always acting as strong stimuli to improvement.

What does collaboration look like in your office? Tell us about your team.

I believe teamwork is crucial, and it is always a winning strategy. For this reason, in my different professional experiences, I have always attempted to create a work environment that could be easy-going but at the same time “loyally” competitive, in which everyone could demonstrate their capabilities, but with the objective of a common victory. A company of this kind is similar to a sports team, everyone has their own role and their own tasks to attend to, but always focused on the same goal. So, I sincerely believe that “Team VisotticaComotec” is for all intents and purposes a beautiful team of professionals.

What does Visottica offer to the market today after the various acquisitions?

Today’s VisotticaComotec is completely different from the Visottica Comotec I knew in 2003. Also thanks to the vision of our President, in the last 15 years Visottica Comotec followed a journey of change and growth that led it to become a leading market player. The development towards a managerial approach and the simultaneous acquisition of leading companies in their own sectors and related advanced technologies allowed Visottica Comotec to keep up, but sometime also anticipate, with the demands of an increasingly complex market.

What are the most important features of VisotticaComotec’s products?

The quality of products, in the most common sense of the term, is something the market expects from our company and it is not therefore in question. On the other hand, the additional benefits we are trying to offer our clients are for example innovative solutions, more often than not covered by patent, to enable the optimization of our clients’ production processes and come up with solutions to specific challenges in making eyewear. Another essential feature of our products is to guarantee the conformity of utilized materials. From 2016, when “Compliance” was still little known and requested by the eyewear sector, Visottica Comotec launched and invested in a project for the analysis, monitoring and certification of materials that other fashion industries had already begun to request. Thanks to investments in the research of new materials and to the system developed and implemented in recent years, we are now able to guarantee compliance with the RSL (Restricted Substances List) of the most prestigious brands on the individual product.

In your experience, what is very important to customers today?

As mentioned before, the market has undergone an important metamorphosis in the last few years, and so have specific demands. Once the key asset was the product, today the product alone is not sufficient anymore. The day-to-day relationship with our customers has gradually evolved and transformed, becoming a daily exchange of information, ideas, problems, solutions, etc. Dynamism, responsiveness and competence are today indispensable requirements. In other words, we can say that the traditional relationship Client-Supplier is changing into a partnership and bond of trust that progressively grows stronger in time.

What do you expect from next year?

It is difficult to say what is going to happen in 2022, the prospects and the signs are all positive, but we know even too well what happened and what we had to live through in these past years. What is sure is that 2021 witnessed a fast-growing market as well as a strong optimism. For our part, we are going to try, as always, to support our partners as best as we can by studying and investing in solutions that will allow us to be reactive at all times and ready for the new challenges of the market.