SCM Group Brand Guidelines: The Gemmani and Aureli Woodworking Machine Group of Rimini

A foundry partnership and one machine.

SCM Group has two starting dates, and it uses both. Its company history begins in 1935, when Nicola Gemmani and Lanfranco Aureli, whom it describes as experts in mechanics and foundry work, began working together. Its corporate page says SCM was founded in 1952, the year of its first woodworking machine, and the Italian financial news site BeBeez gave the same founding year, in Rimini, in 2022. An older account runs earlier still: the Spanish timber journal AITIM, in its March–April 2000 issue, put the origins at 1932, when the two partners set up a farm-machinery factory and a foundry.

The 1952 machine was L’Invincibile, “The Invincible,” designed by the engineer Giuseppe Gemmani, Nicola’s son. The company says it was meant to be simpler and more practical than the machines already on sale, and that it arrived in the middle of a building boom. Australian Wood Review, in a 2022 anniversary article, tells the same story and shows the trademark on a company car in Paris in 1960.

The first model was followed by the B2 and B3 and then what the company calls its most famous machine, the “Invincible B4,” a single unit that combined four operations, among them surface planing, thicknessing and sawing. AITIM described the early machines as strong cast constructions with the brand name cast into the base. For a design guide, that is the detail to keep: the name was part of the casting.

The company says that from the beginning its machines shared standard components and units across models, which it treats as an early form of modular design. In the 1960s Adriano and Alfredo Aureli, Lanfranco’s sons, joined the founders, and with Giuseppe Gemmani they opened directly controlled branches abroad, the 2022 accounts say. SCM dates its first machining centres and systems for solid-wood doors and windows to 1976; the “first” is the company’s own claim.

A house of machine brands.

From the mid-1980s SCM grew by buying specialists. Its history page lists a merger with the Mahros group in 1984 and the purchase of Minimax in 1985, which it describes as a producer of high-end machinery for the DIY market. Gabbiani, a beam-saw maker, followed in 1986. DMC, for sanding machines, and Morbidelli, for panel processing, are dated 1987 on that page, although a 2016 company profile gives 1985 for Morbidelli. In 1992 came Routech, for machining timber-construction elements, and Stefani, for edge banders.

The group later spread beyond wood. The 2016 profile dates the takeover of CMS, for plastics, composites, glass and stone, to 2002. On the wood side, Superfici joined in 2004 for finishing, CPC and Sergiani in 2006, and Celaschi in 2007. In November 2018 SCM announced the purchase of DMS, a CNC machinery maker in Colorado Springs, to sit alongside CMS. Two further deals came in 2024: control of Tecno Logica of Treviso, signed that June, and 51% of Mecal Machinery of Pavia, which works with aluminium, PVC and light alloys. A partnership with the planning-software company Tecnest followed in December 2025.

The older names did not disappear. The SCM wood website still lists them as separate labels, and the 2016 profile tied each one to a process: Stefani to edge banding, Gabbiani to panel saws, Morbidelli to machining centres. A separate joinery range covers machines such as sliding table saws, surface planers and band saws. That profile described Minimax as semi-professional.

Behind the machines is a components business. The 2016 profile lists SCM Fonderie for cast iron, Steelmec for metal carpentry and ES for electrical panels. Hiteco, which makes electrospindles and heads, began in 1977 as an in-house department at Villa Verucchio, near Rimini, and opened new premises in Rimini on 14 June 2024, the trade site glassonweb reported that July from the company’s release. Cast iron remains on the group’s website as a component sector, a direct line to the founders’ trade.

How the category presents itself.

Woodworking machinery is sold on the look of the work as much as the look of the machine. A nesting CNC table loaded with a sheet of birch ply, the parts of a cabinet marked out across it, is one of the category’s standard pictures. So is an edge bander with panels feeding through in a line, each one leaving with a finished edge.

The colour of the machine often does a lot of the recognition work. Sliding table saws and planers tend to appear in a maker’s machine green or grey, photographed square-on against pale timber, with curls of shavings gathered under a planer as the proof that it has been running. Hand-held tools get a closer view: a plunge saw on a rail, its dust port in frame.

The setting changes with the customer. Factory shots show long lines and automated handling for furniture producers, while other pictures move to a joinery workshop with a bench, a stack of boards and a single operator. Many makers use both, because their ranges run from the small shop to the industrial plant.

Trade fairs are the category’s shop window. LIGNA in Hanover, Xylexpo in Italy, IWF in Atlanta and Holz-Handwerk in Nuremberg are where new machines are shown running, often linked together on a stand to suggest a working production line rather than a row of separate products. For a sector that sells to engineers and cabinetmakers alike, the running demonstration matters as much as the brochure. This guide looks at what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its machines are made.

Two families, one holding.

The families are still there. On 17 February 2022 SCM announced a reorganisation of its share capital in which one branch of the Gemmani family left, and said the group would be led by “the three founding families,” who “will remain owners on an equal footing.” BeBeez explained the three: the Gemmani branch of Giovanni and Anastasia Gemmani and the two Aureli branches of Alfredo and Adriano Aureli, acting through the holding company Ageco, after buying back a stake it put at 30%. The website footer in November 2026 still states that the company is under the management and coordination of Ageco S.r.l.

A May 2025 release set the board for 2025–2027: Enrico Aureli as President, Andrea Aureli and Giovanni Gemmani as Vice Presidents, and Marco Mancini as Chief Executive Officer, with Adriano Aureli as Honorary President. The company’s news page still called Enrico Aureli President in August 2026.

On manufacturing, the same release describes “highly specialised and integrated plants in Italy and other sites in Germany, the United States and Brazil with production dedicated to local markets,” and more than 4,000 employees. Those are the company’s own words. Its releases name sites at Rimini and Villa Verucchio.

SCM’s clearest design recognition is for software, not a machine body. The Maestro Active operator interface, developed with the design firm NiEW to run across the group’s product lines, won a Red Dot Award in Brands & Communication Design 2019 and a special mention at the German Design Award that February, SCM announced. The stated aim was a single interface across all the group’s technologies. In November 2026 SCM reported a SMAU Innovation Award for artificial intelligence applied to surface finishing.

No brand guidelines are published. The website’s stylesheet is dominated by one deep blue which it also declares as the browser theme colour, and it sets text in Roboto and Helvetica Neue.

For a design guide, SCM Group shows how a family holding can keep many acquired names alive under one operating system. Compare Biesse, another Italian panel-machinery group, and HOMAG in Germany. For this guide we use a navy, a birch tone and a foundry orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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