Bally are at the crossroads of digital innovation

He’s the kind of guy you’d seek out in Ticino for business and innovation and when trying to prove the six degrees of separation. We met over a cup of coffee and hot chocolate with rum, served with a poppy-seed cake that is popular in Eastern Europe and Israel and the conversation turned to what I call «pure Hub»: Bally is in the process of digitizing its archives in what is a truly mammoth operation. Each month, they ship an entire series of shoes from their warehouse in Schönenwerd to Ticino, where they scan them down to the smallest detail. We’re talking about thousands of models. «How wonderful!» I say to Carlo. «They’ve got it all: the past and the future, artisan and high tech, analogue and digital, and that insane and fearless urge to jump into the future that only a few selected century-old firms have». As a matter of fact, Hub is a crosscut magazine that taps into stories that are both «horizontal» (in a geographical sense: from Ticino to Switzerland to the rest of the world, and vice versa) and «vertical», i.e. stories that come from the past and are destined to go elsewhere with that spirit of exploration which, as Christopher Columbus once said (played by the legendary Gerard Depardieu in 1492 - The Conquest of Paradise by Ridley Scott), is the one thing that makes the real difference between men. And between businesses. Dear readers, in this issue we bring you a story that you’ll certainly enjoy.