An engineer, a factory and a company that kept its founder’s name.

Pirelli began in Milan in 1872. The company’s cultural foundation, Fondazione Pirelli, tells the story in a 2022 article: that year the young engineer Giovanni Battista Pirelli returned home to set up a business in rubber, and in 1873 the company’s products started coming off the line at its original factory in Milan. By 1922, fifty years after its founding, the foundation says, the company had commercial offices on three continents.

Rubber, not tyres alone, was the starting point. English Wikipedia describes a company that initially specialised in rubber and its derivatives and later concentrated on two large businesses, tyres and cables for energy and telecommunications. The same source says Pirelli has been listed on the Borsa Italiana since 1922, and that in the 1950s Alberto Pirelli commissioned the Pirelli Tower skyscraper in the same area of Milan that had housed the company’s nineteenth-century factory.

Over the following decades the group narrowed. According to English Wikipedia, Pirelli sold its cables, energy systems and telecommunications assets in 2005, and the business that took them over was renamed Prysmian. In 2010, the same source says, it completed its conversion into a pure tyre company by selling Pirelli Broadband Solutions and spinning off its real-estate arm, and in the same year set up Fondazione Pirelli to look after the company’s historical archive and promote business culture. From 2002 the company also put its name on clothing, watches and eyewear, an extension of the brand beyond the car.

Today Pirelli’s headquarters are in Milan’s Bicocca district, and its business is consumer tyres for cars, motorcycles and bicycles. English Wikipedia records a tyre plant in Shandong, China, opened in 2005, and a plant at Slatina, Romania, chosen in 2006; the company also has a factory in Burton upon Trent, England, beside the football ground that carries its name.

Owners, shareholders and a return to the stock exchange.

Pirelli’s ownership has changed more than its name. In March 2015, English Wikipedia says, Pirelli shareholders accepted a bid from ChemChina, the Chinese state-owned chemical group, made together with Camfin and LTI; the transaction was completed and Pirelli was delisted in November 2015. ChemChina agreed, the same source says, to maintain the tyre company’s ownership structure until 2023.

The delisting did not last. On 4 October 2017, according to English Wikipedia, Pirelli returned to the Milan stock exchange after separating its industrial-tyre business and focusing on tyres for cars, motorcycles and bicycles. In May 2024 the Silk Road Fund sold its whole shareholding, while Camfin, the holding company associated with Marco Tronchetti Provera, strengthened its position together with other Italian investors. In April 2025, the same source says, Pirelli’s board of directors, applying an Italian government decree of 4 August 2023 and the IFRS 10 accounting principle, determined that control of the company by Sinochem had ended. Pirelli remains a listed Italian company headquartered in Milan.

Sport has carried the name for most of its history. English Wikipedia says Pirelli has sponsored sporting competitions since 1907. In Formula One it competed in 1950–1958, 1981–1986 and 1989–1991, and it has supplied tyres to every team on the grid since 2011, after Bridgestone withdrew at the end of 2010; the current agreement runs to the end of the 2027 season. It has done the same in the FIM Superbike World Championship since 2004, and English Wikipedia says it is due to take on the MotoGP premier class from 2027.

Football has carried the name too. Pirelli sponsored Inter Milan from the 1995–96 season, and its name has appeared on the shirts of clubs in South America, including Palmeiras, Peñarol and Vélez Sársfield. In England, Burton Albion’s ground, opened in 2005 next to the company’s factory in Burton upon Trent, was named the Pirelli Stadium.

The Pirelli Calendar, published since 1964, is one of the brand’s cultural objects. English Wikipedia lists photographers who have shot it, among them Richard Avedon, Peter Lindbergh, Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton. The calendar sits beside the advertising line “Power is nothing without control,” which the same source describes as Pirelli’s well-known slogan in television and print campaigns.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are all tyre names. A tyre brand reaches people in an unusual way: its name is moulded into the rubber itself, so the lettering on a sidewall, the shape of a tread and the colours of a shop sign or a racing livery often do more of the identity work than any single advertisement. Many of these names have also travelled far from where they began, through mergers, new owners and factories in other countries.

That makes the plain questions behind each name worth asking: who started the business, which companies came together to form it, who owns it now, where its head office sits and where its tyres are made. A brand that began as a repair business, a rubber works or a family firm can end up as one name among several inside a much larger group, while still carrying the mark it was given decades earlier.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, its factories and the history of its marks — and attributes each claim to the source it comes from.

One long letter, many designers.

The “Long P”, the Pirelli wordmark with its elongated initial, is the brand’s constant, and Fondazione Pirelli uses the phrase as shorthand for the company’s whole visual communication. Around it, Pirelli built an advertising culture that drew in Milanese graphic designers.

A 2021 foundation article on Pino Tovaglia sets out part of that story. It says Tovaglia started working with Pirelli in 1957, taken on by the advertising director Arrigo Castellani, on a campaign that also involved Antonio Boggeri, Franco Grignani, Erberto Carboni, Ezio Bonini and Bob Noorda. The foundation credits Tovaglia with clean lines and nothing superfluous, a manner that culminated in the Un viaggio, ma campaign for the Cinturato tyre in 1966. It also records a 1966 film, The Tortoise and the Hare, made by the British company Pirelli Ltd for the Cinturato; a Pirelli stand for the 1967 Paris Motor Show devised with the architect Roberto Menghi; and a 1968 “flags” campaign in which the Cinturato appeared only as a stylised national flag for each country. The company’s own magazine, Pirelli, carried the same graphic thinking onto its covers.

Colour also carries the identity at the racetrack. English Wikipedia says that since the 2019 season Pirelli has marked its dry-weather P Zero Formula One tyres with three sidewall colours — white for hard, yellow for medium and red for soft — with green for the intermediate and blue for the full wet, both branded Cinturato, a name that dates from the 1950s. For 2026, the same source says, the coloured rings became a chequered-flag design while the compounds kept their colours. Product names such as P Zero, Cinturato, Scorpion and Diablo carry the identity across car, motorcycle and bicycle ranges.

For a design guide, Pirelli shows how a single letter, stretched and repeated across posters, calendars and sidewalls, can hold a brand together while the designers, owners and products around it change. Compare Michelin, whose identity rests on a character rather than a letter, and Bridgestone, the company Pirelli replaced as Formula One’s tyre supplier. For this guide we use a strong red, a compound yellow and a tread black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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