Giardino Italiano comes of age and celebrates their 18-year activity in the web with a brand new logo. Willing to keep a substantial continuity with their debut on-line, Giardino Italiano’s new logo displays an essential yet elegant style, embodying the essence of a company capable of bravely investing in IT technology at times when the Internet was still a vision more than a practical tool.
Born by women, run by women and carried on by women, Giardino Italiano has been offering worldwide for 18 years the best of the made-in-Italy: aesthetically gorgeous yet practical objects like fountain pens, and much more.
That’s one of the reasons for one of the green leaves in the new logo recalls a nib’s shape and opens the other leaves like a fan, to remind the choice of other objects you can find in the website.
You will soon find out what Giardino Italiano is up to at the moment to celebrate together with their enthusiasts (to call them ‘customers’ would be reductive) this special birthday of theirs.
The Challenge of the Internet
1996: the very first homepage
Let’s go back to 1996, when Giardino Italiano was founded by Susanna Buffo, who is still their beating heart of the business. That was the year of cult videogames like Quake and Tomb Raider, Final Doom and the Tamagotchi; the year of Motorola StarTAC; the year a computer beat chess champion Kasparov.
The Internet was, at that time, a new, unexplored horizon, especially in Italy, where e-commerce had to face serious objections due to costs and technical hardships at once. Just think: the very first web pages of Giardino Italiano’s website were built by hand-typing HTML code (you can see here the original Home Page of the website) and weighted no more than 3kb. Pictures were no more than 15kb each.
Neatness of web pages was a necessity, mainly due to modems’ speed for data transmission (about 14.4kbaud); Internet connections and e-mails were to be paid as a plus to providers besides the costs of phone calls. Indeed, e-mails were often typed off-line: it unthinkable the possibility to be forever connected like we are today.
1996: the first logo of Giardino Italiano
For this reason, when the domain giardino.it was registered (that was in 1997, a few months after the company’s start up), the site design stuck to the 3-click rule and it so it is still today: wherever the user is, it won’t take any more than 3 clicks to get to the product.
Giardino Italiano’s debut in the www
The first order Giardino Italiano received, however, was by ordinary mail, instead of email as proposed by the website.
The first automated basket – in Perl language – wasn’t to come until 1998; and the debit of the sum by credit card was made by telephone. Among the first items sold by Giardino Italiano were fountain pens – which are today their top items -, leather goods and books for kids. Only later watches, costume jewelry and accessories – still available for sale – were added. Books, paintings and cosmetics were put aside, instead. Another issue of starting such an advanced and technology-oriented business – Susanna recalls – was that of having to explain suppliers what the Internet was. That happened for the first few years of activity. Beacuse of this “cultural” gap, the first customers of Giardino Italiano came from abroad, especially from the United States – collectors, in particular.
Giardino Italiano today and tomorrow
After changing into a SRL (the italian LLC – Limited Liability Company) in 2001, Giardino Italiano evolved together with the net and conquered the Italian shy market, as well. Nowadays the company is still making the most of the IT resources for the web: with the inauguration of the blog and their Facebook page, they succeeded to consolidate their brand not only as an e-commerce website, but also as a virtual place for amateurs and collectors where it is possible to gather information about the best objects representing the excellence of Italy in the world.
What about the future? Believe it or not, it’s already here… stay tuned and you will discover soon all the news coming up next at Giardino Italiano‘s.
Happy Birthday!