Barbara’s parents dedicated their careers to a major American multinational, a leader in the manufacturing of air compression machinery. Her father, one of the most prominent distributors in Italy, founded RIVAIR in 1982, a company that quickly conquered the air compressor installation andmaintenance market under his leadership. However, in 1991, he decided to take an independent path and continued to write his own success story. Raised in a family environment highly oriented towards work, Barbara was not the son the family had hoped for to carry on the family name.
However, since she was a child, she had an innate passion for fashion and the artisanal creation of women’s clothing, learning the art of sewing from her grandmothers and designing her own dresses. After obtaining a degree in fashion design and industrial fashion illustration from the Carlo Secoli School in Milan, Barbara began working as a supervisor for the AirOne airline, gaining valuable experience in the professional world. At the age of 27, Barbara decided to fulfill her dream of opening a fashion atelier. To finance her project, she joined the family business as a commercial manager, but her life took an unexpected turn when her father passed away prematurely in 2006 soon after her arrival in family Company . Despite the general skepticism surrounding herentrepreneurial abilities as a woman, Barbara felt a strong sense of responsibility towards the employees and their families, and decided to carry on her father’s legacy by taking the helm of RIVAIR. Thrown into a male-dominated world, Barbara put aside her dream of becoming a fashion designer for 17 years.