Bandera Brand Guidelines: The Busto Arsizio Family Firm Built on a 60 mm Extruder Screw

A screw, a wartime workshop and a family name.

Bandera’s story starts in Busto Arsizio, the Lombard town that was Luigi Bandera’s home. The Plastics Hall of Fame, which named him in its Class of 2024, says he began work as a design engineer in the late 1930s and that the history of plastic extrusion in Italy began with him during the Second World War. It credits him with a first extruder, a 60 mm screw for PVC pipes and profiles, and says he was among the first to see that moving from piston technology to screw extrusion gave better control, efficiency and flexibility across different polymers.

The company tells the same story on its own history page, which carries two dates. One line speaks of the first extruder “created by Luigi Bandera in 1947”; the timeline below it groups the same machine under 1943–1947 and places it during the war. Both the company and the Hall of Fame agree on the formal start: in 1947 Luigi Bandera established Costruzioni Meccaniche Luigi Bandera in Busto Arsizio. The Hall of Fame says the business first concentrated on PVC and rubber extrusion systems.

Growth came quickly. The company says it became a joint stock company in 1950, and the Hall of Fame describes that year as the start of industrial-scale production of thermoplastic resin extrusion systems. The range took in pipe lines, profile equipment and sheet lines, the company says.

One story from those years explains how the name travelled. In a post dated 28 February 2025, the company says that in 1957 Salvador Vairo, a Salvadoran shirt maker looking for wrapping for his shirts, visited a plastics factory in Mexico and found a machine labelled “Costruzioni Meccaniche Luigi Bandera, Busto Arsizio Italia.” He flew to Milan to meet the maker, bought what the company calls the first plastic extruder for Central America, and in April 1958 founded Industrias Plásticas, known as IPSA. The post includes a picture of the label from that first machine.

From pipe lines to film and sheet.

The product focus shifted over the following decades. The Hall of Fame says Bandera moved into multilayer lines with the arrival of coextrusion in the 1960s, and credits it with the first high-thickness membrane extrusion. It names a further milestone in the 1990s: a patented dryless technology for the direct extrusion of PET. The company says it was acknowledged as one of the leading names in blown film and sheet extrusion in Italy and abroad between 1980 and 1990, and that it received an ISO 9001 certificate in 1998, a date the Hall of Fame repeats. The Hall of Fame credits Luigi Bandera personally with 26 patents and records that he was made a Cavaliere della Repubblica.

Today’s catalogue on the company’s website falls into five groups. Blown film lines make single and multi-layer films for food, medical and pharmaceutical, agricultural and geomembrane uses. Flat die lines make rigid films and thick sheets, with the rigid film going into thermoformed packaging. The other three are recycling systems, extrusion coating and laminating, and PVC pelletizing.

Named series give the catalogue its shape. Barrier FLEX covers blown lines for barrier films of seven, nine and eleven layers, built around a central EVOH layer with polyamide layers beside it, the company says. AlphaPET is its PET rigid-film range, with stated uses including food packaging and furniture film. VelPET is its name for a structural foamed PET film, which it sells under the phrase “Lighter Packaging.” Trade press has followed the line-up at shows: PETnology reported in August 2022 that Bandera would run a nine-layer Barrier Flex Nine line for barrier film at K 2022 in Düsseldorf, in the company’s 75th year.

Research has become part of the offer. The company says it opened the House of Extrusion in 2015–2016 as a space for research and wet tests on complete production lines, alongside a laboratory it calls the Extrusion Academy. Customers can carry out research there, alone or with Bandera, it says, and the centre houses a mainly flat-die line named the Condor Line for applied research and training. The Plastech business directory describes the same centre as a place for experiments and training. At K 2025 the company had two stands and says it received more than 2,000 visitors from over 1,000 companies.

Machines at scale.

Machinery for plastics film, sheet and recycling is sold to plant owners and engineers, and its makers build their image on the machines themselves. The tallest of them is the blown-film tower, where a shining bubble of film rises several storeys before it is flattened and wound. Wide cast lines and winders offer the same kind of picture lying down: long, level and glossy, with the finished roll as the closing shot.

Close-ups supply the colour. Extruder barrels, guards and control cabinets are often finished in brand colours, which makes the livery of the line one of the few visual assets a maker fully owns. Thermoforming makers favour the end of the line, with formed trays stacking up as they leave the machine. Makers of bottles and preforms show rows of finished shapes.

Recycling has added its own set of pictures. Pellets in glass jars, shown before and after processing, turn an industrial step into something that can sit on a table at a trade stand. Bales of used film do the opposite job, showing the raw material as it arrives. Both images need careful handling, because they suggest a result that the words around them should state plainly and with a source.

The category’s main stages are its trade fairs, among them K in Düsseldorf, NPE in the United States, Plastpol in Poland and Fakuma in Germany. Stands there often feature running machinery. For a designer, this is a field where the identity has to work on a steel guard, a touch screen and a technical data sheet as well as on a web page. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker and leaves the rest out.

A founder’s name and an Extrusion Intelligence line.

Its website describes Bandera with the phrase “a family with a pioneering mindset,” and says the company is currently managed by Piero and Franco, the founder’s sons. A company post from February 2025 names Edoardo Bandera, a member of the board, as the third generation of the family. The legal name is still the one on that 1950s machine label, now Costruzioni Meccaniche Luigi Bandera S.p.A., and the Plastech directory lists the company in Busto Arsizio.

On manufacturing, the claims are the company’s own. It says it remains “firmly rooted in the Made in Italy tradition,” and its figures list a production site of 29,000 square metres, 205 employees and “100% in-house design and manufacturing.” It also counts 35,000 extruders running around the world, a number the Hall of Fame repeats, and 15,500 active clients. Its lines are tailor-made, it says, from engineering through installation and after-sales service.

The trade name now used is BANDERA – Extrusion Intelligence®, which PETnology was already printing in 2022. The company explains the term as the essence of its ideas in extrusion technology. Alongside it run “Extruding Future Plastics Now®,” “Be part of the plastic change” and “Innovation is a state of mind,” while facilities and lines carry their own registered names, such as House of Extrusion® and Condor Line®. The web address is luigibandera.com, so the founder’s full name stays in use online as well. The company’s intellectual-property page says that buying a Bandera line means acquiring its specialised experience, embodied in the machine.

For a design guide, Bandera shows how a family firm can keep its founder’s name in its legal title and web address while trading under a technical phrase of its own. Compare Piovan, another Italian name in plastics machinery, and Reifenhäuser, a German family maker of extrusion lines. For this guide we use barrel blue, film silver and melt amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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