For ten years the brand has been owned by Fabio Gatto’s holding company. With a turnover of 6 million euros it expects to close 2026 with a growth of 30%.
There are brands capable of facing different eras, of falling and rising again without ever losing their identity. This is the case of Ballantyne, founded in Scotland in 1921, after the Second World War Queen Elizabeth awarded it the Queens Award and then entered the Charme Investors fund in 2004 under the leadership of Luca Cordero di Montezemolo and Maurizio Canessa. The latter’s premature death marked the beginning of a period of crisis that continued until Fabio Gatto took over the creative and strategic reins. In 2015 the entrepreneur and creative director, through the family holding, completed the acquisition of the brand with a turnover of 300 thousand euros and took it into a new dimension, combining the mastery of the Scottish manufacturing tradition with Italian taste. Ten years after the operation, Ballantyne is a healthy 6 million euro company with a rich wholesale distribution, in addition to the online boutique. “When I joined the company, it was 2020, e-commerce generated less than 100 thousand euros”, explained Beatrice Gatto, head of communications and second generation of the family, “today we are at 350 thousand euros, there is still a long way to go, but the path we have taken is clear. Direct digital is the basis of the strategy to identify the markets with the highest potential. Today, in fact, in addition to Italy which was the market of the restart, we have taken over Germany, Austria, France, Spain and the USA which at the moment is only made up of organic traffic. We have different interests even if we don’t invest in it, so it is only organic traffic, looking at wholesale expansion and then perhaps also retail, our priorities are on the European market, but we are also keeping an eye on Japan and Korea, where, although cautious, there is growth and is constant”. In this process of rebirth, the brand has evolved by balancing the men’s/women’s offering and introducing distinctive objects such as the Kate bag and giving space to the heritage with the Raw capsule, “Ballantyne in these ten years has been able to be reborn, combining Scottish expertise with Italian sensitivity, enhancing the men’s proposals without diminishing the women’s collection”, continued Gatto, “today it is a coherent project, where knitwear acts as a link between the past and experimentation. So we have introduced, on the one hand, sportswear; on the other, the Raw Collection, a capsule that gives voice to the essence of cashmere, which is untreated, rough and softens over time: online, in the winter, this proposal of ten/twelve models represented more than 10% of sales of the total collection and that’s no small thing”. At the latest edition of White Ballantyne presented a provocative video that plays on AI as a communicative language. “My father Fabio Gatto frequented the fairs for a long time, and from his experience we know that they are no longer the commercial conversion tool they once were”, concluded Gatto, “for us they represent above all an opportunity for communication, where we can underline our identity: a complementary world between Scotland and Italy”.
