Stefani

The Stefani company was founded in 1950, when Giovanni Stefani opened a small workshop in Vicenza where he produced woodworking machines for small carpentry shops: a surface planer, a thicknessing planer and a vertical router. His innovative and winning idea was to design machines with productivity capacities that are higher than other machines on the market. His first patents were registered back in 1953.

Stefani, along with his wife and the long and cherished collaboration with Luigi Cattelan, continued to develop new ideas and the company continued to grow. Soon enough it moved into a much larger plant and began producing also band saws, circular saws, presses and combined systems that performed five types of machining, establishing itself in the Italian and international markets and producing on an industrial scale. In 1962 it was the first Italian company to offer one-sided and two-sided automated edgebanders as well as sizing edgebanders. They were the first attempts to apply continuous edgebands to chipboard panels in order to replace static bonding benches.

The first series of edgebanders included gluing, butting and trimming units; the second included additional corner rounding and bevelling units along with an innovative, at the time even futuristic, unit for rounding edges at various radii. Driven by customer needs, innovations and new important patents followed, like the edgebander for doors that allowed you to apply an edgeband divided into three strips in one go, to edgeband profiled panels, and to perform postforming operations.

In 1973, the first sizing edgebanders were marketed complete with loading and unloading systems, up to delivering complete factories. Stefani thus became a world leading producer for the furniture industry. In 1992 Stefani sold the company to the SCM Group, which continued to develop the company by investing in resources and the surrounding territory. The first decade of the 21st century saw the introduction of electronics and fast automation.

Recent years have been marked by a strong commitment to designing and providing solutions for customised production, suitable for the new post-crisis economic model. Current efforts are focused on offering suitable edgebanding solutions for contemporary materials and designs, as part of the new Industry 4.0 vision of maximum connection and integration.