On Giovanni Lanfranchi’s death, the responsibility for the company fell on the shoulders of his young sons who suddenly had to run a company that was consolidated to a certain extent, but still fragile in that the eldest brother, Gentile, was just twenty and the youngest, Gaetano, only two. Fortunately, just before Giovanni Lanfranchi died, he had met two excellent salesmen, a Milanese, Aristide Calef, and a Londoner, James Floercheim, who proved to be good friends to the young Lanfranchi brothers.In 1940 the Lanfranchi Company incorporated the Società Italiana Chiusure Lampo, and in 1943 it hastily transferred the latter to Palazzolo, as Milan had become uninhabitable because of the constant bombings. This proved to be a successful decision since the production of buttons began to dwindle because of the blockade of Atlantic shipping; as a result the supply of corozo became almost non existent, and that of galalite also decreased. Furthermore, the company had previously been geared to exporting to Great Britain, and the elimination of that market created many problems. Curiously enough, an attempt was made during the war to replace corozo and galalite with the more readily available beech wood, cutting the branches into the appropriate thicknesses and then shaping the buttons with a lathe.
Today Lanfranchi is a group of six manufacturing companies, located in Italy, and employs 400 people. The covered surface of all the locations is more than 40.000 square meters and in 2003 the turnover was over 45 million euros; the output was approximately 13 millions meters of zips and 56 millions pieces of sliders. Roughly five percent of the turnover is spent for research and development of new products and machineries. Export markets reaches 30% of the turnover.
