“Passers-by looked down at this shop with curiosity and banter. What could be the commercial reach of a business exclusively or almost exclusively based on handles? What a bizarre idea, they thought. But this on the contrary was the outcome of a lengthy reflection based on a process of study and research that convinced me that over time, specialization would be an increasingly key asset.”
Ida Bazzi

Poignee was inaugurated in 1967, from an inspired intuition conceived by Ida Bazzi, an intellectual-entrepreneur from Rome who transformed her love for art history, design and architecture into artisanal knowledge specialized in the making of handles, opening a first shop in the centre of Rome, no.10 Via Bocca di Leone.
Her studies in French-speaking Switzerland, her many travels, her passion for foreign languages and her European background, induced Ida to give her store a French name, Poignee, handle, expressing her wish to create a new and original place where people could find artisanal objects resonating with that fine taste, refinement, attention, and cultural flair that always characterized Ida’s life. An all-handle shop, an apparently extravagant and risky idea that the founder developed with that determination and dedication that belong only to those restless spirits who are capable of envisioning the future with imagination and pragmatism. Almost forty years ahead of time, in the 1960s Ida Bazzi knew that the market of the future would be about specialization and craftsmanship, qualities that would become synonymous with sartorial customer-oriented excellence.

“Poignee is a to-go-to place for great architects, artists, as well as for retail customers. Our shop is like a window open onto the world, where our qualified clientele can expect quality in terms of production and service. What we are able to draw from this constant exchange we then translate into our business, into our production.”
Roberta Borra Cinque

Following Ida’s premature death, the activity passed into the hands of her young daughter Roberta. Staying true to her mother’s passion and philosophy of “producing Italian hand-made objects, translating great artisanal quality and the highest consideration of the customer’s needs”, with her husband Alessandro’s support Roberta was able to transform Poignee injecting it with a great entrepreneurial and productive vision. From being an artisanal workshop, Poignee soon became a factory of Italian excellence, a point of reference both nationally and internationally in the fields of handle production, designer objects, and customized and made to measure interior design accessories.
The historical shop in Via Bocca di Leone expanded in Via Capo le Case, also in Rome’s city centre, and the first part of the plant in Pomezia was inaugurated – an industrial plant that would in the future expand. The activity during that first stage focused on the development and growth of production, renewing the production processes and specializing in the working and processing of new and different metals, such as aluminium, steel, bronze, Plexiglas and brass of course, for the production of handles and other elements of interior design.

“Our priority was to establish a dialogue between different skills, techniques and materials. Therefore today, besides home accessories, in our art-focused foundry and micro-foundry labs, we also create glass panes, mosaics, and carry out restoration interventions also working with new materials and the latest resins”.
Alessandro Cinque

On its fiftieth anniversary, Poignee was still growing. It took over Domusdei, the time-honoured art foundry specialized in lost-wax and flask casting specialized in sacred art, consequently expanding its range of production. This was a great cultural and mind-set shift that led the family and the business to experiment with artistic production and various artistic disciplines, meeting high standards of aesthetic and productive excellence, aspects that play an increasingly important role in the context of today’s Italian economy, expertise, and quality on an international level.
In the meantime, Ottavio, the firstborn, in his early twenties, a football player who since his childhood had familiarized with the company’s knowhow and his parents’ passion, founded Blor Company, an innovative business that taking advantage of e-commerce potential, launched on the international market a line of sports equipment and clothing.
The second-born Ginevra is currently studying: her interests are marketing and communication and she is preparing to make her entry into the family business to carry out a digital revolution to expand its market, product promotion, logistics, and product placement.

“Dostoyevsky said that beauty will save the world, and all these years’ experience working in this company have taught us that the only imaginable future is that based on investing on flexibility and multidisciplinary skills, with no fear of change, innovation, failure.
Like all parents, we wish the younger generations, our own kids as well as the many young people working with us, will continue what we have initiated. But for us this can happen only provided that at Poingee they always find an inclusive, lively and stimulating environment, where they can experiment, invent, and discover who they are. Innovation and tradition for us have never been two opposites. Innovation is not about creating something new, but about keeping up and renewing a tradition.”
Roberta e Alessandro Cinque

The name Poignee tells a significant story of an Italian family business, today led by Roberta and Alessandro who are the two to-go-to persons in the company. Their ambitious effort – fuelled by professional passion and love for their work, and by a concept of family revolving around their children and all the people working in the company, who are considered the true capital of the future – is to create a working environment that is a foundry of ideas, combining the long-standing experience acquired via the creativity of the excellent artisans, architects, and designers Poignee involves in the creation of each product. Designers, artisans, and suppliers are active and valuable components of Poignee, a time-honoured artisan workshop has now established itself as a fabrique creative looking with trust and confidence to the present and future: a reliable entrepreneurial culture, bound to its territory, at the service of Italian and international contemporary projects.