FAAC Brand Guidelines: Bologna’s 1965 Gate-Opener Maker, Owned by the Archdiocese

A builder, an open gate and a hydraulic idea.

FAAC began in 1965 at Zola Predosa, just west of Bologna. Italian Wikipedia, citing the Corriere della Sera business supplement L’Economia of October 2017, says the name stands for Fabbrica Automatismi Apertura Cancelli, roughly “automatic gate-opening factory,” and that the founder, Giuseppe Manini, was a small building contractor who had noticed that the gates of apartment car parks were always left open, because nobody wanted to get out of the car to close them.

Manini’s answer was hydraulic. The company says he created the first system for moving gates automatically by applying oil-hydraulic technology; Italian Wikipedia names that first product the “750 interrato,” an operator buried below the gate, and says it drew on the hydraulic supply chain of the Bologna area’s industrial districts. A second model, the 400, was the first for swing gates mounted on the outside, the same source says. FAAC dates the start of series production to 1970.

Electronics followed. The company dates its first microprocessor control boards to 1983 and says production of its electronics was concentrated in Ireland at FAAC Electronics Ltd, a business it had acquired; Italian Wikipedia dates that Irish company to 1989, through the purchase of a firm called Elab, so the sources differ on the year. In 1979 FAAC began training courses for its specialist sales force and opened its first foreign subsidiary, in Switzerland, followed by France in 1981. Germany and Austria, the United Kingdom, the United States and Spain followed between 1984 and 1990, the company says. In the 1980s, Italian Wikipedia adds, a FAAC television advertisement showing a lion crouched before a gate in the middle of a desert became well known in Italy.

Gates, doors, barriers and car parks.

FAAC now describes itself as an international group for vehicle and pedestrian access automation and access control, for homes, businesses and industry. Its Italian website groups the range into operators for swing and sliding gates, garage and industrial doors, automatic barriers, swing, sliding and revolving automatic doors, turnstiles and motorised gates, and traffic bollards. FAAC says its own brand is the centre of the group’s research and development, built on both hydraulic and electromechanical technology, and it offers installers a support portal and an app, Simply Connect, for managing their customers’ automations remotely.

Two dates in the company’s timeline stand out. In 1993, it says, the motorway operator Autostrade SpA commissioned FAAC barriers for all its toll booths, and FAAC registered a patent for a self-learning remote-control technology called SLH. In 2005 it launched FAAC City, a line devoted to traffic bollards.

Growth also came through acquisitions. The company lists Automatica Casali, maker of the Genius brand, in 1994; Spazio Italia in 1999; Voltec in 2002; the tubular-motor maker Altron and the Swedish door and gate automation firm DAAB in 2006–07; Clemsa of Spain in 2010; Kemko and the Swiss Zeag Group in 2011; Datapark of the United States and Germany’s Magnetic Autocontrol group in 2012; and Centurion Systems of South Africa in 2016. FAAC calls the Magnetic, Datapark and Zeag purchases fundamental to its move into access control and car park management. Italian Wikipedia adds the Californian gate-operator maker Viking Access Systems, bought through FAAC International in April 2019, and the Brazilian pedestrian access firm Wolpac later that year.

Parking became a full division. The company names HUB Parking as its brand for integrated car park systems, from large infrastructure to small and medium sites, and lists the acquisition of the TIBA parking group and its Texas distributor in 2020–21, alongside part of ASSA ABLOY’s European automatic-door and high-speed-door business, under the ASSA ABLOY and Record brands. By the end of 2017, Italian Wikipedia says, citing Il Sole 24 Ore, FAAC had 18 production sites in 15 countries and worked in three divisions: access automation, access control and parking.

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.

From a family firm to a church-owned group.

For almost half a century FAAC was a family company. In 1990, the company says, Giuseppe Manini arranged a cross-shareholding with the French motor maker Somfy: FAAC took a stake in Somfy and Somfy took a share of FAAC’s capital, a partnership that lasted 25 years. The founder’s only son, Michelangelo Manini, later led the company, according to Italian Wikipedia.

In 2012 ownership changed in an unusual way. The Archdiocese of Bologna became owner of 66% of the group, the company says, with Somfy holding the remaining 34%. After a period of court-supervised custody ended, FAAC bought Somfy’s stake, paying in Somfy shares, and from May 2015 the cross-shareholding was dissolved and the group had a single shareholder; Italian Wikipedia dates the purchase of the French stake to 2014. In April 2016 the Corriere della Sera reported that the Archdiocese owned all of FAAC’s shares, held through a trust set up to keep the running of the company separate from religious activity, and that the year’s dividend would go to social projects, mainly in Bologna.

The company says the new ownership sped up a separation of ownership and management that had begun earlier, and that FAAC is run by a board made up mostly of independent professionals and a management team. Its website names Andrea Moschetti as executive chairman, appointed in March 2012, and says Giovanni D’Abramo became managing director of the group in March 2023. The group now trades as FAAC Technologies, with FAAC S.p.A. as its parent company, and says it has companies in 30 countries. Italian Wikipedia also records its sports sponsorship: FAAC was main sponsor of Bologna FC from 2015 to 2018.

For a design guide, FAAC shows how a gate-opener maker from a Bologna suburb grew into a group spanning gates, doors, barriers and car parks while keeping its founding initials as its name. Compare TIBA, the parking-systems brand FAAC added in 2020–21, and CAME, another Italian maker of gate automation. For this guide we use a barrier red, graphite and warm stone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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