Mario
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
""Everything moves, everything runs, everything spins quickly. A figure is never stable before us, but appears and disappears incessantly," reads the Futurism Manifesto that captures the spirit of the times, the Zeitgeist in which two brothers, Mario and Martino, open a shop destined to make history: Fratelli Prada."
"While Arturo Toscanini returns to La Scala with a concert that attests to the desire to start again, the collapsed walls on the monumental entrance arches of Mengoni's opera are being rebuilt. Underneath, Mario and Martino try to restart with a store that they try to adapt to new needs: luxury, exotic leathers, and fine silverware are not the priority, functional suitcases and "useful" objects are needed, a word that will become dear to their niece, Miuccia."
"Mario was maniacally engaged in the search for fabrics and leathers. Leather, for example, is bought from the best European suppliers."
"I still had a driver in New York named Mario. Sweet Mario was kind and gracious; everyone loved him for good reason—and, it turned out, for other reasons, too. While driving me from the front seat of the car, he had his own business going on in the trunk. It was only after I left Paramount and gave him up as my driver that a friend told me what had been going on behind my dim back. Apparently, Mario had been one of the prime cocaine dealers in New York, particularly to all my friends. I always wondered why they insisted that Mario drop me off first after our nights out. Once I left, Mario would open his trunk and deal out the drugs."
"We transformed the traditional brokerage business model by capitalizing on the intersection of two big, advantageous trends: the shift toward using truck brokers as middlemen, and the efficiencies of automated services in an industry where that was not yet the norm. If I was to sum up the genesis of XPO, GXO, and RXO, it would be the vision I shared with Mario in my living room in 2011: Automate everything you can. The importance of that, within the context of this chapter, is that we got the big trend right in our industry a dozen years ago, when it was far less apparent than it is today."