Dorin Brand Guidelines: The Florence Family Compressor Maker Dating From 1918

A Florence workshop that found refrigeration in 1932.

Dorin dates its start to December 1918. That is the month Giovanni Dorin, the founder’s great-grandson and then the company’s marketing chief, gave Refindustry in a January 2018 interview for the centenary. The magazine wrote that Mario Dorin had turned away from his father’s trade in heating systems to work on his own, and it recorded his motto: “Sleep a little and work hard.”

The first business was not in refrigeration. The company’s history page lists machine tools, broaches, air compressors and the repair of motor vehicle engines. The German trade journal Die Kälte & Klimatechnik, in a report of October 2001, describes a maker of machine tools, air compressors and liquid pumps with a vehicle repair workshop alongside, and says the air-compressor work led to the first refrigeration machines.

Those came in 1932, when the workshop began making open-type piston compressors for refrigeration; the company says they soon became its core business. Giovanni Dorin told Refindustry that the refrigeration field then had few manufacturers.

Semi-hermetic compressors followed in 1952, according to the company and Die Kälte & Klimatechnik; a Refindustry report of May 2019 gives 1957. In a semi-hermetic machine the motor sits inside the compressor’s bolted housing, and Giovanni Dorin claimed in his interview that Dorin was the first to offer a compressor with the electric motor on board.

The first factory was inside Florence. In 1970 it moved compressor and unit production out of Florence to Compiobbi, in the municipality of Fiesole. The company puts the site at about 20,000 square metres, Die Kälte & Klimatechnik reported 23,000 in 2001, and an undated Nuremberg trade-fair profile gives a 50,000 square metre building. The 2001 report also found open compressors still made at the old Florence site, with casings machined at Scandicci.

From ice-cream machines to carbon dioxide.

The product Giovanni Dorin named as the most widely used in the company’s history is the two-piston semi-hermetic 1MG range, designed in the early 1960s and sold for jobs such as ice-cream machines and cold rooms. Larger machines came next. The company says six- and eight-cylinder models joined the range between 1983 and 1998, and in 1998 it added a 16-piston, 150 hp compressor, no longer in production, which it counts among its flagships.

The turn that now defines the brand was carbon dioxide as a refrigerant. Giovanni Dorin dates the first prototype of a transcritical CO2 compressor to 1991 and describes joint research in the 1990s with the Norwegian institute SINTEF. The company’s history page dates the application of CO2 to 1999, as does a NaturalRefrigerants.com report of June 2024. A Nuremberg fair profile places the TCS range in 2003 and the CD range in 2009.

He also named what that choice cost. Asked by Refindustry about the company’s biggest mistake, he said that around the 1990s Dorin had misjudged demand for screw compressors and put its effort into CO2 instead, missing the screw opportunity while gaining the CO2 one. “Market is leader,” he said.

The recognition came in 2021. Cooling Post reported that Officine Mario Dorin won the Refrigeration category of the AHR Expo Innovation Awards with the CD600 range of six-cylinder transcritical CO2 compressors; the awards went ahead although the show itself was cancelled that year. The AHR Expo citation, as printed by Refindustry, called it the largest CO2 transcritical compressor platform available worldwide. In July 2023 Refindustry described a fully released range of up to 160 hp.

Dorin also has a platform called Transformer, announced in February 2019, in which common parts serve different configurations. The company sells compressors for food retail, transport, agrifood and pharmaceutical uses. In November 2019 it opened its first CO2 Campus, a seminar for professionals, Refindustry reported.

Design and documentation.

Refrigeration is a trade that sells equipment most people only half notice, and its makers tend to picture it where it works. Supermarket case makers show long runs of cabinets, glass doors catching the aisle lights and the shelves stretching away down the frame. Cooling tower makers go up to the roof and shoot their steel boxes against open sky.

Compressor makers work closer in. Their catalogues favour the cut-away: a casing sliced open with the copper, windings and pistons labelled, part engineering drawing and part sales picture. Coil makers go closer still, with condensate beading on fins and tubes in tight rows. Beverage cooler makers have a different job, because the cabinet is also an advertisement, so the photograph often sits on a shop floor with a drink brand’s name on the door.

Much of the category’s public life happens at trade fairs. Chillventa in Nuremberg is the refrigeration industry’s own show, EuroShop in Düsseldorf is where retail fittings meet retail design, AHR Expo moves between American cities for the heating, cooling and refrigeration trades, and Mostra Convegno Expocomfort in Milan covers heating, plumbing and cooling. At these shows the stand does the work of the brand book: a unit opened up, a logo at full height, model names on the panels.

That naming is a habit worth noticing. Ranges are usually identified by letters and numbers, written for engineers who read specification sheets, so a memorable product name or a founding story stands out. The guides here set out what can be checked about each one: who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made.

“The main thing is that our products are always perfect.”

The family has stayed with the name. Die Kälte & Klimatechnik called the company wholly family-owned in 2001 and found it run by the third generation: Mario Dorin, the founder’s grandson and namesake, with Filippo Dorin and Giuseppe Balduini. Cooling Post wrote in 2015 that it was still a family business headed by that grandson, with his cousins and sons. Giovanni Dorin told Refindustry in 2018 that he was the fourth generation and that a fifth was growing up, and a Refindustry report of May 2019 said the Dorin family still ran it. Its profile on the NaturalRefrigerants.com directory calls it the oldest family-run company in the field.

Dorin’s base is at Compiobbi, with a presence in China too. Dorin Shanghai was founded in 2010 and a manufacturing presence at Jiaxing, Dorin Compressor Jiaxing, followed in 2014, NaturalRefrigerants.com reported in June 2024; Giovanni Dorin spoke in 2018 of locally produced models for the Far East. The same 2024 report quoted Lucy Luo of Dorin saying that the CO2 compressors sold in China were then made in Italy. Stated volumes vary by date: about 50,000 piston compressors a year on the company’s history page, more than 60,000 in Cooling Post in 2015, and more than 75,000 in the undated fair profile.

Its website sets the name in capitals as DORIN, shows the logo in a deep red, and uses the lines “The power of brains” and “From tradition to innovation.” It quotes the founder: “The main thing is that our products are always perfect.” In 2001 the company’s credo, as the German journal printed it, was that the future comes from the year 1918. For the centenary it planned events at trade fairs, from Mostra Convegno Expocomfort in Milan to Chillventa in Nuremberg.

For a design guide, Dorin shows how a founder’s name, a date and one colour can carry an engineering brand for generations. Compare Frascold, the Italian compressor maker that grew out of another family workshop, and BITZER, the German compressor name. For this guide we use a deep red and a cast-iron grey with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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