From Quotidiano Nazionale, 04/15/2026
Article by Simone Arminio 

If you walk down Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, or any other shopping street in Italy and the world, it is very likely that you have come across a window display of Terranova, the most iconic brand of the Teddy Group. What you might not know is that the man leading that group, Alessandro Bracci, president and CEO, could be right next to you at that moment. Incognito. Observing. Evaluating. Not just his own shop windows, but also those of his competitors. “I do it whenever I can and even when I can't,” Bracci says with the frankness that distinguishes him in his interview with our vodcast Money Vibez Stories. “I look at mine with a particular attention, even a certain anxiety. I look at those of others with more serenity.” This is the human and managerial hallmark of one of the most interesting entrepreneurs on the Italian retail scene: a constant gaze on reality, never filtered by the distance that often separates top management from the daily life of the stores.

One group, four brands, one mission

The Teddy Group is not synonymous only with Terranova. Under that name, which comes from the surname Tadei of the founding family—even if the exact origin of the brand remains shrouded in mystery—four distinct labels operate, each with its own positioning and identity. Terranova is the historic brand, the most widespread, and the one the general public knows best. Calliope bears the name of a Greek muse, the muse of literature, with the precise intention of evoking beauty and inspiration. Rinascimento completes the offer with a more feminine and elegant touch. And then there is the latest arrival: QB 24, an acronym that Bracci explains with geometric sobriety: “Quanto basta (Just enough) for a man's 24 hours.” Four brands, one single group, approximately 800 points of sale distributed in about forty countries worldwide. The founder of all this was Vittorio Tadei, a figure Bracci describes without hesitation as “mythological.” “In Rimini, he was respected and is still remembered today as a brilliant, enlightened entrepreneur,” says the CEO. “The proof is that I, after eighteen years, have not yet managed to destroy the company he genially created.” A joke, of course, but one that hides a sincere tribute. Tadei wanted to be an accountant. Then he realized that the profession required too much “fake relationship with people,” as Bracci calls it. And so he threw himself into his seamstress sisters' clothing store in Riccione. From there, he sensed the possibility of building something great. And he did.

The impossible triangle: quality, price, sustainability

Ask Alessandro Bracci what the most difficult challenge is, and the answer comes clear, precise, almost geometric. “Until yesterday, there was the quality-price ratio. Today, there is the quality-price-sustainability triangle.” A triangle where each vertex tends to erode the other two, and which affordable fashion companies must try to keep in balance every day. Sustainability, in this framework, is not an additional cost to be endured reluctantly. It is an investment that “in the long run returns in the relationship with the customer.” But the real point is that today’s consumer is no longer satisfied with buying a low-priced product: they also want to know how it was produced, with what environmental impact, and under what working conditions. “Not everyone is able to always find, or at least with a certain consistency, the balance of that triangle,” Bracci observes. “And this is the beauty of the challenge of our work.” Because every month, new products and new services must be reinvented, maintaining that balance that is hard to find and even harder to maintain.

Designers: sentinels of the future

Behind every t-shirt (and behind the slogans that appear on them) is a team of designers whom Bracci describes with almost fatherly admiration. “In my opinion, they do the most beautiful job in the world,” he says. “They travel by train and plane to the most beautiful capitals in the world. They look, they observe how people dress, they look at the trends that are emerging.” But their work today does not stop at direct observation. Teddy Group designers also use artificial intelligence systems to verify if what they have seen “is something that is truly establishing itself and at what speed.” In this context, AI does not replace human creativity: it guides it, calibrates it, and brings it into focus relative to the pace of global trend diffusion. The result is a synthesis between artistic intuition and quantitative data that allows the shops to carry garments the market desires, without waiting for that desire to be already satiated by competitors.

Incognito in his own stores (but then he introduces himself)

One of Bracci’s most revealing habits is visiting points of sale incognito. With 800 stores scattered around the world, it is inevitable that many employees do not know him personally. And he exploits this anonymity to make unfiltered observations. “The first thing I do is greet people,” he explains. “Because I expect our people to greet a customer who enters.” Then he looks. He evaluates. He hopes to find what he would like to find. “It doesn't always happen, though.” When he decides to reveal himself, he does so with a touch of Romagnolo understatement: “Hi, I’m Alessandro, I’m a colleague from Rimini.” No announcements, no fanfares. Only the reality of the field. Then, inevitably, someone at headquarters calls the store clerk to tell them who had stopped by. Informal communication in the Teddy Group works like this too.

Using the "tu" as corporate culture

In the company, everyone uses the informal "tu". Always. “When they address me with the formal 'lei', I turn around and look for my father,” Bracci says laughing, making an “enormous effort” to respect the formal register of the interview. It is a cultural trait with precise geographical roots: Romagna, Rimini, a territory that Bracci defines as carrying a “broadly relational genius loci.” “With us, it is very easy that wherever you go, you find someone who will struggle to address you formally.” This informality is not superficiality: it is the concrete manifestation of a business model based on trust, delegation, and proximity between hierarchical levels.

From corporate lawyer to CEO: an all-Italian story

Alessandro Bracci never planned to become the CEO of an international fashion group. His trajectory is one of those stories told to demonstrate that the best plans are often built without a plan. Born in Pesaro in 1973, he attended a linguistic high school with the initial idea of not enrolling in university. Instead, he later enrolled in Law, found a job as a librarian in a law firm, and there fell in love with the profession of civil lawyer, particularly corporate law. For almost ten years, he shuttled between Milan and Bologna (“seven-thirty in the morning on the train, 9:00 PM at night, some children you don't see until the weekend”) in a firm where he was happy but physically absent from his own family life. The turning point came quite unexpectedly. It was a group of six or seven managers—the ones who had co-founded the company with Vittorio Tadei—who asked the patriarch to involve his son-in-law in the management. Tadei, who was looking for someone who could succeed the historic managers without breaking the internal balance (any one of them would have created tension by choosing themselves), found himself faced with a proposal: this young lawyer, married to one of his daughters, who was already handling some of the group's legal matters, could be the solution. And Tadei went to Bracci with a disarming argument: “I would never have asked, because I see you are happy where you are. But since Tizio, Caio, and Sempronio asked me, and they cannot ask you...” Bracci accepted on one condition: a one-year trial. “You have to teach me everything you can. In a year, we’ll draw a line. If I’m capable, fine. Otherwise, I’ll go back to what I was doing.” He did not go back.

The philosophy of delegation and humility

Eighteen years later, Bracci leads a company with 800 points of sale and a presence on four continents. But his approach to leadership has remained faithful to a basic premise: adequacy is never definitively acquired. “A sane person never comes to think they are perfectly adequate to lead a company,” he says. “The fortune of companies that move forward is being led by people who feel a bit inadequate, and therefore they study, look around, and verify.” This humility translates into a precise operating model: his day, except for Monday dedicated to fixed staff meetings, is determined for about 80% by the needs of those who work with him. He has no secretary. He has an open digital calendar, “which is worse” than a closed door, because people insert meetings into it that he discovers as he goes. “My agenda is basically 60% made by others and 40% by me,” he says without hesitation. “For this reason, the delegation and trust we give to people is a very important criterion for us.” But there is a fundamental corollary: trust requires continuity. “When I give you trust, I must be able to believe that you will still be here in three years, to reap the fruits of the decisions you made or to recover from the damage you caused.”

The book, the tour, the stories that "are worth a company"

One of the most touching moments of the interview concerns a project that Bracci carried out to pass on the founder's values to new generations of employees. On the initiative of an internal manager, the group published a book that tells the story of Vittorio Tadei, not as a biography, but as a mirror of corporate identity. The goal was to allow “a young person who joins Teddy today and works in the store in Casamassima in Bari to be able to have the same encounter as someone who actually knew Vittorio.” The book was then taken on tour around Italy, in meetings with fifty, sixty, seventy people from the stores. “I was very struck,” says Bracci. “Almost moved. I saw how our company’s story intersected with their lives and how this generated for them the possibility of achieving the dream they had, maybe starting a family, buying a motorcycle, pursuing a hobby.” And then comes the emblematic anecdote: when the Teddy Group closed a store in Rome, some employees, in order to stay with the company, went to work in Fabriano, waiting for a point of sale to reopen in the capital. “There – he says – it is worth building a company just to hear these stories.”

40 Countries, 800 stores, and the Italian competitive advantage

In a global market increasingly dominated by fast fashion giants with enormous financial firepower, from Shein to Zara, from Eastern brands to large Northern European players, the Teddy Group has chosen to compete by focusing on a model that its CEO defines as a “frontier company.” “We have always arrived among the first in foreign countries because we have this vocation for the frontier.” The international expansion model is largely based on franchising: and here one of the most surprising facts emerges. Teddy has affiliates who have worked with the group for twenty, twenty-five years. “Why have they been with us for twenty-five years? It's not just because things always went well,” explains Bracci. “Our characteristic trait has always been being able to share both the good and the bad times. When things weren't going well, we stayed close to our partners to help them overcome that phase.” Partner loyalty cannot be bought with contracts: it is built through relationships. And here the Romagnolo genius loci returns, that vocation for hospitality and relationship that Bracci considers the true competitive advantage of Italian companies. “Italian companies have this great relational capacity. If we lose it, we become like the others.” In this sense, Made in Italy is not just a geographical label or a guarantee of manufacturing quality. It is a style of relationship. “What people like abroad is the experience, as well as the fact. It is not just what you propose as a product, but the style of relationship you propose.” Creativity and relational capacity: when the two things manage to stay together, says Bracci, “that is the secret.”

Family, children, and the "transparent father"

With four children (Caterina, Lorenzo, Giovanni, and Pietro, aged between 18 and 26), Bracci has experienced the paradox typical of many entrepreneurs: building something great for a family he does not manage to see growing up. “My children defined me as the 'great absentee', mom's friend,” he says with a hint of self-irony. “My wife says I was a practically transparent father until my children were eight or ten years old.” Then, with adolescence, he “took the field.” None of the four children work in the company, and Bracci does not seem to want to push them in that direction. “They know the company is there, and they know that as they will probably be shareholders in the future, they will have to worry about it. But worrying because you are a partner in a company and working inside the company are two completely different things.” Two nephews, sons of his wife's sister, are instead already following a path within the company after gaining experience outside. “They have well understood the difference between being future shareholders and being collaborators. Which is no small thing.”

A typical day

When he is in Rimini, Bracci wakes up between 6:30 and 7:00 AM. Gym from 7:30 to 8:30 AM, then in the office at 9. Monday is dedicated to fixed staff meetings; the rest of the week is filled with the needs of colleagues. He works until 8:00 PM when necessary, at dinner if there are foreign partners visiting, on Saturday morning if needed. The weekend starts “generally at 1 PM on Saturday, hoping that sport-wise it is favorable.” Unfortunately, at the time of the interview, the sporting weekend is on a forced break: Bracci is sidelined by a torn meniscus, caused by a sport “that those of our age should not do” and which he does not mention out of discretion. In his free time, he reads, stays with his wife (now that the children are grown), and cultivates friendships. On this point, he quotes Mourinho - “whom I don't particularly esteem for the teams he coached, but as a person...” - and adapts his famous aphorism: “He who knows only about football knows nothing about football. I am deeply convinced that he who is always focused on business knows nothing about business.” In short, one needs to live. To drink, to have fun, to look at other people's shop windows.

The lesson of the non-linear path

Perhaps the most powerful message that emerges from this interview is that of the value of the unplanned path. Bracci tells it through the symbolic object he brought with him: an orthodontic appliance case, a residue of his first school choice, the professional institute for dental technicians in Pesaro at age 13, later abandoned for the linguistic high school. An object he uses to answer young people who ask him for career advice. “I didn't want to go to university. I did it because I finished high school well. I didn't want to be a lawyer. I did it because I ended up in a law firm by chance. I didn't want to be a manager. I ended up being one.” The thread is not planning: it is attention to the turning points that life proposes. “The most important thing is to have a hypothesis, equip yourself, fight for that hypothesis. But always staying attentive to what reality offers you.” It is a philosophy of life that also works as a corporate strategy: having a vision, but keeping your eyes open on the ground. In the windows, in the stores, in the people. Exactly as he does every morning, in Milan or Rimini or wherever he may be, the president of the Teddy Group who walks among the passers-by and looks at the shop windows—his own with anxiety, those of others with serenity.