Auteur/autrice : Newsroom

So, my cooking really hasn’t changed, but it has evolved. Using less sugar, less salt, and less fat means it is much lighter. But that doesn’t mean it’s tasteless. I believe in bold blends of flavors.In other words, when I cook, I like to find combinations of flavours that work well together. For example, right now we are preparing celeriac with coconut. I never would have guessed that coconut could pair well with celeriac. But these two worlds really come together if we try. Let’s say if we focus on depth of flavor, which is to say, trying to find the perfect balance and the perfect equation between celery and coconut.

The colour black came into my life thanks to an artist I really admire named Pierre Soulages. It’s now been nine years that we’ve been working with black, and for me, black is a colour that has never been as central in my cooking as it is now. That’s what I’ve been trying to do: emphasizing this colour as well my own black and white style.

For the opening of the new showroom in Paris, I created the dishes that reflect my interpretation of black and white and of Marcolin’s sublime craftsmanship linked to innovation. It was very interesting to create these combinations for such an important event.

Since 2021, Marcolin has worked together with Treedom, the digital platform that enables companies and businesses to plant trees and help “re-green” our planet, thus ensuring that tons of Co2 are absorbed. To learn more about it, we met Treedom founder and CEO Federico Garcea, who was recently hosted at the first Marcolin Talk at the Milan showroom.

In 2006, after many jobs, I ended up working in a bank in Barcelona. A job that I found boring, however. Every day was exactly the same, I felt like I wasn’t making a contribution to the world. One day, though, I got a phone call from a group of ambitious environmental engineers whom I had met in Copenhagen: they wished to implement renewable energy projects in Africa and so, suddenly, I quit my banking job and embraced the environmental cause. We soon came to terms with the big illegal deforestation issue in Africa: farmers earned their living by selling off hectares of forest land, where trees were being cut down. And that’s when we got the idea of creating a project that could support farmers to plant rather than cut down trees. At the time, moreover, I often played an online game that allowed you to build virtual farms, so I used to buy trees to adorn my virtual farm. In the end, we joined the dots and thought of creating an online platform where people could buy real trees, an idea which we thought could work. And that’s what happened. Today, by combining sustainability with the digital world, more than 4 million trees have been planted across the world thanks to Treedom».

«Treedom today works with over 10,000 companies in Italy and around the world, companies spanning across all sectors, basically. And while in the beginning we were being contacted by energy-intensive companies for the most part, today we are happy to work with businesses that have already started going green, so it’s a lot easier and more natural for us to connect and find common ground with them. It’s all about the numbers: an ever-increasing number of businesses have embraced sustainability, not only by planting trees. Our collaboration with Marcolin, for instance, started thanks to our collaboration with one of their license brands, Timberland Eyewear, and then extended to the whole Group and became part of their corporate strategy. The initial goal was to plant 10,000 trees, now we’ve reached more than 15,000. The idea is to continue this collaboration over the next years, planting forests all over the world and thus supporting the local communities».

«Even though the signs we’re getting from the planet are far from encouraging, a lot has changed over the past 15 years. Ten years ago, just 1 business out of 10 used to embrace sustainability, today it’s the opposite and the only business that hasn’t put the issue on its agenda is more than likely destined to shut down. It’s a positive message, promoted by the whole Fridays for Future movement, which changed the rules of the game. Sustainability today is imperative if you want to make your business survive, grow and prosper in the market and I think that this upward movement is an extremely powerful and positive message that can really make a difference, along with technology, which must also do its part to achieve the net zero emissions target».

«Marketing has always existed, because every time we talk about ourselves and try to show our best side, we are actually trying to talk ourselves up to impress others. With the evolution of our species, we’ve started doing so also through the products, accessories, and garments we wear or buy, and every time we do so we are revealing something about ourselves, to ourselves or others».

«There’s this play on words in English: “making people want things”. But the marketing vision that I prefer is the opposite: rather than “making people want things” it’s more like “making things people want”. According to this vision, marketing is not just about promoting things that already exist, it’s about inferring products, services and experiences. In a nutshell: it means shifting from push to pull, where marketing is necessary to define the right products or services, the price people are willing to pay and the one that enables companies to maximize profit. How do we communicate a brand? How do we pick the best sales channels for a brand? If we do our job well enough, then we’ll choose to only make those products that are likely to sell more. It means less waste, less stock items, less useless products. It also means making targeted products, services, experiences and communication messages, which reduce background noise. It’s a natively sustainable approach».

«Eyeglasses are a beautiful metaphor: they are lenses that enable us to see the world in a different way. And if there’s one thing, we’ve learned over the past few years it’s that we can’t go on this way.  So, a kind of marketing that continues to push us to buy more and more has little future. A kind of marketing that, instead, allows us to tune into demand, make the right products, make profit to invest in research and development and express the meaning of these products, making us feel better, that’s a good kind of marketing, which can support companies in their innovation processes. The father of management, Peter Drucker, said that the business enterprise has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. All the rest are costs. On my recent TED talk, I mentioned the word harmony, Harmonia was the daughter of the god of war and the goddess of love, who therefore reconciled two opposites. That’s what marketing should do: help businesses reconcile the many opposites between ethics and profit, long and short term, product duration, there are many opposites to reconcile. It’s not by chance the TED Talk was called: How to become a marketing superhero».