The people behind the brand: 150 years of Fiocchi

Ask Hannah Gibson, commercial business manager at Fiocchi UK, what a 150-year anniversary actually means – and she does not reach first for cartridges. She thinks of people. “When you think of 150 years for any company,” she says, “and when you think of the world wars, the economic turmoil, the pandemics, so many things that have happened – for any company to survive is impressive.” Fiocchi, founded in Lecco in 1876 and marking the milestone this year under the banner Legacy in Motion, has survived all of it. The question is how.

The answer they keep returning to is not a clever product or a lucky break but the breadth of people it has taken on. “We are a company of shooters – there’s a lot of us here that shoot,” says Hannah. “But that doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful. You need people in the engineering department who are passionate engineers, people in production who are passionate about production, world-class accountants, lawyers. You need every sector to be really passionate about what they’re doing.”

A family still in the building

Part of what gives the claim weight is that the founding family has never left. Five generations on, Fiocchis remain in senior positions within the group. James Rose, chief executive of Fiocchi UK, shines a spotlight on the youngest of them, fifth-generation Leonardo Fiocchi, who is said to have worked in every department of the manufacturing business in order to understand the product completely. “It’s really quite nice that they still have that passion and that desire to be significant,” James says. For a sector that prizes continuity and provenance, the image of a fifth-generation heir learning the trade on the shop floor is a powerful one.

That sense of access to living history is being captured in a handsome book, produced for the anniversary, that traces the company’s 150 years. Hannah describes it as the kind of volume that makes you realise quite how far Fiocchi’s reach extends – how many sectors it touches and how many shooters use its products, often without knowing it, because the company also supplies components to others. Even a shooter loyal to another brand, she notes, is very likely firing Fiocchi parts.

A historic firm inside a new group

The latest chapter of the people story is the company’s place, since 2022, within the Czechoslovak Group, the international industrial holding that now owns it. It is the kind of change that can unsettle a long-established business, and the UK team is candid that there was some apprehension about how culture and day-to-day life might shift. Their account of how it has actually played out is striking for its warmth. The group, they say, runs to more than 100 businesses, and the expertise that opens up is considerable; there is a deliberate push to connect teams across the group, with training, joint projects and shared dinners, so that the synergies are used rather than merely talked about. The leadership describes the group’s owner, Michal Strnad, in glowing terms – hard-working, committed and demanding in equal measure – and credits him with setting a tone that encourages everyone to raise their game.

If that sounds like the gloss a company puts on its new parent, the team’s instinct for relationships predates the takeover. James talks about the importance of getting people physically together – of sitting down with a drink and a meal to solve the problems that an email or a video call never quite will, especially with Italian colleagues – and says the firm hosts and visits sister operations across Europe almost fortnightly. It is an old-fashioned, deeply human way to run a business, and a revealing one for a sector that still values a handshake and a shared lunch.

Made, not assembled

That last point opens onto the thing Fiocchi is proudest of, and the thing that most distinguishes it from its rivals: it makes its own components, from raw material to finished round. Powders, primers, cases, bullets and shells are produced in-house rather than bought in. “We’re making from raw material to finished product,” James says. “We’re in control of all of those processes.” It is why, he argues, Fiocchi can sometimes undercut a competitor’s equivalent without cutting quality – because the competitor is buying its components from one of the few firms that make them, and Fiocchi is that firm.

There is a craftsman’s pride in this that fits the Fieldsports reader. Owning the propellant means owning the burn rate; owning the primer means owning the ignition. It is the ammunition equivalent of a gunmaker who forges his own barrels, and it becomes especially significant in a moment when the whole industry is being asked to reinvent its loads.

The shop floor meets the shooting field

The most telling story the UK team tells is not about a product at all. When Fiocchi UK first took a stand at the British Shooting Show, it had nothing to sell there – the company supplies gun shops rather than the public, so the stand was a shop window, not a sales floor, and an expensive one. What it bought instead was contact with the end user. So in the second year, the firm did something unusual: it brought its production staff along.

“These are the men and women who are making the ammunition,” James explains, “and then you’ve got the people shooting it, and we’re the bridge in the middle.” Most of the machine operators and warehouse staff are not shooters themselves; they watch millions of rounds go out of the door without ever seeing where they end up. Putting them face to face with the shooters who depend on their work, James says, left the production team “absolutely blown away at the passion of the shooter.” The company now runs screens on the factory floor showing competition results, and offers production-floor staff the chance to go shooting so they understand the small details that matter. When Fiocchi UK won an industry award this year, James made sure the factory supervisor was there to collect it. “It’s not our award as salespeople,” he says. “Those guys made that product.”

The next chapter

A heritage piece could end there, on the warm note of a family firm and its loyal hands. But Fiocchi’s team is clear that 150 years is being treated as a springboard, not a victory lap, and the springboard is the move away from lead. The company sees the coming transition – which its readers will know in detail already – as the next great test of the same adaptability that carried it through the previous century and a half.

Hannah’s framing is striking for its optimism. “It’s a really exciting opportunity to discover new things,” she says of the non-toxic challenge, describing new materials and new powders coming out of the research programme. None of it, she stresses, would be possible without the breadth of expertise the company has spent 150 years assembling – and which has lately been widened further through Fiocchi’s place, since 2022, within a large international industrial group.

That is the thread that ties the anniversary together. The product will change; the lead that has defined shooting for generations will give way to steel and other metals. What the company is betting will not change is the thing it credits for its survival in the first place: the right people, passionate about their corner of the work, lined up to solve the next problem. After 150 years, it is a bet with a solid track record behind it.