The looms at Lanificio Castellaro begin at six in the morning, and for most of her childhood Beatrice Castellaro woke to their rhythm drifting up the valley. It was, she says, the sound she spent her twenties trying to escape. She studied economics in Milan, took a job in London advising retailers on supply chains, and told her father, repeatedly and with increasing firmness, that she had no intention of becoming the fourth generation to run the family's wool mill in Biella.
In 2019 her father suffered a stroke. The mill, which employs ninety people and weaves fine worsted cloth for tailors in Europe and Japan, had no succession plan beyond the assumption that she would eventually relent. She flew home intending to stay a month, find a professional manager and return to London. Five years later she is still there, running the mill from her father's old office, where the desk remains covered in his fabric swatches.
Her first year was, by her own account, humbling. The senior weavers had known her since she was a child and were not inclined to take instructions from someone who had never set up a loom. Rather than assert authority, she asked to be trained. For four months she worked early shifts on the weaving floor, learning to read warp tension and to spot flaws by ear. The weavers still tease her about the cloth she ruined.
Tradition with the lights on
What she brought from London was a conviction that the mill's quiet excellence was being wasted. Castellaro cloth had been sold for decades through agents who revealed little about its origin, and the mill had no direct relationship with the tailors who used it. She changed that, inviting clients to visit the valley, publishing detailed information about the provenance of every bale of wool and launching a small line of cloth sold directly to independent tailors under the mill's own name.
I thought I was coming home to rescue a business. It turned out the business already knew exactly what it was doing. It just needed someone to tell the world.
She has also tackled the problem that haunts every mill in the region: a workforce whose average age is well over fifty. Castellaro now runs a paid apprenticeship with a technical school in Biella, taking eight young people a year and pairing each with a senior weaver for two years. Retention has been higher than she dared hope. Several apprentices, she notes, came specifically because they had seen the mill online and wanted to make something real.
Her father, now largely recovered, visits most mornings and walks the weaving floor with a cane. The two of them disagree often, particularly about the direct-to-tailor line, which he regards as an undignified distraction. She listens, she says, and then does what she thinks is right, which she suspects is exactly what he did to his own father. Neither of them has seriously proposed that she return to London.
Asked whether she regrets the career she left behind, Castellaro pauses for a long time. She misses the city, she admits, and the anonymity of a job where failure did not carry a family name. But she has come to hear the looms differently. They no longer sound like a summons. They sound, she says, like ninety people going to work in a valley that might otherwise have gone quiet, and that is not a sound she is prepared to lose.
