Leonardo Del Vecchio, businessman whose eyewear empire made him one of the world’s richest men – obituary

Leonardo Del Vecchio, who has died in Milan aged 87, rose from humble beginnings in an orphanage to become one of the richest people in the world; he was described as probably the greatest Italian entrepreneur of the 20th century.

He turned a workshop called Luxottica that made parts for spectacles, which he opened in 1961 in the small Alpine town of Agordo in the Veneto, into a global colossus employing 80,000 people.

Luxottica manufactures, distributes and retails many of the world’s most famous eyewear brands such as Persol, Vogue, Oakley, Ray-Ban and Costa del Mar. It has 60 factories and more than 9,000 retail outlets worldwide which include Sunglass Hut, Lenscrafters, Pearle Vision, John Lewis Opticians and OPSM.

It also makes many leading designer sunglass brands under licence including Armani, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry and Prada.

In 2018, Luxottica merged with the equally huge French company, Essilor, the world’s largest lens manufacturer, to become EssilorLuxottica, employing 180,000 people with a then combined value estimated at £49 billion. Del Vecchio owned a controlling share in EssiLux – as it is known – via his Luxembourg-based holding company Delfin.

EssiLux sells nearly a billion pairs of lenses and frames a year and has an astonishing 30 per cent share of the market.

According to Forbes magazine, Del Vecchio was worth £22.4 billion when he died, making him the 52nd richest person in the world and the second richest in Italy, behind Giovanni Ferrero (Nutella, Ferrero Rocher) – but ahead of the media tycoon and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is Italy’s fourth richest, and a pauper by comparison, worth just £5.1 billion.

Giorgio Armani – Italy’s third-richest person according to Forbes – was the first fashion designer for whom Luxottica made sunglasses in 1988 and became a major shareholder. He tweeted: “I’ve lost a friend, first, and a companion in this long professional adventure. Your passing afflicts me deeply.”

Yet when Del Vecchio died, few Italians had heard of him. And though it is very difficult to do business in Italy without breaking the law, he was never charged with any crime or linked to the Mafia. He was never involved in politics, nor did he even publicly express a political opinion.

Leonardo Del Vecchio was born on May 22 1935 in a working-class district of Milan. His parents were from the small coastal city of Barletta in poverty-stricken Puglia on the heel of Italy. He was the youngest of four children, and his father, who had a cart from which he sold fruit and vegetables, died just before his birth.

In 1942, when he was seven, and at the height of the Second World War, his mother was forced to place him in an orphanage because, as she explained on the application form, her son spent each day in a state of “complete abandon”. The orphanage was the most famous in Milan – the Martinitt – and like a tough but well-run British boarding school. “It was my good fortune because the college became my family,” he would recall.

Aged 15, he left the orphanage because he wanted to work. His mother gave him a bicycle which he used to look for a job, eventually being taken on as an apprentice in a Milan factory that made medals, brooches and trophies; there he learnt engraving. After work he did a course in design, and unlike other children spent what little free time he had studying.

He married the first girl he fell in love with, Luciana Nervo, who gave birth to his first child, Claudio, in 1957, and a year later, with the help of one of the engravers at the factory, he opened his own workshop in Milan making plastic parts for spectacles.

Then in 1961, with two clients as backers, he moved the business to Agordo, in the province of Belluno, which was the centre of Italy’s spectacle and sunglass industry. The council in the little town in the Dolomites was offering free premises to attract new businesses, and he employed 14 people.

His timing could not have been better as Italy, after the devastation caused by its disastrous experiment with fascism, was on the verge of five years of explosive economic growth known as the “economic miracle” that would see GDP rise by an average 6 per cent a year.

Del Vecchio was among the first to realise the huge business potential of transforming glasses from a necessary, often embarrassing, medical device, into a highly desirable must-have fashion accessory.

In 1967, he began to make his own Luxottica glasses, but in 1969 he almost went bust when his bank manager refused him an overdraft and the word got out that he was going bankrupt. Luckily, the manager of another bank had faith in him and granted him the vital overdraft which he used to keep the business afloat and buy out his two partners. Today a computer algorithm would no doubt have turned him down.

The overdraft also enabled him to present his first collection of glasses, which proved a big success in 1971 at the new Milan Mido trade fair that would soon become the rapidly growing industry’s most important trade show.

Del Vecchio typified the kind of small Italian businessman who created an incredible range of beautiful products in the 1960s and 1970s that would make “Made in Italy” a global byword for quality and flair.

But a small business was nowhere near enough for Del Vecchio. As he once said: “I’ve always strived to be the best at everything I do, that’s it.” He added: “I could never get enough.”

He disagreed with the “small is beautiful” mantra, he said, because it gave Italians, famous for their small, family-run businesses, an illusory sense of superiority that blocked the changes necessary to make them world-beaters.

Unlike them, he had an unquenchable thirst to expand his business until he controlled every aspect of the making and selling of glasses and sunglasses.

Shy and secretive, he avoided social occasions such as parties, and refused prizes because he hated flattery and being in the limelight. He hardly ever gave interviews and there are relatively few photographs of him in the public domain.

On one occasion, he explained: “I’ve always said no to all those who asked me to tell them my story. In this country if you become rich it’s assumed you’re a thief.”

On others, he mentioned “fortuna” (luck) and “volontà” (will) as the secrets of his success. Others speak of his “simplicity”, his ability to cut through the trees to see the wood, and his loyalty to staff.

His only biographer, the Bloomberg journalist Tommaso Ebhardt, said at the presentation in May 2022 of his book: “The difficulty with this book has been to tell the story of a man who does not want it told.”

It was in 1974 that Del Vecchio began his journey to global domination when he bought an Italian eyewear distribution company. In 1981, he opened his first international subsidiary, in Germany. In 1988, with Armani, he struck the first of many deals with the leading fashion houses to make their eyewear.

But it was in 1990, when he listed Luxottica on the New York Stock Exchange, that it began to enjoy the explosive growth that would make it the largest producer and distributor of glasses in the world; its share capital enabled it to buy Vogue Eyewear, Persol, LensCrafters, Ray-Ban and Sunglass Hut within little more than 10 years.

A good eyewear frame costs only about £5, a designer quality frame not much more – about £12 – and yet the price charged in the shops for a pair of glasses or sunglasses can be as much as 1000 per cent higher than that. “I know. It’s ridiculous. It’s a complete rip-off,” Dean Butler, founder of LensCrafters, bought by Del Vecchio in 1995, told the Los Angeles Times in 2019.

That Del Vecchio was able to convince people to buy his glasses and sunglasses regardless of such obscene mark-ups is yet more proof of his extraordinary genius.

He used some of his immense fortune to become the largest shareholder in the investment bank Mediobanca, and one of the largest in Generali, Italy’s biggest insurance company, plus a 13 per cent share in Luxembourg’s state airline, Luxair.

He had homes in Milan, Monte Carlo – where he spent much of his time and kept his 62-metre yacht Moneikos – and Antigua. But he carried on wheeling and dealing until the day he died, though in later life he did admit: “I’ve only got one real regret. I always thought first about work ... I’ve spent little time with my children.”

Del Vecchio, who married three times, had six children. With his first wife he had two daughters and a son, but they divorced in the 1990s. He was 62 when in 1997 he married Nicoletta Zampillo, a 38-year-old Milanese divorcee, two years after she had borne him a son.

He and Nicoletta Zampillo, who was the daughter of a member of Luxottica’s original sales force, divorced in 2000 when Del Vecchio began an affair with Sabrina Grossi, a Luxottica investment adviser, with whom he had two sons, in 2001 and 2004, but never married.

Then in 2010 he remarried Nicoletta Zampillo, who had meanwhile sold the matrimonial home she had received in her divorce settlement – a spectacular 1920s Liberty-style palace in Milan – for £20 million.

She now inherits 25 per cent of Delfin, the Luxembourg holding company, and the six children 12.5 per cent each.

But Del Vecchio deliberately excluded his children and their mothers from roles at the heart of his business empire. And to ensure continuity after his death he also stipulated that even though they own the parent company they cannot take any executive decision unless they reach near-unanimous agreement – 88 per cent – nor can they change the management team, or sack his two closest advisers, who have contracts for life.

Leonardo Del Vecchio, born May 22 1935, died June 27 2022