Valextra

Valextra was founded in 1937 in Milan by Italian designer Giovanni Fontana as a small Italian luxury-leather-goods manufacturer specifically focused on producing technically-engineered leather travel-trunks, briefcases, and luxury small-leather-goods for the Italian and international luxury-customer community. The brand has been continuously operating from the same Milan atelier for over 85 years and is one of the longest-continuously-operating Italian luxury-leather-goods brands still operating under its founding name. The Valextra vocabulary settled around several specific products: the iconic Valextra Iside top-handle leather handbag (the brand's defining 2010-pattern product — a deliberately-architectural top-handle handbag that became one of the defining post-2010 Italian-luxury handbag-conversation products), the Valextra Brera briefcase programme (a defining 1990s-pattern leather-briefcase product), the Valextra travel-trunk and small-leather-goods programmes, the iconic Valextra coloured-leather palette (the brand has been continuously focused on saturated-coloured-leather construction in unusual contemporary colour combinations), and a colour palette anchored to washed-cream leather, oxblood, washed-charcoal leather, ecru, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, royal-blue, marigold-yellow, washed-rose, and the iconic Italian-luxury-leather-aesthetic accent combinations. Production is entirely Italian at the Milan atelier. The brand is owned by NEO Investment Partners (the British private-investment partner that acquired Valextra in 2013). Valextra operates flagship retail in Milan (Via Manzoni — the brand's home flagship since 1937; Via Montenapoleone), Rome, Paris (Avenue Montaigne), London (Sloane Street), New York (Madison Avenue), Tokyo (Aoyama, Ginza), Hong Kong, Shanghai, plus extensive wholesale through Net-a-Porter, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Mytheresa, Bergdorf Goodman, the major US-and-European luxury department stores, and the broader Asian-luxury-customer distribution. The brand has been one of the longest-continuously-operating Italian-luxury-leather-goods brands.