Established in 1976 in Pavia, 40 kilometers away from Milano, Coven Egidio Snc is a family run company whose focus is to produce quality filling and crimping machines for the perfume industry, and to provide its clients worldwide with excellent assistance and after-sales service. Coven Egidio Snc was established nearly 40 years ago in Pavia, and is a family run company and today a major player in machinery supply to the perfume market. The company reputation has been growing and broadening throughout the years, and today Coven Egidio’s portfolio includes a range of top quality crimping and filling machines. Coven Egidio also provides its customers with a complete package of after-sales services and assistance, an important and necessary service to succeed in global markets. «Our 25 years of experience», the company stated while introducing its specialties, «allow us now to create high quality and user-friendly products; from the simplest manual crimping tools up to automated filling crimping lines. All of our clients are guaranteed after-sales assistance and flexible and reliable technical service». It was only some 20 years ago, back in 1993, that Coven Egidio’s board decided to specialize in the crimping and filling machinery sector, that represents today its very core business, this success is also due to the introduction of a series of fully automated productionlines, entirely dedicated to the perfume industry. Coven’s customer base has been growing constantly both in Italy and overseas, and the management and workforce’s skills give the vendor the ability to serve a most demanding market. Coven Egidio’s production capacity is indeed outstanding, supplying 14-15 automatic machines each year to the perfumery sector of the packaging market, plus some 150-200 smaller, semi-automated models. CEO Luca Pagetti said this success is driven by a lively, and changing market, requiring innovation of design that gives Coven Egidio the opportunity to meet the requirements of both small users and multi-national companies.
Could You describe, Mr. Pagetti, the perfuming market’s major characteristics nowadays?
The global demand for perfumes is growing constantly despite the international economic slowdown and all channels can today display excellent figures. It is basically split into the low end segment, mainly represented by supermarkets or discount and department stores; the medium-end, including specialized points of sales such as the perfumeries; the high end where perfumeries still play an important role, together with the clothing flagship stores. Possibly, though, there is a richer niche we are addressing, and that is made of small widespread laboratories who decided to focus on original products of their own, often choosing the Web and e-commerce as a distribution channel. Their products can be traded at some 300-500 hundred dollars each, especially in the Middle-East area, in which the request for innovative packaging is rather strong and most challenging, sometimes including top-class diamond-enriched decorated bottles.
Is this kind of fashion restricted to the Middle-Eastern countries or is it gaining momentum in the Western World or in other emerging nations as well, according to your experience?
It is becoming a global phenomenon, undoubtedly, since the demand for top-notch products and packaging is rocketing anywhere and our country, for instance, makes no exception. At the moment the most important destination markets are North America, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE) and, in Asia, South Korea. But as I said, this segment is nowadays consolidating with high end and high quality releases gaining momentum in Italy too. Besides that, it is a lot less frequent in Europe to find perfumeries who produce their own articles in fully owned laboratories and third party production is traditionally stronger. The Middle East is different, competition in the arena is more aggressive and volumes are significantly higher.
It looks like design, marketing, communication are crucial for your success: do you agree?
Undoubtedly. We have been working on those issues for years and we were in fact pioneers in accessing the Internet with an official Website, back in 1994-1995, and since the very beginning online marketing was vital to our company. To give customers and potential customers an idea of what Coven Egidio can do, we always published our videos on our official site and when medias such as YouTube started gaining momentum, we also leveraged them in order to give an immediate, easy to understand portrait of our technologies and machines: that gave us an important competitive advantage. Besides that, we also usually take part to a number of international exhibitions such as Cosmopack in New York and the Tokyo, Japan based Cosme Tech, just to name the most recent ones. Still, if we were to choose, we’d consider online marketing as the most effective form of communication nowadays, being it the most powerful way to promote our products and expertise.
Which factors make your offer unique in the crimping, filling, and packaging arena?
First of all I have to point out that Italy still holds an important share of the packaging global market, thanks to its lively and dynamic domestic market and thanks to the expertise that companies in the segment can display. But what makes us different is the skills we developed in the perfumes industry that make us able to fulfill any customer’s needs because of the robust focus we have on it. Clients immediately understand they are dealing with long time experts in the perfume segment.
What kind of strategies have you been implementing to succeed in the international markets?
Strategies differ from one region to another, since we can both rely on a network of resellers; and on the Internet, that, as I previously said, is also a precious way to get or keep in touch with clients. But then again, we sell directly in such areas as South America, with no distributors or agents, just thanks to the reliability and credibility our company was able to build throughout a 38 years history.
Which aspects of your activity are the most appreciated by customers worldwide?
I think services are a real winner, and to give a customer’s needs or requests an immediate feedback is possibly one of the most important aspects of our overall business. Also, we have to be proactive in fulfilling the market’s needs in terms of design, since producers often require their packages and their products’ look to be completely reshaped from one day to another, which is challenging and forces us to constantly, rapidly creating new concepts or ideas. But so far we have managed to do that, and this is why our customer base is so loyal, thanks to the efforts we dedicate to our research and development activities, that allow us to solve a series of technical issues by only changing or modifying a small part or component in a crimping, filling or packaging machine we produced. Sometimes, it takes creativity to produce that simple touch that solves a number of problems.
What regions do you expect to be the most successful for your business in the near future?
I think one could tell it from the locations we chose for participating in fairs and exhibitions: the United Arab Emirates, with Dubai’s Beauty Middle East, and Japan, that still represents a niche market but whose figures and numbers are steadily and impressively growing in the last few years.
A MATTER OF TRUST
Web marketing, traditional one to one communication, a robust focus on design and innovation: these can be considered some of Coven Egidio’s most effective strategic guidelines, together with the attention the 40 years old Pavia-headquartered family business has always destined to research and development activities in the machinery segment. These are only some of the reasons why today Coven Egidio Snc can pursue success and business outside Italy too, as its presence at such fairs and exhibitions as Beauty Middle East (Dubai, United Arab Emirates); Cosme Tech (Tokyo, Japan) and, last but not least, the New-York staged Cosmopack can easily witness. But if you were to ask the company’s management what’s the real x-factor in the firm’s commitment to clients, then the answer would undoubtedly be: «Trust and reliability».
COVEN EGIDIO SNC: THE WAY WE LOOK TODAY
Based in Pavia since 1976 when it was officially established, Coven Egisio Snc is a family company that has been developing an important expertise in the crimping and filling machinery for perfume manufacturing production, with a 15-20 fully automated and 150-200 semi-automatic models’ average yearly output. The company’s nearly 40 years long experience allows it to create and deploy high quality and user-friendly products or solutions; ranging from the simplest manual crimping tools up to automated filling crimping lines, entirely dedicated to the perfume industry. Coven Egidio’s clients are also provided with complete post-sales assistance and maintenance services, which throughout the years proved to be one of the company’s reasons for international success.
di R. Carminati