CAME Brand Guidelines: Treviso’s 1972 Gate-Motor Maker, Still Owned by the Menuzzo Family

A motor that spared drivers a trip out of the car.

CAME, the automation group based near Treviso in the Veneto, dates its start to 1972. The building trade site Infobuild, reporting on the company’s fiftieth anniversary in October 2022, says that in 1972 Paolo Menuzzo invented what it calls the first automatic gate with an electromechanical motor, with the idea of sparing people from having to get out of the car to open the gate, and of making it a product accessible to everyone.

The same report describes the decades that followed as a move from an artisan business to an international group. The anniversary was celebrated at the group’s headquarters in Dosson di Casier, in the province of Treviso, where the president of the regional industry association Assindustria Veneto Centro presented Paolo Menuzzo with a plaque recognising his ability to build and grow the business through fifty years of change, Infobuild reported.

Several early products are still tied to the name. Infobuild singles out FROG, which it calls the first automatic gate opener with a watertight electromechanical motor buried entirely underground, and BIMBO, a remote control so small, the report says, that it inspired the product’s name, and small enough to carry in a bag or fix to a dashboard. In the 1990s came Generation 6, a bollard built as a single unit under the name MONOBLOC, and from 2000 the company moved into home automation, with video entry, climate control, security and access control systems, according to the same report.

Gate motors, barriers, intercoms and car parks.

CAME now sells across several fields. Its global website lists vehicle access — gate motors, automatic barriers, parking systems, bollards and road blockers — alongside pedestrian access control with speed gates and turnstiles, and smart-home products including video entry systems, home climate control and shutter and blind solutions. It presents itself as a partner “for automation, smart homes, access control, security, and parking systems.”

The group grew through brands as well as products. A company profile on the Italian building site Ediltecnico lists the brands Came, Bpt, Domino LED and GO, covering entrance automation, home automation, intercoms, LED lighting and garage and industrial doors, and the companies Urbaco and Parkare, covering urban projects, the management of paid car parks and access control for public spaces such as squares and streets.

Parking is a division of its own. In May 2021 Parking.net reported that CAME had acquired control of Nepos Sistemas, a Brazilian car park systems company founded in 2006, which joined CAME Parkare in the group’s parking management division. The same report listed projects including the perimeter and access control system for Expo Milano 2015, a parking installation at London’s Gatwick airport and urban-space systems on the Promenade de la Croisette in Cannes. Infobuild wrote in 2022 that CAME had signed more than 3,000 large projects since 2010, and named the parking systems SPK and Zero KM Service, launched in 2021, which it said were designed to give car park operators more control over their own service and maintenance.

CAME also writes about design. Its design page says its products should “blend discreetly into architecture,” with “clean, sharp and clearly defined lines,” and that one shared approach governs lighting, interfaces and components, so that forms change with each product’s function while the “design DNA” stays recognisable.

Parking and gate automation makers.

Most people meet parking and gate automation only at its edges: the striped barrier arm that lifts at a car park entry, the ticket column beside it, the pay station near the lift lobby and, more and more often, a camera that reads the number plate so that no ticket is issued at all. The companies in this series make those machines and the software that runs them, and their brands have to work on a steel cabinet standing in the rain as well as on a phone screen.

The series covers two neighbouring kinds of maker. Car park specialists sell access and revenue control systems to airports, shopping centres, hospitals, stadiums and city operators. Gate and door automation makers sell motors, control boards and remote openers for sliding and swing gates, garage doors and road barriers, equipment that installers fit, set up and service on site.

The settings these makers show are practical ones: a barrier at a busy entry lane, a pay station in a lit garage, a sliding gate in front of a villa, a training room where installers learn a control board.

Trade fairs give the industry its calendar. Intertraffic, held at the RAI in Amsterdam, is a large trade show for mobility and traffic technology, and runs its own awards for product innovation; R+T, a trade fair run by Messe Stuttgart, is another date in the calendar. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about its products — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family group run from Dosson di Casier.

CAME is still a family business. Ediltecnico’s profile describes Came S.p.A. as owned by the Menuzzo family, and Infobuild reported that the presidency passed in 2018 to Andrea Menuzzo, who at the anniversary spoke of laying the foundations for the company to reach its hundredth year. Parking.net’s 2021 report quoted him as president, describing the group’s growth by acquisition as a way of giving acquired brands the technical know-how and organisation of a group present around the world.

On manufacturing, the figures differ by date and source. Infobuild reported in 2022 that CAME employed about 2,000 people in 11 plants, three in Italy and eight in France, Spain, England, Turkey and Brazil, and that it developed at least ten new products a year. Ediltecnico’s profile names plants at Treviso, Sesto al Reghena in the province of Pordenone, Avignon in France and Barcelona in Spain. The company’s own about page now says that from its Treviso headquarters it coordinates 10 manufacturing plants and 4 R&D centres, with more than 25 subsidiaries and 40 warehouses, and that it works in more than 110 countries through its partners and distributors. Infobuild also described a robotic warehouse at the headquarters, which it called one of the first in Italy to handle worldwide distribution.

The company frames its work around the people who install it. Its about page speaks of the relationships it has built with professionals worldwide, who it says help bring its technology into customers’ lives, and its global site offers training, technical documents and a section of support for installers.

For a design guide, CAME shows how an automation maker that started with one gate motor now presents barriers, intercoms and car park systems under a single family-owned name. Compare FAAC, another Italian gate-automation maker that grew from one founder’s idea, and Nice, another Italian gate and door automation maker. For this guide we use a deep blue, slate and pale grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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