«Sometimes the real challenge is creating your own moment», an interview with Barbara Bertelli and Barbara Pigola Founders of the Milan-based agency BertelliPigola

The story of BertelliPigola, a Milan-based communication agency founded in 2015 by Barbara Pigola and Barbara Bertelli, began by coincidence. Its success, however- as demonstrated by the ten years of continuous growth it has just celebrated - is anything but accidental. The two founders tell us about it in their spaces on via Passione, just a few days before the start of Milan Design Week, recalling the beginnings of their careers and the qualities that distinguish them in the fashion, jewelry, hospitality, beauty, interior design, and food&drink industries.

They met in the early 2000s, when Barbara Bertelli had started an internship at the luxury company where Barbara Pigola worked. The founders of BertelliPigola became friends even before collaborators. With extremely different personalities, as they themselves recount -  «I am more precise and determined in achieving goals, while Barbara [Bertelli] is highly reactive and has an open vision toward creativity and communication scenarios» - and therefore perfectly complementary, they remained by each other’s side even when the geography of their lives separated them, with Pigola moving to Paris and Bertelli returning to Arezzo, in Tuscany. Only in 2015, when Pigola was contacted by Simonetta Ravizza to manage the brand’s communication at both an international and Italian level (the latter later entrusted to Bertelli), did their first real collaboration begin. «It was a series of classic coincidences that happen in life, where you find yourself riding the wave that comes», they recall together.

From 2015 to today, BertelliPigola’s work has shown constant sensitivity to the evolution of the working world, even anticipating trends that only emerged in Milan several years later. With a «fluid» approach, as the two founders define it, the agency did not have a physical space until 2018, the year in which their collaboration with Chopard began. «We have been smart workers from the very beginning, it’s something that has always defined us and that was only understood years later, with Covid», they explain, emphasising that not everyone at the time understood that this flexibility was an added value for the company. «Some believed in us from the start, but the early years were key in making it understood». Bertelli and Pigola’s foresight in this regard is confirmed by their team: a group of ten people - «some of whom have grown with us from the beginning» - with different levels of experience but united by the same fluid approach that has shaped the agency.

Having overcome the challenge of introducing a dynamic working method in Italy - one not necessarily tied to limiting structures (both in terms of space and hierarchy) - Bertelli and Pigola have become advocates of two concepts they emphasised during our conversation: care and kindness. «At the beginning, we chose the challenging path of working with smaller brands, which needed dedicated attention» - a risk that ultimately rewarded the agency, leading to prestigious collaborations with names such as the aforementioned Chopard and internationally relevant independent brands like Lessico Familiare. Moreover, Bertelli and Pigola say they have never felt the need to conceal their work out of fear of plagiarism or jealousy; on the contrary, collaborating with external partners and listening to colleagues’ perspectives has allowed the agency to «find different interpretations and sometimes identify the missing piece we needed».

However, care, kindness, and the fluid approach discussed so far are not the only qualities that have helped the two founders establish their agency in the complex and competitive Milanese design landscape. It has also required strategy and maturity, two qualities they have both demonstrated from the outset. Aware that they are facing a year full of challenges for the design industry, the founders are preparing their agency accordingly. «First and foremost, clarity of mind is essential; we operate in a fast-moving world that demands a lot in a short time. We prefer to create a balance that respects current dynamics».

To build a system that preserves the agency’s creativity while keeping pace with the industry’s need for increasingly rapid responses, Bertelli and Pigola are providing their employees with access to monitoring platforms - «beyond the various artificial intelligences» - and new technologies that will allow the entire team to focus on what is most valuable: ideas. «Sometimes the real challenge is creating your own moment, which takes time. We have provided analytical tools and trained the whole team to use them. It’s a major investment, but it gives us more time to think, which is the most important thing».

On the eve of Design Week, we cannot avoid mentioning Kartell, a Milan-based design brand that, despite having more than 70 years of history, is one of the freshest and most youthful brands today. Managed for special events for the past four years by BertelliPigola, Kartell has been able to recognise, before its competitors, the connections between fashion, design, and food. Whether it is fashion, beauty, jewelry, lifestyle, or design, the winning formula for the two founders is always the same: «working on the client’s potential, on the brand’s storytelling, and above all being absolutely credible». Easier said than done—and perhaps easier done as well—with the proven readiness of Bertelli and Pigola, “the Barbaras.”