Training People Before Professionals

Simone Barbaritano is currently responsible for direct Terranova and Calliope stores in the Piedmont area. But when he joined the company in 2017, he was a sales assistant in a newly opened store—one of only two locations Teddy had in the region at the time. An economics student, he thought he had found a convenient job to pay for his studies. It didn't take long for him to realize he was wrong.

"I realized," he says, "that office work and a banking career—the kind people often dream of after graduating in economics—were not for me." In the store, however, he found something different: "Those early years made me realize it was a healthy environment where it was worth investing a significant portion of my life."

When his first promotion arrived, the fear of new responsibilities came with it. "Yes, but I knew I wasn't alone," Simone explains. Giving him confidence was the trust of the company, which saw concrete possibilities for growth: "That trust allowed me to build my own place, step by step. When you feel good where you work, you rarely want to leave."

There is one episode in particular that convinced him to stay: the COVID years, experienced as a store manager. "Stores were closed, communication was sparse simply because nobody knew what would happen." Upon reopening, while hearing about companies cutting staff to save money, his experience at Teddy was the opposite: "We restarted with a level of trust that was hard to find elsewhere at the time. Nobody ever asked us to recover lockdown losses; the focus was entirely on our well-being and our desire to get back in the game." Trust that came even before its time: "They trusted me before I even had the experience to deserve it. At 25 I was a store manager, at 28 a coordinator, and now I manage every aspect of the stores, from safety to new hires. That doesn't happen often, and for that I am deeply grateful."

Today, the responsibility of choosing the right people falls on him. "You have fifteen or twenty minutes to understand who is sitting across from you, and it's an exercise that gets increasingly difficult," Simone says, explaining what he truly looks for in a candidate. Not skills, which "are built together, day by day," but something else: "I look for someone available, positive, bright, and willing to get involved. The rest—technical skills and methods—comes later, and we build it together."

With younger generations, often described as wanting to keep work strictly separate from private life, daily interactions are a given. "It's the topic I work on most with my team," Simone admits. "I myself went through periods where I carried work everywhere, and that's not the solution. You need the awareness that sometimes you can be excessive, and you must know how to distinguish passion from obsession." But behind that distance, he believes, lies a deeper misunderstanding: "Many young people have never had the chance to discover that the world of work can be beautiful, that it can build family, relationships, and belonging. It's up to us to show them." And he is convinced that once this awareness is passed on, the rest follows naturally: "If we succeed in conveying the beauty of work, everything else—trust, the desire to stay, to challenge oneself—comes almost on its own." Because, he adds, "we are never truly compartmentalized: the person I am at work is the same person I am outside, with the same values and energy. That's where I start every day."

Teddy's purpose reads "to clothe the world with beauty and welcoming warmth to foster personal fulfillment." It is a principle Simone feels deeply connected to, and one he tries to convey to his team every day: "finding the positive, even when things get complicated." For him, the best part of the job remains one thing: "Seeing a person happy and fulfilled; it's an endless goal, it never finishes. But that's precisely why it's worth continuing to build it, day after day."

And while the project the company built for him over the years is clear, today Simone has his own project for Teddy: "I want to create more and more people who are conscious of what they do. Bringing responsible, capable people with passion and a desire to build into Teddy." He is not aiming to train "the new manager," but something broader: "I don't want to train 'the new manager,' but someone who tomorrow can take my role, or become a benchmark for others. Building to help people grow: that is the project, and it's also my true personal fulfillment."