Ownership Luxardo Family
Headquarters Torreglia, Italy
Products Spirits, Fruit, Jams
Website luxardo.it
Our Conversation With Them
We met with Luxardo family in 2018, while developing a case study on their approach to scalability. Through a design sprint we developed a bottom-up strategy for new product development.
Luxardo is a family-owned company founded in Zara — a port city now part of the Croatian coast — by Girolamo Luxardo and his wife, Maria Canevari. She started to produce the famous "rosolio maraschino" from a special recipe that convents in Dalmatia used. The high quality of her liqueur led her husband to open the Luxardo distillery in 1821. From that time on, the production remained under the family's control and started a successful and international growth.
The distillery also expanded its variety of products with other fruit- based and herbal liqueurs such as Bitters, Limoncello and Amaro Abano.
After the destructive World War II, in 1947, Giorgio Luxardo wanted to rebuild the distillery in Torreglia, in the outskirts of Padova.
Today, at its seventh generation, the family is still active in the company's manufacturing of classic Italian liqueurs and second line of gourmet liqueur concentrates for bakers and ice cream manufacturers, the Original Maraschino Cherries and premium jams.
Luxardo production is characterized by two different faces: the pure artisanal façade, in which the presence of artisans is fundamental to check that the products compel to the traditional recipes, and the industrial one, which is used to finalize the product and for bottling operations.
The balance between this two approaches leads to a full control on the quality of the product but also to a rise in costs and limits on the production volume.
Moreover, the company is completely family-led: the absence of managers who are not part of the family creates a peculiar organization which pays great attention to tradition and to the relationship with its historical partners Yet, such a peculiarity also generates a much more fossilized structure which encounters limits on the diversification of production processes.
As mentioned, the relation with partners and collaborators is essential to the life of the company. Over the years, Luxardo has built true personal relations with selected distributors, now spread in 80 countries.