The king of the guest experience

With Tommaso Pacini, CEO La Bottega Collective

Hello everyone and happy Wednesday.

Tommaso Pacini may have one of the coolest jobs in hospitality. He’s the CEO of La Bottega Collective, which produces and distributes luxury products at most of the world’s best hotels — bathroom kits, robes, slippers, candles, textiles, and everything else that makes the difference between a room and an experience. The next time you stay at a luxury hotel, take a look at the fine print on the bottle of shampoo. Nine times out of ten, it was produced and distributed by La Bottega SpA.

What began in 1981 as a small neighborhood shop founded by Tommaso’s father, Umberto Pacini, has grown into one of the most influential companies in the luxury hospitality world. Today, La Bottega Collective is a group of five specialized subsidiaries operating under one roof — covering beauty essentials, textiles and linens, OS&E, and design consulting — with 20 offices, more than 900 employees, and 15,000 clients across 117 countries. Their portfolio reads like a checklist of the world’s most coveted hotels: Aman, Bulgari, Four Seasons, The Peninsula, Raffles, Ritz-Carlton, St. Regis, and Orient Express, among many others.

What sets La Bottega Collective apart from a conventional supplier is the depth and intentionality of what they do, rooted in a distinctly Italian passion for craftsmanship and quality. Founded in the country that invented the concept of il saper fare — the intuitive mastery of making things well — La Bottega Collective brings that sensibility to every object that leaves their ateliers, whether a signature fragrance developed with a master perfumer, a linen woven from an Italian fiber, or a bespoke slipper embroidered with a hotel’s crest. Each piece is designed to communicate something specific about the property it represents. In Tommaso’s world, the amenity set is not a commodity. It is the physical expression of a hotel’s identity, and possibly the only thing a guest takes home.

I’m excited to announce La Bottega Collective as one of the partners for this year’s podcast. It’s a partnership that feels particularly aligned, as Italy is the home of The Stanza and therefore continues to influence The Stanza’s editorial vision and perspective on hospitality.

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Your father founded La Bottega Collective in 1981. What was the problem he was solving for at the time, and how has the business he started 45 years ago evolved to what it is today?

Like many Italian companies, it was born through an opportunistic phone call. We were living close to a port, a cruise ship was landing nearby, and someone contacted my father to provide what I consider one of the most luxurious items in the world: toilet paper. Rather than passing the call to a colleague, he said yes, and started supplying amenities for cruise ships. The natural next step was to move into the hotel industry in Italy. That’s where the magic happened.

It’s not a very charming origin story, but it’s the real one, and there’s a wonderful full-circle moment embedded in it. Several years ago we collaborated with Maurizio Cattelan, probably the most controversial Italian artist in the world, to create a Toilet Paper-themed room at the Sixty Hotel in New York. From my father supplying toilet paper to hotels, to a Toilet Paper room in New York thirty years later. All the dots connected.

For readers who may know La Bottega Collective only from their hotel bathroom, the full scope of the group — Beltrami, Vanity Group, Palatino, White Privé — is likely a surprise. How do you describe the platform and the way its pieces work together?

La Bottega Collective connects back to my father’s original dream. The original name was La Bottega dell’Albergo — “the small Italian shop where you can find everything for the hotel.” We started by selling all kinds of items, but over time, particularly after acquiring our cosmetics factory in 2002, we streamlined around beauty as our core business. When I opened the US market in 2008, La Bottega dell’Albergo was unpronounceable, so we shortened it. But with La Bottega Collective, we’ve returned to that original vision: a one-stop platform for guest experience.

Today the Collective is organized around distinct verticals by product category. La Bottega and Vanity Group cover beauty. Beltrami covers textile. Palatino covers accessories. White Privé is a second-line linen brand sitting alongside Beltrami. Beltrami is not a name many people know, but we consider it the jewel of the organization. It’s intentionally small, with an exceptionally high-profile client list: Amangiri in Utah, Passalacqua in Lake Como, the Ritz Paris. We don’t want to scale Beltrami because scaling it would mean losing its exclusivity. That’s exactly why White Privé exists: a more accessible entry point to grow market share without compromising the flagship.

The verticals are structured so there’s no overlap between them. Each item falls into a defined product category, with a go-to-market strategy built around that discipline.

In 2024, Three Hills invested $115M for just under half of the group, and then the Ruffini family came in for a 14.7% stake in September 2025. That is significant conviction from two sophisticated investors with deep hospitality exposure. What were the highlights of your business that catalyzed their investments, and how has their involvement changed your ambitions for the company?

You should really ask them directly! But I can tell you what I believe, having now been through two rounds of institutional investment, the first with Mediobanca back in 2018.

The channel itself is a major factor. Hospitality — what I now call hospitality at large, because it extends well beyond hotels to restaurants, private clubs, safari lodges, golf clubs — is a sector with a compelling growth trajectory. And both investors understand it intimately. Three Hills through investments like Sant Ambroeus; the Ruffini family through Langosteria. They love hospitality, and we speak the same language. That alignment matters enormously when you’re trying to scale while preserving exclusivity, which is the central tension of this business.

The second factor is global footprint. There aren’t many Italian companies that have built one, and investors backing Italian businesses want to see a credible path to international scale.

The third is the platform vision. What I’m building is a luxury one-stop shop for the hotel – pick up a property, turn it upside down, and whatever falls out, we supply it. Their involvement has sharpened our ambitions on the buy-and-build side. Food and beverage, spa, uniforms: these are all verticals we’re actively evaluating for future acquisitions.

Palatino was your third major acquisition within a year. How do you think about the discipline of integration and preserving each company’s distinct identity while building coherence across the platform?

I became friends with the founders of Palatino and Vanity Group before any transaction happened. And I was clear with both of them: if a founder is ready to exit and walk away, we’re not interested. Every acquisition we’ve done has been structured as cash plus equity, so the founder remains invested as a minority shareholder and stays actively involved in a role that fits their strengths. That structure is a signal that they believe in where we’re going, and it’s the best protection against losing what made the company worth acquiring in the first place.

On quality specifically: the philosophy is to preserve what makes each company exceptional and invest heavily in R&D to keep pushing it forward. Take Palatino: the elegance of their detail work is exceptional. But if the same objects appear in every hotel, they become commodities. And once something is a commodity, it competes on price, which is not a business we want to be in. So the challenge with Palatino is constant invention: new guest experience formats, new objects, new collaborations with international designers that keep the work one step ahead.

La Bottega and Vanity Group are different, because licensing multiple brands means we can offer a different face to different clients. We can work with the Ritz-Carlton because we carry Diptyque. The most recent Corinthia Rome opening used Santa Maria Novella. That side of the business is more naturally scalable, though no less deliberate.

How do you decide which brand to pair with which hotel?

There are two approaches: top-down and bottom-up. Some clients come to us with a specific brand in mind, and we evaluate the fit. Others come with no brief, and our brand and marketing team in Milan scouts for the best match alongside our global sales team. We never present a single option because each brand carries a different heritage and speaks to a different type of guest.

Our catalog is essentially a blank notebook. Our salespeople go into client conversations as interviewers first: Where do your guests come from? What is the brand identity you are building? Is the brief rooted in fashion heritage, fragrance, wellness? From there, the right fit becomes clear.

With so many hotel brands licensing the same cosmetics lines, how do you manage exclusivity across clients?

We are almost obsessive about this. You can gain a lot of market share in one year and lose it all the next if you are not disciplined. For certain brands we have formal agreements with international chains that cap volume. When I worked with Thomas Maier at Bottega Veneta, we had a strict limit of five hotel partnerships per year. The go-to-market and marketing strategy behind every brand placement has to be deliberate, and it is not only about which label of shampoo sits in the bathroom. It is about the storytelling layered around the product.

With the Ritz-Carlton NoMad opening in New York, we partnered with Diptyque to install a Bar Parfum inside the hotel, so the product becomes a destination in itself. With Dr. Barbara Sturm, whom I have been in conversation with for nearly four years, we are launching a program this year that moves well beyond the amenity format and shows up across multiple guest touchpoints.

How much does the design of amenities, bathroom products, slippers, textiles, impact the storytelling of a hotel?

These are among the most powerful touchpoints in the entire guest experience, because they are the one thing guests can take with them. They are not going to take the television or the minibar. Amenities are the memorabilia, and when they are done well they become marketing tools as much as products. We regularly see guests reposting beautifully designed objects on social media, which creates organic visibility for the hotel.

There is a commercial dimension too. The big trend now is hotels building retail concepts in-house, not selling brands you can find in five hundred airports, but things that genuinely belong to the property. COVID helped accelerate this. After two years of lockdown, when people started traveling again, they really wanted to find something that belonged to the place they were staying and to take it home with them.

Has the guest expectation around amenities changed meaningfully since before the pandemic?

I think COVID didn’t destroy channels that were already performing; it stopped businesses that weren’t. The trends I’m describing were already in motion before 2020. The last major project I finalized before the pandemic was The Peninsula Hong Kong: plastic-free packaging, a bespoke scent developed with a local artist for each property in the Peninsula portfolio. Every hotel in the group has a different scent, and they built beautiful storytelling around it, video content, in-elevator retail installations, online and offline sales. Place-specific, locally rooted guest experience was already where the industry was heading. COVID just compressed the timeline.

My view is that the hotel is not my client, the guest is. I can have wonderful relationships with owners and GMs, but if the product doesn’t resonate with the people staying there, the contract doesn’t renew. So we work alongside hotel operators with that perspective always in mind.

Guests increasingly demand experiences that feel singular and tailored, yet they’re staying in properties managed by brands that serve hundreds, if not thousands, of rooms. How do you manufacture genuine bespoke at scale?

It depends entirely on what the brand is trying to say. When we work with Aman, the brief is consistency across properties; the beauty has to hold together globally. When we work with Rosewood, “sense of place” is the entire payoff, so each property gets something different. When we partner with W and Davines, the product is the same everywhere, but the guest experience is crafted locally. At the W Sardinia opening this summer, the beauty was consistent, but everything built around it was specific to the property.

We play across our verticals to determine, together with each client, what has to be consistent globally and what has to be crafted for the property. The trend toward local design, local guest touchpoints, and local sense of place is moving strongly through ultra-luxury, but we are seeing it in broader luxury too. We have worked with Four Seasons for many years, and even there the direction is shifting. We are currently involved in the Four Seasons at Hotel Danieli in Venice. I can’t share details yet, but the brief is something that belongs to Venice, not even to the Four Seasons. The approach at Four Seasons Dallas would be quite different.

There’s an estimated $84T being transferred to Millennials and Gen Z over the coming decade. From your position supplying hotels that have to serve this next generation, what changes are you seeing?

I have the most demanding client in my own house: my daughter, who just turned 20. When I was her age, I dreamed about cars. She couldn’t care less about a car, or about fashion. What she wants is to travel, and every time she travels she wants to be surprised by something she has never seen anywhere else, something she can bring home and share. That, to me, is the brief.

What I have watched evolve in her specifically: at twelve, she was captivated by a well-designed kids’ program at the Four Seasons Maui. At twenty, she cares about skincare, the quality of what is in the room, and whether she can actually buy those items, beautiful pajamas, a well-made t-shirt. What we created for Passalacqua alongside Valentina De Santis is a good example: the objects we developed for the property weren’t hotel products, they were retail products born from a hotel context. That is the direction this is heading.

Where do you see the application of AI in your business? And do the hands of a craftsman still matter in 2026?

They will still matter in 2056. Craftsmanship isn’t going anywhere, and I think we are fortunate to operate in hospitality, because AI is not going to replace the experience of being in a place, or the people who create it.

That said, we would be foolish not to use it. For us, the most meaningful applications are internal: guest profiling, go-to-market strategy, demand forecasting. We are already using AI to anticipate hotel requirements with a precision that manual processes can’t match, and on the design and production side it will meaningfully compress timelines. But the work itself, the material choices, the detail, the judgment, that remains human.

La Bottega started in the Marche countryside in 1981. You now have a showroom in Milan and are expanding to New York and Dubai. What does Italy still offer to the world of luxury hospitality that cannot be sourced elsewhere?

Italians do it better. Jokes aside, the Italian gusto, particularly when it comes to the detail of an object, is something we have always leveraged and will continue to. I am not claiming Italian hotels are the best in the world; there are international properties that are far more sophisticated in marketing or in building iconic status. But when Italy is expressed through any guest touchpoint, through the art of hospitality, the level of attention is something I have rarely seen replicated.

I worked with an owner once who repositioned a vase of flowers by one centimeter because the balance wasn’t right. At the time I thought it was excessive. Now I understand exactly why he did it. That instinct for harmony is what Italy still exports to the world.

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