Halfway down Italy’s Adriatic flank, inside a bustling factory in the municipality of Montegranaro, car parts are zipping off the production line. Stacked on moveable shelving while awaiting the next step, every piece will be shifted around an open-plan space to different workstations. In one area, people wearing masks are spraying a blue adhesive that will be used to bind the leather upholstery to the panel through a combination of heat and pressure. This plant, which was founded four years ago, might seem like a car manufacturer’s home base. But it actually belongs to Poltrona Frau, a storied design brand that dates back to 1912 and is better known for furnishing living rooms than the insides of sports cars.
“The company has transformed in the past few years,” says senior designer Luca Bellomarì as he takes Monocle on a tour of the buildings. Bellomarì is talking about Poltrona Frau’s In Motion business, which provides pristine leather-wrapped products, including seat covers, for high-end vehicles. While Poltrona Frau is a household name as a maker of sofas and armchairs, collaborating with such design luminaries as Gio Ponti and Pierluigi Cerri, In Motion has been quietly – and rather successfully – working away from the limelight.
Founded as a standalone business division in 1985, In Motion’s first automotive project was on the Lancia Thema, which had a Ferrari engine. Today the business’s client list includes Range Rover, McLaren, Pagani, Lamborghini and Ferrari. But glance inside the leather interior of a Ferrari and you won’t see a Poltrona Frau logo anywhere, even though it has decked out all of its vehicles since 1998. And though automotive is its biggest segment, In Motion also has a footprint in the yachting and aviation sectors.
As Monocle passes workers dressed in Poltrona Frau T-shirts, some of them wearing sweatbands and gloves, Bellomarì explains that In Motion’s biggest shift has been its decision to start supplying what he calls “systems”. Rather than just upholstering pieces sent to Poltrona Frau, the business now makes everything from headliners – a car’s inside roof – to door panels. “We co-design with the original equipment manufacturers,” he says.
Though there’s plenty of powerful machinery at the plant, it’s clear that In Motion fits out vehicles in the same way as the rest of the Poltrona Frau business approaches furniture. That means it wouldn’t be anywhere without skilled artisans stretching, smoothing, cutting and checking the quality of the hides by eye. Red lasers projected onto the leather might help stitchers to maintain a straight line but technology is only intended as an aid to those carrying out the work. “We still work with our hands,” says Bellomarì. “This is something that often doesn’t get contemplated in the automotive industry.”
Later in the day of our visit, Monocle leaves Montegranaro for the brand’s headquarters, a short drive away in Tolentino – home to a brand museum designed by Michele de Lucchi. On hand to meet us in its café is Giovanni Maiolo, the general manager of Poltrona Frau In Motion. Maiolo joined the company in 2019 and has been responsible for much of its recent success. “Before our change of business model, we were just the last step in the value chain,” he says. “We have completely transformed our approach and started to work with the customer at the beginning of a project.”
In Motion has the advantage of servicing a luxury car industry in which the vehicles are often limited editions and maintain or increase their value over time. This makes the business largely recession-proof. Demand in the segment outstrips supply and Maiolo says that while there was a global slowdown in the furniture market last year, In Motion has been moving in the opposite direction, with an expected turnover of €120m this year. “We have increased turnover by 100 per cent in five years,” he says. “We are now considered a pillar of the group.”
In Motion is clearly a well-oiled machine – and it has to be in a business where a competitor doing something better or more quickly could lead to the loss of a vital contract. Its leather needs to behave in a different way to furniture upholstery too. Designer Bellomarì talks about it being more rigid and “having a completely different characteristic”. In the boating, car and aviation worlds, Poltrona Frau must strike the right balance between craft and performance. Exactly how hardy it needs to be becomes apparent at a testing lab, where leather is exposed to temperatures ranging from -30C to 115C and put through a stress test of being repeatedly tugged for as many as 100,000 cycles – an attempt to cover all bases for the sorts of extremes that the leather might be exposed to in its lifespan.
Daniele Gardini, the R&D leather manager, says that In Motion has about 10 leather collections and can provide the client with everything from digital printing to microembroidery to complete a custom look. The search for innovation is constant. Gardini says that metallic leather is a recent addition, something that has clearly been borrowed from the fashion-accessory world. One major breakthrough has been Poltrona Frau iBreathe, a product that came out of development in 2024. “We have been working on the lightness of leather,” he says. “Removing 10kg from the weight of a vehicle is a good saving for speed and fuel consumption.” It weighs less because there are wider spaces between the fibres in the fabric. Aesthetically, however, you wouldn’t know the difference.
Innovation is crucial to In Motion’s survival. If a declaration of intent were needed, it came in June 2024 when it bought a majority stake in KJ Ryan, a UK company based in the city of Coventry that makes high-end automotive components. It was Poltrona Frau’s first overseas acquisition. With Italy and the UK producing more than 80 per cent of the world’s luxury cars, it was a shrewd move from In Motion, which has worked in the country since 2007 and has clients including Rolls Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin and Range Rover. “The UK was already a market that we knew in some way,” says Maiolo. “But what we were missing was all the rest – everything connected with the culture.” The plan is to eventually shift more production to Coventry for local clients.
With more than 600 employees now spread between Italy and the UK, In Motion continues to move through the gears, even if its touch, in many ways, remains light. Poltrona Frau doesn’t make a song and dance about the work that it does at In Motion but Maiolo jokes that he needs to start talking about it to keep winning more clients and ensure a resilient future – which he has started to do more now that the “hardware” of the business model is airtight. With it, he hopes that the work of In Motion will soon be as recognised and requested in cars as a Bose stereo or a Brembo braking system. “Our goal is that in five years’ time, when you shop for a luxury car, the first thing you ask when looking inside it is, ‘Is this made by Poltrona Frau?’”
