In 2023, what caught me about Legami was the pens. Not just the panda on top, but the fact that the pen itself was well made, the design considered rather than gimmicky, the ink good enough that I kept reaching for it long after the joke had worn off. Underneath the colour was a company that had built itself, quite openly, around joy as a purpose rather than a marketing line. I picked one up on impulse, cheap enough not to think twice about, and it earned its place in my pencil case on quality alone.
Three years later, the shelf near that till has widened into an entire world. Notebooks, home pieces, travel accessories, technology, a catalogue of 5,000 products across 17 product worlds. The company that once fit inside a single impulse buy now reports revenue of roughly EUR 245 million.
Alberto Fassi founded Legami in Bergamo in 2003, after leaving financial consulting to complete a course in creativity. His first product was a redesigned strap for carrying books, offered in seven colours, each tied to a different kind of human connection. He handled the design, the packing, the sales and the shipping himself. Reported revenue moved from roughly EUR 10 million in 2016 to EUR 245 million in the most recent reported year, and the company now employs more than 1,000 people across more than 200 boutiques, alongside wholesale and e-commerce channels. What strikes me most, given how far the company has travelled from that garage, is that Fassi still remains its creative centre and majority owner, more than two decades and a professional management layer later. The growth has not come from one hit product, and it has not come from the founder stepping back from creativity to focus on the business of scale. A character or a phrase, once it works, can travel from a pen to a pencil case, a mug, a lamp, a travel bag, which is how a single strap became a five-figure catalogue in two decades, with the person who drew the first one still, by all accounts, close to the drawing.
What this scale asks for
I have started to think of what a company like this needs as restraint, not the restraint of doing less, but the restraint of choosing carefully what stays and what goes as everything else keeps arriving. Call the deeper skill organisational seeing: the discipline of noticing what is shifting in customers and culture, making shared sense of it as a group, and choosing only some of what is noticed to become a product. Restraint is what protects that discipline from being consumed entirely by delivery.
Here is the tension
During the pandemic, Legami reportedly doubled its number of references. Adding a new character or colour is visible and rewarded, the kind of decision an organisation gets good at quickly. Retiring one is quiet, unglamorous, and usually resisted, because nobody builds their year around a pruning target. A catalogue that size carries costs well beyond production, in inventory, in forecasting, and above all in attention. The scarce resource at this scale is rarely money or time. It is the unclaimed attention that organisational seeing needs in order to happen, the room left over to notice something before managing what already exists takes it all.
Unlike the earlier companies in this series, Legami has not yet shown its answer. Sukiyabashi Jiro chose ten seats for sixty years. Ichiwa chose one stall for a thousand. Legami is still mid-decision, still adding, still growing into whatever restraint it eventually practices, if it practices one at all.
A caveat worth stating plainly: Legami is privately held, and the public figures disagree with each other. Corriere della Sera and De Agostini’s own statement report different numbers for the same years. Nothing in the public record shows whether the company has a working mechanism for deciding what to stop making, only for deciding what to start.
Restraint is what protects that discipline from being consumed entirely by delivery.
A small exercise
A small exercise, if you want to try it on something closer to home:
Pick one thing your organisation added recently, a product, a process, a meeting, that nobody has questioned since. Ask what you would need to notice, and be willing to act on, before you would let it go. Then ask who currently has the authority to say no to the next addition, before it arrives rather than after it has already shipped. If the answer is nobody, that is the gap this piece is really about.
You are not looking for a grand overhaul. Legami did not build a five-thousand-product catalogue by pruning aggressively, and it may never need to. The exercise is simply in noticing, honestly, whether your organisation still has a place where someone is allowed to say no.
Sources
- Legami, About Us — legami.com/en-gb/about-us-legami.html
- Corriere della Sera, 12 November 2025 — corriere.it
- De Agostini Group, 27 November 2025 — gruppodeagostini.it