The Scaglia family were skilled woodwork craftsmen (bobbins, button moulds); from the Imagna Valley, on the Alps north of Bergamo, they moved to Brembilla in late 1700. Three generations later in 1868, one of them, Martino, moved to Milan. The main city of Lombardia at that time was the most important market in the whole Italian peninsula, as well as a rapidly growing economic and cultural center. In Milano, Martino trained his two sons in his craft: Stefano was put in charge of production and Martino of sales.
During the early years of the last century, up to the beginning of the Great War, the market for wooden bobbins, spools and pulleys kept growing, so Stefano returned to his home town, Brembilla, where he established a larger production unit in a new building, that was in the next years enlarged and renewed several times and today is still the major production site of Scaglia group.
The company’s attitude towards innovation was immediately apparent: the factory was equipped with cutting-edge machinery for the time, and in 1911 patented a mechanism that doubled the operating speed of the lathes. This aptitude for innovation would promptly re-emerge in the years after the Second World War when a technological revolution began, which would lead to the upheaval of production methods and materials for Scaglia products.
