Corghi Brand Guidelines: The Correggio Brothers, the Artiglio & a Nightingale Mark

Radios, a hunting call and a nightingale.

Corghi comes from Correggio, a town in the province of Reggio Emilia, in the Po Valley. Its founders were two brothers, Erminio and Remo Corghi. The company says they began putting their skills to work in 1947, building radios and inventing a hunting call that used a wire recorder; Milano Finanza, in an October 2026 report, describes the same beginnings, with early electromechanical equipment and a hunting call called the Fonofil.

The company proper was founded in 1954 as Corghi elettromeccanica, a date given by the company, by Milano Finanza and by the investor One Equity Partners, which describes Nexion as founded in 1954 by the Corghi family. From that point, the company says, a mark showing a nightingale became its symbol. It describes the early firm as an electromechanical business set up in the post-war years in a region with a long mechanical tradition, at a time, it says, when cars were becoming central to daily life in Italy and tyre work still relied on manual effort and unspecialised tools.

The red came later and stayed. The company writes that “Corghi red” became a recognised sign around the world as its machines spread from local tyre shops to the pit garages of Formula 1.

The Artiglio and the wheel-service bench.

Corghi’s defining product is the Artiglio, Italian for “claw.” Italian Wikipedia explains the problem it solved: the first tyre-changing machines, from the United States, were designed for American wheels with a centre hole, which European wheels lacked, so European fitters still levered tyres off by hand. In 1962, Italian Wikipedia says, Erminio Corghi invented and patented in Correggio the first universal tyre changer, with a swinging side arm and a rotating work table whose clamps could grip any type of rim. The company dates the Artiglio to 1961 and calls it the world’s first tyre changer.

The company lists the features of the patent as a rotating clamp to hold the rim, a vertical bead breaker, foot pedals that left the operator’s hands free and a multi-tool turret on a right-angled working arm. It says the name quickly became a byword for tyre changers in Italian, and Italian Wikipedia gives “artiglio” as an everyday name for the machine. The same article says Correggio grew, from the 1970s, into an industrial district specialising in machinery for tyre shops.

From the tyre changer the range widened around the wheel. The company says its first wheel balancer was the ER3, and it later added diagnostic balancers, the clampless R.E.M.O. wheel aligner, the hydraulic Artiglio Master Force and PROADAS, a system for calibrating driver-assistance sensors. Its website now groups the range into ADAS and diagnosis, tyre changers, balancers, wheel alignment, lifts, inspection equipment and workshop software, and it says its EM 9780 balancer is used at major racing circuits. It trains technicians through the Scuola Corghi.

Design and documentation.

Garage equipment is sold to people who already know what a lift or a tyre changer should do, so the makers’ own material tends to show the machines at work. The usual picture is a two-post lift with a car raised to head height in a clean, well-lit workshop, the columns and arms set against pale floors and painted walls, with a technician underneath for scale.

Wheel-service equipment has its own look. Tyre changers and wheel balancers are typically shown as compact cabinets in strong body colours — reds, blues and greys recur across the trade — with a wheel mounted and the controls in view. Alignment systems are often shown through their targets or sensors clamped to the wheels and a screen nearby, and brake testers through rollers set into the workshop floor.

Much of the selling happens face to face. Makers present their ranges at trade fairs such as Automechanika in Frankfurt and at national shows, and most sell through dealer and installer networks rather than directly, so dealer locators, installer programmes and training centres feature prominently on their websites. Certification marks and named standards also appear often; Rotary Lift, for example, says many of its lifts carry the certification mark of the Automotive Lift Institute, a trade body formed in 1945.

The makers in this guide include family firms, private companies and brands held inside larger industrial groups. This guide sets out what can be checked about each — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family brand inside Nexion.

Corghi is now one brand within a larger group. Its website calls it a brand of the Nexion group, based in Correggio, and Nexion lists its brands as including Corghi, HPA-Faip, Mondolfo Ferro, Orlandini, SICE, Tecnomotor and Teco, along with the Danish Stenhøj names and Bradbury. Tyrepress reported in November 2020 that Nexion SpA, then known for Corghi and the other Italian brands together with the Danish Stenhøj Group brands, had agreed to buy Kompunet Informatica of Senigallia, which makes databases and management software for workshops and tyre shops. The magazine said Kompunet had worked in the automotive sector for more than 20 years and had also written software for fleet servicing, car rental and car-window repair, and that its chief executive would stay on to run its projects inside the group.

The family still leads. Milano Finanza reported in October 2026 that Nexion is a holding company controlled by the Corghi family, chaired by Giulio Corghi, and that the investment firm One Equity Partners joined as a shareholder in December 2019 with a significant minority stake, which the paper estimated at about 40 per cent. It counted 17 brands, 12 production plants, eight research centres and 16 sales subsidiaries, with more than 350 distributors in about 150 countries, and reported the opening of a new automated logistics hub of about 22,000 square metres at Prato di Correggio, with room for about 7,600 pallets and a rooftop solar plant of about 1.1 megawatts. Corghi says the group’s plants are in Italy, Germany, Croatia, Brazil and China, and that it employs more than 2,200 people. The group shows at trade fairs including Automechanika in Frankfurt, and its American arm, Corghi USA, exhibited at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas in November 2026.

For a design guide, Corghi shows how one invention, a strong colour and a small emblem can anchor a family brand for seven decades. Compare Ravaglioli, another Emilian maker of garage equipment, and Hunter Engineering, an American maker of balancers and alignment systems. For this guide we use a deep red, near-black and grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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