Mantovanibenne Brand Guidelines: The Mirandola Family Firm Behind MBI & Eagle Shears

A family name and a product word.

Mantovanibenne makes attachments for excavators in Mirandola, in the province of Modena in Emilia-Romagna. The company dates itself to 1963, and Demolition & Recycling International reported in September 2023 that it was founded by Alberto Mantovani and is now run by his children and grandchildren. Benne is the Italian word for buckets, and buckets were, the company says, what it concentrated on in its early years.

From buckets it moved into hydraulic attachments for demolition, recycling and earthmoving, by its own account. Today Mantovanibenne describes itself as the head of the MBI Group, and it sells its crushers, demolition jaws and shears under the MBI mark; the French trade magazine BTP referred to the business in 2016 as Mantovanibenne International (MBI). Its website lists four companies abroad: MBI Bulgaria at Kavarna, which it says handles production, sales and service; MBI France at Lespinasse and MBI Deutschland in Dresden, for sales and service; and ZMM Zhejiang Mantovani Machinery at Shangyu in China, for production, sales and service.

The business remains a family one. When it marked its 55th anniversary on 29 September 2018 with about 400 guests at its Mirandola headquarters, HeavyQuip Magazine reported, members of the Mantovani family, including a new generation, spoke about the company’s past and its plans. At the 60th anniversary in 2023, Paolo Mantovani, the founder’s son and chief executive, said the family had decided together that the company’s future was “firmly here in Mirandola in the hands of the family that founded it,” Demolition & Recycling International reported. Professional Demolition International noted the same year that three generations of the family work together in the company.

Eagle shears and a patented booster.

Its signature product line is the demolition and scrap shear. Paolo Mantovani told KHL in 2022 that the company produced its first SH shear in Italy in the early 1990s. The line is now sold as Eagle shears, written Eagleshears on the company’s own pages, and Demolition & Recycling International named the Eagle shears in 2023 among the products the company is known for, along with other attachments for construction machines of more than 30 tonnes.

The newest generation, Eagle 3, arrived in 2022. KHL reported in June that year that the series was officially presented at the IFAT exhibition in Munich, and described it as the result of 3,000 hours of development work and 10,000 hours of testing; Professional Demolition International wrote that it was first shown at bauma 2022. KHL reported a redesigned mouth that opens up to 9% wider, jaws cut by high-pressure water jet and an upper jaw made from a single element without welding; the range ran from the SH250R, for excavators of 24 to 29 tonnes, to the SH2200R for the largest demolition work. In 2023 the SH600R Eagle 3 won the SaMoTer Innovation Award in the attachments, demolition and recycling category, Professional Demolition International reported.

An earlier prize came for a crusher. In a release published in November 2015, the company said it had won the Innovation Award in the tools and attachments category at the World Demolition Summit in Amsterdam, organised by Demolition & Recycling International, for changes to the hydraulic system of its CRH440 crusher, which it says uses a patented double booster.

The rest of the catalogue covers most stages of demolition. In 2016 BTP reported the launch of the Multisystem MS15R, a multi-purpose tool for 15 to 21 tonne carriers with four interchangeable jaw versions, and said the MBI range then covered carriers from 15 to 160 tonnes. The company’s website also lists demolition jaws, rotating and fixed crushers, rail splitters and hydraulic magnets, as well as buckets and quick couplers. Its pile breakers, as it describes them, crack the concrete of foundation piles while leaving the reinforcement inside intact, and its pages also show shears for subsea demolition. On its figures page it claims 15 registered patents and more than 100 models across more than 20 product types.

Design and documentation.

Excavator attachments are sold on what they let a machine do. A tiltrotator sits between the arm and the bucket so that the bucket can turn and tilt, and its makers tend to show it at work: a bucket angled along a trench in a city street, a ditch shaped beside a forest road in northern Sweden, a grab sorting stone on a building site. Hydraulic breakers are pictured against rock faces and concrete, demolition shears against steel, and quick couplers in close-up, where the meeting of tool and machine is the point of the picture.

Much of this trade began in the Nordic countries. engcon traces its tiltrotator to the mid-1980s in Jämtland, and Rototilt traces its name to a 1986 launch by Noreco of Umeå; in 2020 Rototilt and Steelwrist launched Open-S, a shared standard for fully automatic quick couplers, KHL reported. Breaker and demolition-tool makers in Italy, Finland, France, Germany and Japan complete the group of makers in these guides.

The makers meet their customers in person. Trade fairs such as bauma in Germany and Intermat in France, Conexpo in Las Vegas and national machinery shows are where new ranges are unveiled; engcon says it first showed its tiltrotator at a Stockholm fair in 1993, and Rototilt presented its Rototilt Control concept at bauma in 2022. Demonstration days, factory open houses and dealer events let operators try the equipment, and much selling goes through local dealers and sales companies.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word. The palettes and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not the brands’ marks.

Still in Mirandola, by family choice.

Mantovanibenne’s manufacturing is spread across three countries, by its own account: alongside its base in Mirandola, it names production at MBI Bulgaria and at ZMM in China, and it says it works through a network of dealers on every continent as well as its own subsidiaries. HeavyQuip Magazine’s 2018 report gave a sense of what the Mirandola site has been through, saying an earthquake had almost destroyed the company’s headquarters and its main production line before the business went on to celebrate its anniversary there. The theme of that celebration, the magazine reported, was “Emilian Excellences,” a nod to the region’s reputation for food, fashion, fine mechanics and fast cars.

Its trademark notice names the word “MANTOVANIBENNE” and “MBI,” with the related logo, as the company’s marks. Its website also displays the logos of trade bodies including the European Demolition Association and UNACEA, the Italian construction-machinery association.

For a design guide, Mantovanibenne shows how a family name joined to a product word can become a brand, then share the stage with three initials, while its main shear line takes the name of a bird of prey. Compare Indeco, another Italian maker of demolition attachments, and Arden Equipment, the French maker of shears, grabs and couplers. For this guide we use a slate, a concrete grey and a shear orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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