Renzacci Brand Guidelines: The Città di Castello Family Firm Behind Dry-Cleaning Machines

A dry-cleaning-machine maker in Umbria.

Renzacci makes dry-cleaning machines, washer-extractors, tumble dryers and ironing equipment at Città di Castello, in the upper Tiber valley of Umbria. The company’s full name is Renzacci S.p.A. – Industria Lavatrici, “washing-machine industry,” and it carries the name of its founder, Azelio Renzacci.

The company gives two versions of its start. Its history page says Azelio Renzacci set up the business at the beginning of the 1960s, determined that it should be built and developed in Città di Castello, the town where he was born. Its company profile gives a firmer date, saying it was founded in 1965, and the company’s head of sales repeated 1965 in a March 2026 interview with CINET, the international textile-care association.

It remains a family business. The company says Gabrio and Donatella Renzacci now lead it, after a handover from the founder that took place some years ago, and that Renzacci S.p.A. is part of a larger group active in many sectors. Its website lists it as a company with a single shareholder. The founder, the company says, was for many years president of ELMO, the European association of washing and dry-cleaning machine makers, and Gabrio Renzacci has presided over the Expo Detergo trade fair, for its 2010 edition, and over Sviluppumbria, the regional economic-development company.

The name has also appeared in less expected places. Italian Wikipedia lists Renzacci, with Cast and Himont, among the main sponsors on the yellow livery of the Coloni Formula 1 team in 1987.

Perc, natural solvents and water.

Renzacci’s range is broader than laundry alone. The company describes machines for dry cleaning, water washing, rotary drying, washing shoe soles, and washing and degreasing metal parts. Its dry-cleaning machines are grouped by solvent: perchloroethylene models in the Winner and Progress series, and machines for alternative solvents, including hydrocarbon, Sensene and GreenEarth versions. The Progress 4U models, in load sizes from about 8 to 17 kilograms, carry a touchscreen computer the company calls I-TOUCH.

For water washing it sells suspended high-spin washer-extractors in the HS, HS Eco and HS Ecocare series, rigid SX and LX machines and the Dry Tower, with dryers and ironing equipment including MSA calenders and KZ mangles. Its OCEANO wet-cleaning system, which it says rests on a washing technique it calls the Techstream System, is presented as professional water washing with professional machines and detergents, rather than as a way of washing everything in water.

In September 2018 CINET reported that Renzacci had introduced a range of “Bio Dry Cleaning Machines” for what it calls Natural Cleaning, and a training programme, the Renzacci Campus, built around them. The company says it now trains customers in a centre of more than 750 square metres given over to dry and wet cleaning, with academy days and technical courses at start, pro and master levels.

It also sells more than machines: turnkey self-service laundries, shop layouts, franchising and online technical support, aimed at coin laundries, hotels and restaurants, industrial laundries, sports clubs, hospitals and clinics.

The company’s argument about its own field is set out most plainly in that March 2026 CINET interview. There its head of sales described a shift in what used to be called dry cleaning towards what Renzacci calls bio dry cleaning, using natural solvents, and said a successful cleaner now needs to offer both bio dry-cleaning machines and industrial washing machines, with training in how to use them.

Commercial laundry equipment.

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.

One factory town, many export markets.

Renzacci says it keeps research, development and production in its own plant at Città di Castello. It describes a main site of about 20,000 square metres, around 15,000 of them covered, supported by satellite plants for specific parts, with laser machinery, CAD and CAM systems, automated guided vehicles on the production line and a testing department of 17 computerised stations. It says it makes more than 2,300 dry-cleaning machines a year — a figure Laundry & Cleaning News repeated in a 2024 preview of the Texcare fair — and its website carries a “Made in Italy” banner.

Exports are central to how it presents itself. Its profile says the brand is sold in more than 120 countries, naming markets from Japan, the United States and Australia to Germany, China, Singapore and Britain; its home page puts the figure at 130 countries and its experience at more than 55 years. It calls itself a world leader in industrial washing technology; those are the company’s own words.

The name has a long history in Britain. Laundry & Cleaning News called Renzacci “a familiar name in dry/wetcleaning circles in the UK” in October 2024, ahead of the company’s stand in Hall 8 at Texcare in Frankfurt. In November 2025 CINET reported that the business known as Renzacci UK for more than 50 years had completed a rebrand begun in November 2024 and would continue as Wavepoint Group Limited, offering wet-cleaning systems, finishing equipment and automation.

For a design guide, Renzacci shows how a family industrial name can carry across a range of very different machines. Compare Grandimpianti, another Italian laundry-equipment maker, and IMESA. For this guide we use a deep Tiber green, linen and a terracotta with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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