Marco Milani is having his picture taken, and he is very keen that the shiny new washing machine behind him should not get into the photograph. Not that he’s worried about being upstaged by a domestic appliance, but he’s convinced that his competitors will study the design with a magnifying glass if it appears in the paper.
“I trust you 100pc but there is 18 months work here,” he shouts at the photographer as he makes his way out of the door. This may seem like paranoia, but then Milani, who is now 49, has made a career out of white boxes that clean, heat, and cool.
As chief executive officer of Merloni Elettrodomestici UK, he controls two brands that many of us have in our kitchen – Indesit and Hotpoint. It’s a subsidiary of an Italian company, but it has a 28pc share of the British market. Washing machine design is a cut-throat business, apparently, and he doesn’t want his best ideas being stolen.
I don’t think I’m giving away any trade secrets if I say that the new machine looks pretty much like all the old ones, with more knobs on. Milani, however, reckons that the new style will help us to love our domestic equipment a bit more.
“The challenge is making the purchase of the appliances more emotional than rational,” he says. “Do I love appliances? No I don’t. I love the job of making them sexy.
“When you buy a washing machine it is because the old one is broken and you need a new one immediately. When you buy a car you buy magazines and study the performance and the brands. I love the challenge of making white goods exciting.”
Britain is probably not ready for a monthly What Washing Machine? magazine quite yet, but somehow the comments sound a lot more plausible coming from an Italian. His accent manages to make the most mundane domestic cooker sound sexy, and even when he starts mimicking a washing machine on spin cycle it doesn’t sound ridiculous.
Sadly, this isn’t Naples, it’s Peterborough, and Milani is no Armani-clad smooth talker. When asked how his colleagues would describe him he says “a mess”, and his haircut is certainly more reminiscent of a shoe-shine brush than anything Toni and Guy would recommend.
However, his views on food are Italian through and through, and he explains that he moved to a village near Peterborough “because it is my dream to go home for lunch”. “I could do it,” he reckons, although he has only managed it twice this year. “It is only fifteen minutes, and the sandwiches in the vending machine are – I can’t use the right word because it is not polite.
“The canteen here is quite good if you want to eat Yorkshire pudding with . . . what do you call it . . . gravy, but I see people putting seventy three different things on the same plate. In our Moscow office you can always get mozzarella.”
Sounds like the canteen is next on his list for modernisation, but it’s not surprising that he hasn’t got round to it yet. Merloni has only run Hotpoint for 18 months, when it bought a controlling stake from Marconi (the rest is still owned by General Electric of America, but Merloni has an option to buy it in stages).
Milani admits that when he arrived he found a brand that was perceived as old-fashioned, but insists that the company was basically sound.
“It was like a fire that you leave in your fireplace, for a few hours and when you come back it is not working anymore. It looks dead, but you blow it a bit and it starts again. There was just a bit of ash on it covering the flame.”
He has had plenty of experience of relighting such fires, having worked at Merloni since 1980 as the company integrated acquisitions in markets including Russia and Eastern Europe. Since he joined the family-controlled company as a graduate trainee it has transformed itself, incorporating new corporate governance structures and pushing out family involvement.
Only the slightly scary-looking bust of the company’s founder Aristide Merloni gives you any indication that Hotpoint is controlled by one of Italy’s most powerful families, or indeed that it is Italian at all.
That’s fine by Milani, who says that since most of the 6,000 employees here are British and are producing products for the British market there is no reason why he should shout about it. He says there is no point manufacturing washing machines elsewhere because they are so heavy to move about that any cost savings on labour would be wiped out.
In fact, he is passionate about British manufacturing and the company has invested large amounts in a new call centre and in its four factories in Peterborough, Stoke on Trent, Yate and North Wales. In June, on the day of Gordon Brown’s “not yet” verdict on the euro, the company announced a £15m investment in one of its four factories.
This was seized upon by the pro-pound lobby as a demonstration that staying out of the euro would not stop investment in Britain, but he insists it was a coincidence. “It is absolutely necessary for Britain to join the euro,” he adds. “Britain is a very attractive place to invest, but this is about the stability of investments.
“In terms of practicality for day-to-day life, Britain is the best place to live. Things are quite well organised”. Except, it seems, the Ryanair and Easyjet flights to Italy, which he takes almost every weekend.
“I don’t understand why cheap means unpolite. It doesn’t make any sense. It is possible to be a cheap airline and people can be really nice. Some of them are, but some of them are unacceptable.”
Of course he sees the rest of the Merloni team when he goes back to Italy, but the real reason is his son, who lives in Trieste. When I ask about his family, his natural expansiveness comes to an abrupt end. “Do you want to know really?” he mutters, folding his arms and looking at his watch.
It transpires that he has two children, his eleven-year-old son who lives with his second wife, and a 19-year-old daughter at Rome University who lives with his first wife.
Milani himself lives with his “partner”, although he occasionally refers to her as his wife, and a large number of motorcycles. Because his work is “his life”, he says he has few hobbies apart from looking at white goods in department stores. He has even had to give up windsurfing, which used to be one of his favourite things.
“I went once to the seaside on the East Coast. We parked the car and there were some dunes. We climbed on top of them, and there was no sea because it was low tide. The tide in Mediterranean is around three centimetres so you don’t notice. I went there and the sea had gone away. It was absolutely incredible. I never went back.”
That’s enough personal details, apparently, and he is keen to take me on a tour of the fridge factory, which is on the same site as the head office. Milani strides round the factory opening doors, peering into machinery and explaining that the Peterborough plant had just received extra investment before Merloni bought its stake in the business.
The warm room, where fridges are tested in extreme conditions, is a welcome respite from the freezing temperatures, but Milani is disturbed to see some reject fridges, thanks to faulty seals. “Why is this happening?” he asks the man in charge, coming across as a boss who is not going to suffer shoddy work gladly.
Back in the visitor’s centre, which is a bit like a large branch of Comet, he’s opening and shutting oven doors and showing off new features on the appliances. They are all very attractive, but I’m still not convinced that he’s fulfilled his brief – after all, how do you make a washing machine sexy?
“If you know it, I wish you would tell me,” Milani says, shrugging elaborately. Maybe he needs to launch that new washing machine magazine after all. He could call it Suds Law.
From money.telegraph