50 YEARS
The story of a journey to celebrate 50 years of people and products.
2024 is a special year for Fapim: our fiftieth anniversary!
Fifty years of overcoming challenges, creating innovative products, and evolving from small workshops into ever larger, well-maintained, and technologically advanced industrial facilities. Fifty years of enthusiasm and passion that unite two generations of ownership and over five hundred employees, who together have established one of the most robust, world-renowned manufacturing companies in Tuscany, serving as a global reference point for metal doors and windows hardware accessories.
Fapim continues the development of the sliding products by offering the market a range of specific handles, the TWENTY range: this is the incipit of a much larger project that is taking shape in recent months with the release of FORMULA multi-point lock. TWENTY offers a complete range of fixed, operable window handles with straight or deviated handles, all with the same operating technology which sees the handle rotate by just 20° while the square inside the mechanism performs the classic 90° rotation. The aim is an ergonomic handle for safer and more effective movement of the sash.
This is the Fapim product that required the greatest design effort in terms of internal studies and tests, but as soon as the MAGICUBE hidden hinge was released on the market, it ousted the competition with performances that are still unattainable today! “The only one at 180° for 180Kg” read the launch slogan which went straight to the point, but which did not mention its universality, the extreme speed of assembly, the micrometric adjustment in three dimensions, the facilitated door-frame assembly… MAGICUBE has been a transversal success for many markets, pushing Fapim to invest even more in process innovation in order to cope with the required numbers.
In the field of door hinges, Fapim has always been an innovator, so a few years after launching LOIRA on the market, it designed its minimal cylindrical hinge dedicated to clamping catch mounting on doors. Over time, the different variants of VENICE and VELOX ranges arrive, until the release of MONZA which manages to combine all the most interesting features of its bigger sisters. In fact, it offers the installer a wide micrometric adjustment with the hinge bodies remaining perfectly aligned: the design is saved!
Fapim catalogue has grown at a pace never seen before, to cope with the ever-changing dynamics of the international market through product ranges dedicated to new markets. OLE’ is the range of handles for sliding doors created to accompany HOCKEY rollers with the idea of offering the market a complete and high-performance package for parallel sliding dedicated to the Latin markets. OLE’ combines extreme ease of assembly with micrometric adjustment, in order to facilitate the work of the windows and doors fabricator.
The PAD version of PANAMA system was created to enrich the range of panic exit devices which was available in the Fapim catalogue only a couple of years earlier. PANAMA has marked an even more rigorous approach to emergency exits, based on the principles governed by the international certifications which has required the development of an increasingly technological test laboratory. With PANAMA Fapim has managed to combine certified safety in an exemplary manner with the design of elegant shapes and a color range that fears no comparisons. This is also why the anti-panic sector is among the most appreciated in the history of Fapim and has never stopped renewing itself and enriching itself, going through the strategic change with OLTRE up to the latest examples of automation with access control systems.
With the new millennium, Fapim begins to offer its own tilt-and-turn mechanisms with which it definitively conquers international markets and exports become prevalent compared to the Italian market. Thanks to Galiplus2 and the various Anta Ribalta ranges released in the following years, Fapim’s proposal for windows becomes increasingly broader and more competitive, coming to represent a significant share of turnover. In fact, Galiplus3 and Galiplus4 were born and finally in 2014 also Galicube which boasts unbeatable performance. Precisely with this product comes the first international CE, RAL, SKG certifications which are indispensable today!
Range of cremone bolts, handles and handles with rounded shapes as trendy, at the end of the 90s its sinuous lines have made fall in love the market and not only the Italian market, enjoying great success. In that moment Fapim production is equipped with a high-performance die-casting department to be able to produce the new rounded shapes with impeccable quality. With Nefer, the change in trend towards painted accessories, and no longer exclusively anodized ones, also materializes. From this need begins a large investment in the painting system to offer an ever wider and more high-performance range of finishes up to the very recent Clean Hand antibacterial paint.
The Blitz range hinge for window was the result of the constant price battle with the competition on this type of products, which are very popular but at the same time simple. The Fapim strategy was to redesign the production process to optimize costs, thanks to important initial investments for cutting the extruded profile and processing the counter-plates. Winning choice: even today Blitz and window hinges are the products with the highest sale numbers in Fapim
The Atlas latch was created with particular attention to design, offering a snap cover painted in many standard finishes to cover the fixing screws. We are in the early 90s and Fapim continues to enrich the accessories ranges dedicated to the door with Titan and Atlas latches which still today – after over 30 years – remain among the products on sale, not at all affected by time!
The Loira bearing hinge has become an iconic product for Fapim, created with the specific project of aggressively attacking the European market and completely succeeding. It was one of the best-selling products ever, accompanied by many declinations and variations that have followed one another over the years up to the very current Loira+, each time offering the market innovation, quality and design. Loira also meant for Fapim an absolutely innovative production system for those years with numerically controlled production lines. Loira was also the protagonist of the 50+1 exhibition promoted by Museimpresa which debuted in Milan in 2012 and then continued as a traveling exhibition in Italy and abroad.
It is a lever handle for window vertical movement, created for the first time starting from extruded profiles. The first Fapim product with a plastic insert on the handle to improve ergonomics, together with the Tuscania cremone bolt, it opened the strategic market of southern Italy, which supported the company’s growth until the opening towards foreign markets.
Designed by Sergio Pacini, one of the three founders of Fapim, it had an off-centre handle which required less effort when rotating to open. Another interesting feature was the ease of assembly: the knob simply screwed onto a pre-assembled boss. It was the first successful Fapim product, which remained in production until 2010 and is still present on front doors across half of Italy!
