IMESA Brand Guidelines: The Cessalto Laundry Maker Formed in 1968 to Build Hotel Washers

A Veneto company formed by two teams.

IMESA is a maker of commercial laundry equipment at Cessalto, in the province of Treviso in the Veneto. It dates its start to 1968: Laundry & Cleaning News reported in September 2008 that the company was celebrating its 40th anniversary that year, and IMESA itself writes “since 1968.” The business trades as IMESA S.p.A. and makes washing, drying and ironing machines for professional laundries.

It was not founded by a single person. According to the 2008 interview in Laundry & Cleaning News, IMESA was formed by technical and sales teams from the two leading suppliers to the Italian hotel and restaurant trade, who worked together to set up a company to make washing machines for hotels. Italy was then in its “economic miracle,” the magazine wrote: the country was becoming popular with holidaymakers, and hotels were starting to set up laundries of their own.

The Miotto family came later. The same interview says that Carlo Miotto’s father was an IMESA supplier in the early days, joined the management team some years later, and that the family eventually acquired the business as sole owner. A 2005 report in the same magazine dated the family’s ownership to 1979 and named Carlo Miotto as sales director.

The company’s own website tells its origin story in a more lyrical register, recalling washerwomen at the rivers, sheets hanging in the sun and the hotels along the coast, and speaking of its “artisan roots in the Veneto region.”

From hotel washers to a full range.

IMESA grew from hotel washers into a complete laundry range. The 2008 interview says the company saw that its location put it near large makers of dry-cleaning and finishing machines, in a region with many hotel and restaurant suppliers but no laundry-equipment maker, and that it decided to fill that gap with washers, dryers and ironers of its own. While other Italian equipment makers moved their factories abroad, Miotto told the magazine, IMESA chose to stay in Italy.

The 2005 report, by Janet Taylor, described a company of 115 people on a 22,000-square-metre site at Cessalto, making around 4,000 machines a year, two-thirds of them for export. Texcare 2004 was the first European trade fair at which it showed its complete portfolio: soft- and rigid-mount washers, dryers, ironers and drying ironers, all produced in-house. Its motto was “Technology in progress.” The magazine reported that IMESA gained ISO 9001 certification in 1994, claiming to be the first Italian company to do so, introduced its own wet-cleaning system in 2001 and produced its own ironers for the first time in 2003. Its machines also carried ETL approval for the United States. On-premises laundries, such as those run by hotels, were the larger part of its business, the magazine reported, alongside dry cleaners adding laundry services.

By 2008 the range ran from 5 to 85 kg. In 2006 the company had started a certified-partner programme to build exclusive relationships with its main distributors, with partners in Austria, France and Portugal. It also offered a GSM system that let it monitor machines in real time and So.Laundry, software that helps distributors choose the right size of machine for a customer.

Design and documentation.

Commercial laundry equipment is sold to two quite different worlds. At one end are laundromats, hotels and restaurants, where a row of stainless-steel washer-extractors and tumble dryers sits in plain view of customers and staff; at the other are industrial laundries, closed factories that wash for hospitals, hotels, airlines, cruise ships and workwear services. Girbau, for example, divides its business into commercial, self-service and industrial laundries, while Kannegiesser lists healthcare, hospitality and workwear among the uses for its machines.

In the industrial plants the machines become a production line. Soiled linen is sorted, carried on overhead monorails, washed in tunnel washers that move batches from chamber to chamber, then fed into flatwork ironers and folders or, for garments, steamed in tunnel finishers. Kannegiesser presents its range in exactly these terms, as one system from sorting to stacking, and in 2022 added a camera-guided robot that feeds towels into a folding machine.

For smaller customers the brand lives on the machine itself: the stainless front, the porthole door and the control panel. Girbau, for one, also sells a remote monitoring system called Sapphire. Makers speak a shared language of capacity and of water, energy and chemical use, and name their certifications and sustainability programmes prominently; the claims behind them are the makers’ own.

Many of these names remain family firms rooted in particular towns. Girbau grew from a workshop in Vic, in Catalonia, and Kannegiesser from a shed near Vlotho, in East Westphalia; Kannegiesser’s partner Montanari is a family business in Modena, in northern Italy. Several now build close to their customers abroad, as Girbau did when it opened a plant in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 2025. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — founding, ownership and where it builds — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

“From product to service business.”

The current catalogue on IMESA’s website is organised by task. Its LM high-speed washer-extractors run from 8 kg to 125 kg; the RC line covers washers with lower spin speeds; D2W barrier washers have separate loading and unloading sides; and ES rotary dryers come in Easy, Smart and Premium versions. Ironing is handled by FI roller ironers and by MCA and MCM drying calenders, and the TDM tandem unit pairs a washer with a dryer. The sectors it lists include hotels and restaurants, hospitals and care homes, self-service laundries, marine use and wet cleaning.

Its services have moved online. In a 2024 feature in Laundry & Cleaning News, IMESA described IM.CONNECT, a web portal for managing laundries remotely, and IM11, a digital control unit, and presented its mission as moving “from product to service business.” It said it exports over 75% of its output to more than 70 countries. On its website the company names ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and ISO 50001 certifications, an ItalyX recognition promoted by Confindustria and Il Sole 24 Ore, a 600-kilowatt solar installation at its plant and a life-cycle assessment project, and it describes its machines as “authentically Made in Italy.”

Training is part of the offer. IMESA runs a Laundry Academy for customers, and its know-how pages say it has studied the main textile materials in its own laboratory to develop washing, drying and ironing processes. It describes its shift from a product-focused company to a service-oriented one as involving new in-house skills and a reorganised way of working.

For a design guide, IMESA shows how a regional family-owned maker presents itself through engineering, a factory in the Veneto and a widening list of services. Compare Grandimpianti, another laundry-equipment maker in the Veneto, and Electrolux Professional, the Stockholm group whose professional business set up an operational headquarters at Pordenone in 1999. For this guide we use a deep teal and a warm linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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