Caprotti Manifattura was the textile company of the Caprotti family of Albiate, Italy, a business that changed names several times over its history, from “ditta Bernardo Caprotti di Giuseppe” to Società anonima Cotonificio Caprotti, and finally Manifattura Caprotti.[1] The company is best remembered in design circles for the modern logo created for it by Swiss graphic designer Max Huber in the late 1950s.
Design and History
In the 1950s, Bernardo Caprotti, who was still actively involved in the family cotton mill, commissioned Max Huber to create a new logo for the company.[2] Huber, who would later design the famous elongated “S” logotype for Esselunga, worked on the project between 1957 and 1959, a period documented in company archives as the “Campagna marchio Caprotti” (Caprotti brand campaign).[3]
The project’s starting point can be traced to an 18 November 1957 letter, almost certainly from Bernardo Caprotti, in which he agreed with Huber on the need to depict either the letters “M.B.C.” or the company’s goat mark, while admitting he was tempted by a completely abstract mark.[3] In the end, Huber fused both elements, combining the initial letter “C” with the company’s ancient goat trademark.[3]
The new logo started from the idea of the initial letter “C,” artfully lengthened to contain the full company name “Caprotti.”[2] Huber placed the whole mark within the image of an identification tag with a string, the kind of tag that was actually hung on the pieces of cloth the company produced.[2] In a more sophisticated version, the ancient little goat appears inside the eye of the letter.[4] The design has been described as a forerunner of the future Esselunga logotype, which Huber developed around the same period for Bernardo Caprotti’s supermarket venture.[2]
The logo launch was supported by a press campaign and a calendar combining historical company documents with photographs of the factory’s modern reality, including shots by photographer Ugo Mulas.[3] Original drawings and applications of the logo, including packaging paper in several colors, are preserved in the Max Huber archive in Lugano.[5]
Meaning and Symbolism
The goat was not a new invention for the 1958 mark. The Caprotti family had chosen a goat as the company’s factory trademark decades earlier, with a certain dose of self-irony, since “caprotti” evokes the Italian word for goat (“capra”).[6] The original goat drawing was designed to imprint itself in the memory of customers, particularly Italian emigrants in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Brazil who wanted fabrics similar to those sold at home.[7] In Huber’s 1958 version, the ancient goat was restyled into a new, stylized, ultra-modern form, placed inside the eye of the bright red “C” (rendered in black and white in printed versions).[8]
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