The visionary creative campaigns that built B&B Italia

Sixty years after its founding, B&B Italia's identity remains as recognisable as many of the furniture pieces it produces. While the Italian furniture company is celebrated for collaborations with designers including Mario Bellini, Gaetano Pesce and Antonio Citterio, it also pioneered an approach that treated graphic design, photography and advertising as extensions of the design process itself.

B&B Italia visionary campaigns

That philosophy began almost immediately. In 1966, founder Piero Ambrogio Busnelli commissioned the young graphic designer Enrico Trabacchi to develop the company's (then known as C&B) corporate identity. It was the beginning of a decade-long collaboration that established the visual language of the company. Rather than following the conventions of furniture advertising, Trabacchi developed campaigns that drew on contemporary graphic design, experimental typography and art photography, reflecting the wider cultural shifts taking place across Italy during the late 1960s and 1970s.

Stefano Casciani, writing in The Long Life of Design in Italy, argues that Trabacchi's ambition was 'to differentiate the image of C&B from the clamour of furniture marketing', at a time when the industry's advertising often lagged behind the innovation of its products.

One of the defining early examples came with the launch of Gaetano Pesce's revolutionary UP armchairs in 1969. Instead of placing the sculptural polyurethane seats within comfortable domestic interiors, Trabacchi collaborated with Swiss photographer Klaus Zaugg to stage them against stark, lunar landscapes that felt closer to science fiction than traditional furniture catalogues. The imagery echoed Pesce's own intentions for the project, transforming a commercial campaign into a visual manifesto about technology, design and social change.

Trabacchi's willingness to challenge convention established an approach that would continue throughout the company's history. Advertising became another arena for experimentation, shaped through close collaborations between designers, photographers and graphic designers rather than marketing departments.

That creative confidence reached a new level with the arrival of a young Oliviero Toscani, whose photography for Mario Bellini's Le Bambole sofa pushed provocation even further. His image of model Donna Jordan reclining topless on the sofa helped redefine the visual language of furniture advertising. Although undeniably influential, it also illustrates how ideas of provocation evolve over time: an image once celebrated for its boldness may now be read as relying on the objectification of the female body.

The company's visual language continued to evolve with each generation. From 1976 until 1995, B&B Italia collaborated with Swiss graphic designers Hans Suter and Fritz Tschirren of agency STZ, whose witty, surreal campaigns treated furniture as actors within carefully scripted narratives rather than static objects. Their dadaist photographic tableaux and a series of 15-second television commercials for RAI in 1985 – among the earliest by an Italian design company – demonstrated that communication could be as playful and experimental as the products themselves.

By the mid-1990s, the emphasis had shifted once again. As B&B Italia expanded into integrated furnishing systems and a global network of flagship stores, its communications increasingly presented complete living environments rather than individual pieces, reinforcing the idea that the brand was selling a way of living as much as furniture itself.

Looking back across six decades, what emerges is not simply a history of memorable advertising, but of a company that regarded communication as another form of design. Graphic designers, photographers and art directors were given the same creative freedom as furniture designers, resulting in campaigns that often proved as influential as the products themselves.

'Today, it is essential to maintain a high level of creativity – one that is also, to some extent, subversive, free, experimental, even avant-garde, however we choose to define it,' reflects Piero Gandini, executive chairman and art director of Flos B&B Italia Group. 'This is precisely what has characterised Italian design, and above all what has created a thread of connection between the public and the brand – one based on respect, but also on a certain degree of affection. And this, in my view, is crucial.'