belong to everyone
Become what you are
Freeing oneself from social conventions, leaving a mark on society, conveying one’s own values to the community: those are the essential elements distinguishing happy people. Or, at least, those who are brave enough to look for their own happiness, being aware that only through the journey to self-awareness one can truly be helpful to others.
The spirit of community and the will to leave a mark are the elements dreamers have in common in their experiences. It is the same spirit driving the recovery of the new-born Italian Republic, of a country that wanted to leave behind itself the wreckage of the Second World War. Where everything had to be rebuilt and starting again over and over was a daily business, together with dreaming outside the box. Among those dreamers there was Vittorio Tadei, a man who listened to his inner voice, the Jiminy Cricket that pushed him to trust his most hidden passions. So, the boy who grew up during the postwar years of deprivation looked at the clothing stores as an opportunity to give people small daily dreams: he turned them into shops of happiness at hand, with truly affordable fashionable items he wanted for anyone.
His Teddy proves that it is possible to fulfil a Dream and make it part of everyday life. He did it, being born in the middle of 1930s, in the town of Rimini destroyed by the bombings, as a child of the will of redemption marking his generation. He was the sixth of seven children, but did not follow in his father’s footsteps as a railway worker, choosing to study to become an accountant. However, he was struck by the chameleonic, exotic and night humanness animating Rimini Riviera at the beginning of 1960s, a destination for international tourists. He then unexpectedly found his own meaning entering the clothing store in viale Dante, in Riccione, where he started to help his sisters Adele and Berta when he was 24. Working from 8am to 2am Vittorio started to understand that was his way: “He soon fell in love. Neither with a salesgirl, nor with a German tourist. He fell in love with the job”.
This professional and life experience proves that finding a meaning and pursuing it in everyday life is possible. For him the source of inspiration was the story of great suffering and humanity of his son: “I wrote Teddy Dream, but Gigi inspired me, his sufferings inspired me. Teddy Dream is to build up a large and global company that earns much money, enough to have the means to expand it, to give job and to use, every year, a part of the net profits to help weaker people thanks to charities operating in Italy and abroad. The Dream is to build up a company where, thanks to their job, young people and even less young are able to give a meaning to their own life”.
Thanks to the Dream, inspired by Gigi, Teddy became a driving force in postwar Italy, the opportunity for affordable fashion for all, the glimpse of freedom for Eastern European people. Vittorio with his Teddy managed to be innovative, to ride the change while keeping the identity of a family company.
“Throughout my life I would not worry about how much to earn, but I would only be myself, be happy. So, it was. I have never been worried about making money, but only to build something beautiful and great, something to give a job to people and help others suffering from hardship, inside and outside Teddy”. This is the ground for the meaning searched and found by Tadei, a modern Pygmalion who shaped a company showing its distinct identity still today, which, however, at the same time feels familiar and citizen of the world.
The starting point to be truly happy is to listen to yourself. A virtuous circle therefore starts from this that tunes with the dreams and the wishes of other people, as to create the harmony resounding in real, community projects. The same harmony we feel resounding in the educational revolution of the Italian priest Don Milani, who thanks to his school in Barbiana gave everybody the opportunity to look at the world through different eyes, in order to understand that the power of education and training lies within each one of us. A good teacher must be able to identify the inner “fire” and keep it lit.
Behind the success of a company founded more than fifty years ago there is the “fire” of Tadei, who always fueled it and whose origin he himself dates back to two moments of his childhood. “Since I was a child”, Vittorio says, “there have been two sentences that have always been with me […]. I read the first when I was 13, among the wreck of my bombed house in Via Abruzzo. While walking through the rubble on an afternoon in 1948, I found an opened book on which I read: “Man is an administrator of the goods he is given and not the owner”. […] I read the second sentence on a wall in a convent nearby Pistoia […] “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?””.
All those aspects coexist in the experience of Vittorio Tadei. His internal “sculpture” shows the shapes of one who had the strength of never feeling alone: “We are not alone; we really have a ‘senior partner’ thanks to whom everything is possible”.