Indeco Brand Guidelines: The Bari Hydraulic Hammer Maker Founded in 1976

A hammer maker in Puglia, run by one family.

Indeco is an Italian maker of hydraulic hammers and demolition attachments based in Bari, the port city in Puglia. The company says it was founded in 1976, and the timeline on its website dates the start of production of spare parts and custom hydraulic hammers to that year. Its legal name is Indeco Ind S.p.A., and its website gives an address in Bari’s industrial zone. It describes itself simply as “an Italian manufacturer of hydraulic hammers.”

The company’s own magazine, Indecommunity, says Indeco was co-founded and steered from the very beginning by Mauro Vitulano. In its 2025 issue the magazine reported a change at the top: in July 2024, after 48 years, he left his operational role as sole director to become chairman of a new board of directors, and the company is now led by Susanna Vitulano, his daughter and the group’s financial manager, as chief executive. The magazine framed the move as “a major change in the spirit of continuity,” and credited his recent years in charge with organisational and structural changes and with investment in product and process innovation.

A third member of the family has carried the name into the wider Italian industry. Michele Vitulano was quoted as Indeco’s marketing manager in a 2016 issue of the same magazine, which marked forty years of the company. In June 2024 the trade site Machines Italia, run by the Italian Trade Agency, reported that he had been re-elected president of UNACEA, the Italian construction equipment association, for a further two years, after a board meeting in June and an assembly in May at Villa Ottoboni in Padua.

From breakers to a full range of attachments.

Indeco began with breakers, and hammers remain at the centre of its range. Its website divides them into large, medium and small models in several versions. The timeline lists the steps: in 1986 what the company calls the first “intelligent hammer” in the demolition world; in 2004 the HP series of hammers; and in 2008 the HP 18000, which Indeco described as the world’s biggest hydraulic hammer. The company also says it won the Samoter International Prize in 1996, for technological innovation in hammer manufacture and for its customer service.

From the early 2000s the range widened into other demolition tools. Indeco dates its IFP fixed and IRP rotating pulverizers to 2003, the MULTI multifunction tool and IHC compactors to 2006, and the ISS shear to 2010, alongside an anti-blank-firing system for its hammers. In 2011 and 2012 it added the IDG demolition sorting grab and the IBS pedestal boom system, which is mounted over the mouth of a primary crusher. The IDG grabs later evolved into the IMG range, made in five versions from 2016.

Later additions moved beyond demolition alone: a low-pressure dust-abatement system in 2019, hydraulic mulching heads for land clearing in 2020, and in 2022 IRC rail cutters for railway, tramway and underground track. The same year the company launched Indeconnect, a remote monitoring system it describes as based on the principles of the Internet of Things. Indeco says its pulverizers use Hardox wear-resistant steel, and that its management system was certified to UNI EN ISO 9001:2015 in 2023. Its IMP multiprocessor takes interchangeable kits so that one tool can be set up as a crusher, a pulverizer or a shear, the company says.

Design and documentation.

Excavator attachments are sold on what they let a machine do. A tiltrotator sits between the arm and the bucket so that the bucket can turn and tilt, and its makers tend to show it at work: a bucket angled along a trench in a city street, a ditch shaped beside a forest road in northern Sweden, a grab sorting stone on a building site. Hydraulic breakers are pictured against rock faces and concrete, demolition shears against steel, and quick couplers in close-up, where the meeting of tool and machine is the point of the picture.

Much of this trade began in the Nordic countries. engcon traces its tiltrotator to the mid-1980s in Jämtland, and Rototilt traces its name to a 1986 launch by Noreco of Umeå; in 2020 Rototilt and Steelwrist launched Open-S, a shared standard for fully automatic quick couplers, KHL reported. Breaker and demolition-tool makers in Italy, Finland, France, Germany and Japan complete the group of makers in these guides.

The makers meet their customers in person. Trade fairs such as bauma in Germany and Intermat in France, Conexpo in Las Vegas and national machinery shows are where new ranges are unveiled; engcon says it first showed its tiltrotator at a Stockholm fair in 1993, and Rototilt presented its Rototilt Control concept at bauma in 2022. Demonstration days, factory open houses and dealer events let operators try the equipment, and much selling goes through local dealers and sales companies.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word. The palettes and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not the brands’ marks.

A Bari company with subsidiaries on four continents.

Indeco built its export business through subsidiaries of its own. The first was Indeco North America, founded in 1990 to cover the United States, Canada and Central America. In May 2007 the trade magazine Rental Equipment Register reported that it had moved from Stratford to a new building in Milford, Connecticut, a 35,000-square-foot site housing administration, sales, service and a spare-parts warehouse, and that Indeco then had more than 50 dealers in North and Central America. The company marked thirty years of its North American business in 2020, and in 2024 it opened a further branch in Canada.

Other markets followed. The company’s timeline lists Indeco Australia in 1992, Indeco UK in 1999, Indeco Mexico in 2011 and Indeco Brazil in 2017; in 2023 it added Indeco Japan and, the same year, a newly opened Mexican subsidiary in Cancún. The website now runs in languages from Russian to Japanese, with separate English, French and Spanish versions for North America. Throughout, the head office has stayed in Bari, where the company was founded.

By its own account, Indeco has had one co-founder at its head for almost half a century, and is now led by his daughter. Its products carry short model codes: HP for hammers, IFP and IRP for pulverizers, ISS for shears and IMG for grabs.

For a design guide, Indeco shows how a regional engineering firm can build an international name around one core product and short model codes. Compare Rammer, the Finnish hammer brand made in Lahti, and Montabert, the French breaker maker. For this guide we use a navy, a limestone and an ochre with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Indeco’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.