Neomadeinitaly
We are Italian and we work in Italy.
We care about people, the land and our history.
This is what we call neomadeinitaly.
It is 1971
Maria Pramaor starts up a company and gives it her name, and so begins a story that is still unfolding today.
It was a very different Italy in the 1960s, although something has remained the same. Even then there was an area famous for its eyewear and the care with which it was produced. Agordo is its name ad this is where, in 1971, Maria Pramaor opened up her very own frame-making workshop, after nine years as an employee in the industry. This was the first chapter of an exciting story, a tale of passion, skills and deep commitment. Because if you haven’t always had certain values, you will never have them.
Standing out from the others
By the 1990s we had already started working with titanium, to carve out our own path.
In the 1980s the majority of frames were made of ordinary metal and acetate, and almost no one had thought of making titanium frames. In 1991 Maria Pramaor and her husband Primo Del Din, started working with titanium, to create something different from their competitors. They sent their technical experts off to Japan, set up a small department just for this material and began accumulating that know-how that is still the hallmark of every Blackfin titanium frame.
We’re still here
We have never moved out of Agordo,
the place that reflects our values.
Our commitment and desire to learn have not changed since those early days. We still lavish the same care on our frames and we also care deeply about the place in which we make them. We were born in Agordo and we are still here today. We have made changes to our premises to give us more space and make our workers more comfortable but our Pramaor base is still where Blackfin frames are created. Our history and our affection for one another binds us together and it will carry us forward into the future.
A very special place
We work in Agordo, a little town in the heart of the Italian Alps, as wonderful as our eyewear.
We are lucky to live and work in a delightful, almost magical place. Mountain lakes, centuries-old woodland, Alpine streams, towering over us the glorious Dolomites, a mountain landscape in its purest form. We couldn’t stop at just gazing at these wonders of nature, rather we let them be our inspiration, making sure all the eyewear we produce embodies these wonders. It would be utterly pointless to live in such a magnificent place and then betray it by making something mediocre.
A rite of passage
A Blackfin frame is the result of hundreds of processes,
to some these would just be the production process, but for us each one is a little ritual.
We are Italian and everything we create is conceived and produced in Italy. Even that’s not enough for us. A Blackfin model is unique because of how it is made, each one the fruit of the technical expertise and the creative vocation of generations of men and women dedicated to producing a work of art. People we are still meeting and whom we can thank with all our heart for everything they do but, above all, for the wonderful way they do it.