Platform Basket Brand Guidelines: The Poviglio Spider Lift Maker Born From Basket in 2005

A fabrication family buys a spider lift maker.

Platform Basket is an Italian maker of tracked aerial platforms, the self-propelled crawler machines that the Italian trade calls ragni, or spiders. The trade site Vertikal.net reported in April 2016 that the company was born in October 2005, when the Scillia family took over an existing manufacturer called Basket. The company’s own history puts the start at the end of 2005 and describes it as the takeover of a pre-existing builder of platforms for work at height.

According to Vertikal, Basket had previously been a division of Italmec, building spider lifts and self-propelled boom lifts that were sold under the Sel brand. The Scillia family already ran a fabrication business, TMC (Torneria Meccanica e Carpenteria), which Vertikal says began in 1973 as Fratelli Scillia and took the TMC name in 1977. It machined and fabricated steel parts for local equipment makers, among them Linde forklifts, Dieci telehandlers and the loader-crane maker F.lli Ferrari. The family bought Basket, the same report says, to invest in a range of products of its own, to be sold in Italy and around the world.

In March 2006 the managing director of TMC, Carmelo Scillia, hired Carlo Molesini, who had spent 23 years at the loader-crane maker Ferrari, as managing director of Platform Basket, Vertikal reported. Access International, interviewing him in November 2023 as Carloalberto Molesini, said he went on to develop some of the inherited spider lifts into what became the company’s product of choice.

The company is based at Poviglio, in the province of Reggio Emilia. In April 2016 it marked its tenth anniversary with an open day at a new Poviglio facility, opened by the town’s mayor, where it also showed its new 27-metre Spider 27.14, Vertikal reported. The name itself carries over the word Basket from the business the Scillia family bought in 2005.

Spiders, rail platforms and a 54-metre flagship.

The range is split in two on the company’s website. The industrial line is built around tracked spiders: the company says its crawler machines have working heights from 12 to 43 metres, widening tracks and simple controls, and that the whole range is also offered with a fully electric drive. Named models include the Spider 27.14, the newer Spider 30.14, which the company says reaches a working height of 30.4 metres, and a 46 kV insulated version of the Spider 22.10. The second line is for railways: the RR road-rail platforms, from the RR 9/200 to the RR 19/500, which the company says are certified by the main European rail authorities. It says its RAIL ROAD 14 model has approvals in Britain, Germany, Switzerland, France and Australia.

The largest machine is the Spider 54T. Access International previewed it at Platform Basket’s headquarters in Reggio Emilia in October 2023, the day before the GIS show in Piacenza, and reported a 54-metre working height, a 400 kg basket capacity at full height and an interchangeable 1,000 kg winch that turns it into a mobile crane. Molesini told the magazine that the machine took two years to develop and was aimed at telecoms antenna and electricity pylon work. The company says the Spider 54T won Product of the Year in the self-propelled booms and atrium lifts category at the IAPA Awards 2026, presented in Istanbul.

The year 2023 also brought the company’s first vertical mast lift, the Heron 10, launched at the APEX show in Maastricht, Access International reported, and its first mini cranes and tracked material carriers, the MCR and PCR models, sold under the group’s Elma brand. The magazine described Elma as the company’s new engineering wing, and the Elma website is linked from every page of Platform Basket’s own.

Design and documentation.

Aerial work platform makers present themselves through the machines first. Scissor lifts, articulated booms, telescopic booms, truck-mounted platforms and tracked spider lifts are usually painted in a single strong colour, such as an orange, a blue, a red or a yellow, with the maker’s name and the model code set large on the chassis or the boom. Seen across a site, the colour does much of the work a logo would do elsewhere.

Much of the industry sells to rental companies rather than to the people who use the machines, and its pictures often show that. Brochures and websites favour long rows of identical scissors and folded booms in a rental yard, machines lined up on a delivery truck, and close views of control boxes, battery packs and parts that a fleet workshop would care about. Product names tend to be strings of letters and numbers that encode working height, width or drive type.

The other stock image is the machine at work: a platform raised against a steel frame, a warehouse ceiling or a building facade, with operators in hard hats and harnesses at height. Electric and hybrid drive, lithium batteries and low-noise indoor use have become common themes in recent launches, described in the makers’ own words.

Trade fairs and awards fill the rest of the calendar. New models are often unveiled at The ARA Show in the United States, at bauma in Munich and at APEX, the access-equipment show in the Netherlands, while the industry press runs its own prizes, such as the International Awards for Powered Access. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A family group that builds its own steel and wiring.

Platform Basket describes itself as part of a holding headed by TMC, which it says has more than 40 years of experience making structural parts, and says this background lets it build welded structures with robotic processes. It also took control of an electrical-systems supplier: Access International reported that at the end of 2016 the company acquired 75% of QBM, bringing the electrical systems of its spider lifts in house rather than relying on outside suppliers. The company says its materials are kept in computer-controlled vertical warehouses and that the design and production of its spiders are entirely Italian; those are its own claims.

The company says it holds ISO 9001 quality certification and that its products are certified to the European EN 280 standard, with approvals for markets including Canada, the United States, Australia, Korea and Russia. In 2025 and 2026 its news pages list appearances at Bauma, CONEXPO-CON/AGG in Las Vegas, Interschutz in Hanover, InnoTrans and APEX, often alongside Elma. Its application stories range from rail maintenance in Japan to platforms for tunnels on the Stockholm metro and a roof inspection at Toronto City Hall.

For a design guide, Platform Basket shows how a family-owned engineering group can build a specialist identity around one machine type, the tracked spider, and extend it to rail with a separate, plainly coded RR line. Compare Socage, another Emilian maker of aerial platforms with its own spider range, and Teupen, a spider-lift maker. For this guide we use a deep teal, graphite and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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