Itema Brand Guidelines: Somet’s 1967 Rapier, Sulzer’s Projectile & One Name

A family of textile makers adds a loom.

The Itema name is recent; the business behind it is not. Itema traces its roots to Somet, which its own timeline says Gianni Radici founded in 1967 at Casnigo, in the province of Bergamo. Italian Wikipedia expands the name to Società Macchine Tessili and says the business began with Pietro Radici and then his son Gianni. Itema describes the step as a diversification: Radici wanted to add another link of the supply chain to the family’s existing textile businesses in the Seriana Valley, which the company calls the “cradle” of the Italian textile industry. The company’s accounts differ on the town. Its timeline says Casnigo, while its account of the fiftieth anniversary, held on 14 October 2017, places the party at the historic headquarters in Colzate, “exactly where everything began.”

Itema also claims a technical first for that year. It says Somet “invented, industrialized and launched the very first rapier weaving machine as we know it today.” That is the company’s wording.

The second name arrived from next door. Itema’s timeline says Vamatex was founded in 1973 at Villa di Serio, also in the Bergamo area, that the Radici Group acquired it in 1992, and that Somet and Vamatex merged in 2000 to form Promatech. Italian Wikipedia says Miro Radici, Gianni’s brother, took over the leadership in 1990 and stepped aside in 2010, when top management opened to outside managers.

By then there was a group name above the machines. Textile World Asia wrote in November 2005 that the Itema Group had been established five years earlier by Miro Radici. The companies kept their own names: the same report described Itema India, opened at Coimbatore on 24 September 2005, as serving Somet, Vamatex and Savio. Itema’s timeline dates its first branches to China in 2002 and India in 2003.

Winterthur, Zuchwil and the projectile.

The third name was the oldest. Sulzer was founded in Winterthur in 1834, and its textile division had become, in the words of swissinfo, “once considered the flagship of the corporation.” On 27 July 2001 swissinfo reported that Sulzer had sold Sulzer Textil to Promatech, a member of the Itema group, as part of a wider divestiture programme. Sulzer Textil then had 1,850 staff, most of them at Zuchwil in the canton of Solothurn and at Rüti.

The deal took time to close. Textile World reported that the European Commission approved the purchase in July 2002, and that regulators had been concerned about dominance in the rapier market. As a result Sulzer Tessile, the Italian subsidiary of Sulzer Textil, became a stand-alone company, and from 1 January 2003 it went back to the name SMIT, which it had carried before Sulzer Textil bought it. Itema’s timeline gives 2001 for the acquisition, and Textile World in March 2003 gave 2002; the sale was agreed in 2001 and cleared in 2002.

Names were the sensitive part. The Swiss business became the Sultex group in 2002, while its products kept the Sulzer Textil brand. Paolo Antonietti, then president of Sulzer Textil, told Textile World in August 2002 that the company wanted the Sulzer name to remain on its machines, its advertisements and its distribution channels. Itema’s timeline says Sultex became Itema Switzerland in 2009.

The Swiss line also brought the projectile machine. Itema says projectile weaving machines were made continuously at Zuchwil from 1953, beginning with a model called the TW11, and that the line continues today in the P7300HP V8. Italian Wikipedia describes the projectile loom as exclusive to Itema.

The three names then became one. Itema dates the unified brand to 2011, when the A9500 air-jet machine was launched at ITMA Barcelona as the first Itema-branded loom; English and Italian Wikipedia date the rebranding and Itema S.p.A. to 2012. The R9500 rapier followed in 2012, and Itema calls it its “absolute best-seller.” The company now says it is the only manufacturer in the world offering all three weft insertion technologies: rapier, air-jet and projectile.

How the category presents itself.

Textile machinery is sold through scale. A spinning frame can run the length of a mill hall, so makers often photograph it from one end, with spindles and yarn packages receding in a long line. Looms are shown mid-beat, with the rapier or the reed caught in motion. The pictures are less about a single object than about a repeated one, thousands of identical parts working in rows.

The opposite view is the close-up. Catalogues and websites in this trade move in tightly on needles, yarn guides, rings and travellers, because the product’s precision is hard to see from across a hall. Cones of coloured yarn supply the colour that grey and white machine casings lack, and flat-knitted sample panels show what a machine’s pattern work can do. 3D-knitted shoes and technical fabrics do the same for newer markets.

Software has joined the picture. Control touchscreens, status lights and mill-monitoring dashboards now appear next to the steel, as makers present automation and digital services alongside the machine. Saurer, for one, promotes LED operator guidance on its Autocoro 11 rotor machine.

The trade meets at its fairs, and these set much of the calendar for launches and imagery. ITMA, ITMA Asia, Techtextil and ShanghaiTex are the names that recur in these companies’ news pages, and a stand there works much as a catalogue does, with working machines, sample walls and yarn displays. Few makers in this guide publish a brand rulebook. Their identities show up instead in a company name carried over many decades, in product family names, and in how they picture the machine.

From Zuchwil to Colzate.

Italian Wikipedia, citing L’Eco di Bergamo of December 2012, says the heirs of Gianni Radici hold 60 percent and the Arizzi and Torri families 40 percent. In September 2025 Textile World named Maurizio Radici as president of the board and Ugo Ghilardi as chief executive. Italian Wikipedia also records that the company applied to list on the Borsa Italiana in March 2018 and withdrew about six weeks later, citing market conditions.

Since 2017 the group has spread beyond looms. Itema says it took a majority stake in the composites maker Lamiflex in 2017 and full ownership in 2021, launched the technical textiles division Itematech in 2019, made its incubator Itemalab an independent company in 2021, and formed Tofflonit, a biopharmaceutical systems joint venture with Tofflon of Shanghai, in 2023. Closer to weaving, it bought 80 percent of the reed maker Schoch, founded in 1907, in 2019 and the remainder in 2024, Textilegence reported. In February 2026 its American subsidiary bought the assets of Palmetto Loom Reed of Greenville, South Carolina.

The biggest recent change is geographic. On 27 May 2025 Blick and Keystone-SDA reported that Itema would close its Zuchwil production site in stages by the end of 2026, with just under 90 employees affected. The company said demand for the Swiss-built projectile machines had fallen 83 percent in 2024 against the previous year. Ticinonline reported in July 2025 that a social plan had been agreed with the employees’ association Angestellte Schweiz. Itema keeps an office at Wollerau for administrative and technical sales work, Blick said. In June 2026 Itema announced that the first projectile machines built in Italy had been produced at Colzate in early May, as part of the transfer from Zuchwil.

The Seriana Valley is gaining a site at the same time. In July 2022 Itema bought the former Cotonificio Cantoni area at Ponte Nossa, unused since 2004, and it laid a first stone there on 18 September 2025, Textile World reported, with the first step, a manufacturing plant, expected during 2027.

The brand itself is spare. Italian Wikipedia gives the slogan “feel the future,” the machine lines carry short taglines such as “It simply does everything” for the R9500EVO and “A Breath Ahead” for the GalileoAX, and the website’s newsletter panel reads “Just a Red Dot Away,” beside a site styled in black, white and red.

For a design guide, Itema shows how three separate nameplates can be folded into one short word without losing their history, which the company still recites in its own timeline. Compare Picanol, the Belgian weaving machine maker, and Rieter, a textile machinery name from Sulzer’s home city of Winterthur. For this guide we use a red, a near-black and a greige with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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