The CEO of Italian eyewear company Blackfin, Nicola del Din says his eyewear brand’s success today results from hard work and a long-standing commitment from every member of the team. Known for its titanium eyewear produced exclusively on site at its own manufactory in Northern Italy, the company has established itself not only as an independent eyewear reference in Italy as well as a sustainable innovator with its headquarters achieving “CasaClima Work and Life” certification in recognition of its high standards of environmental sustainability, energy efficiency and workplace quality. Here del Din tells Eyestylist about his current aspirations for the brand…
Blackfin has built its reputation around titanium and Italian manufacturing. How do you continue to innovate and what have been the biggest design challenges along the way? Innovation for us is driven by three fundamental elements: passion, experience, and, above all, our people. Right now, we are experiencing what I can only describe as a truly magical moment at Blackfin. It is the beautiful result of years of relentless commitment, dedication, and hard work from our entire team. However, we absolutely do not feel like we have ‘arrived’ or reached the finish line. On the contrary, we see this as a brand-new starting point. There is an incredible energy in the company right now, a deep enthusiasm for the future, and our minds are full of new ideas just waiting to be realized.
When it comes to the design and operational challenges along the way, the main one is directly tied to our ambition. When your goal is to constantly raise the bar to establish yourself as an increasingly premium brand, seamlessly uniting advanced technical engineering and micro-mechanics becomes incredibly complex. You are constantly pushing the titanium, and the design, to their absolute limits.
Furthermore, because we proudly keep our entire production process strictly in-house, one of the most demanding tasks is cultural and operational alignment. It is not always easy to coordinate the manufacturing side and ensure that everyone fully understands and embraces this continuous, demanding journey toward absolute excellence. It requires a shared mindset to guarantee that every single person in the factory shares the same obsession with premium quality and extreme attention to detail. It is a challenging process, but bringing the whole team along on this upward trajectory is precisely what makes our product so unique. Above: Blackfin specialises in titanium eyewear
You describe your product design, development – and production – as requiring a rigorous team effort, starting from R&D. How have you developed this process through the years? – how many people are now involved? As I mentioned previously, our people, our company culture, and the strong interrelation between different departments are absolutely crucial to making this process work. I clearly remember years ago when the entire product and R&D team consisted of just myself and three other people. We were handling every single aspect of creation together.
Over the years, as the brand and our ambitions grew, this process had to evolve significantly. Today, we have expanded into a dedicated product development team of 8 to 9 people. But we realized that to truly push the boundaries of what is possible with titanium, we needed deeper specialization. That is why we instituted a specific R&D team of 6 people whose sole focus is engineering new technical ideas and mechanical solutions. Furthermore, because colour is such a defining element of the Blackfin DNA, we created a specialized color development team. Working with titanium requires extreme expertise, and this team’s specific mission is to research and achieve increasingly innovative chromatic effects, while ensuring an incredibly strong, long-lasting hold and durability on the metal. So today, we have all these specialized minds working under one roof. The rigour comes from how these teams communicate and challenge each other daily—blending design, mechanics, and colour into a single, cohesive vision.
What are key considerations when developing new ideas? When developing new ideas, our primary consideration is our continuous journey to elevate Blackfin as an increasingly premium brand. Therefore, every new concept we explore must be perfectly coherent with our brand identity and our core values. We are absolutely obsessed with the finer details, because in the premium segment, the smallest nuances make the biggest difference in the final product. To achieve this level of extreme precision, having our entire production in-house is absolutely strategic. When you are constantly raising the bar and refining every single aspect of a frame, from the initial technical sketch to the final colour application, you need uncompromising control over the entire process. If we didn’t have all these complex manufacturing steps under the exact same roof, it would be literally impossible to be the company we are today. Furthermore, it would be impossible to aim for the highly ambitious goals we have in mind for our future. The immediate connection between our development teams and our production line is what makes our vision a reality.
How long does the whole process take? Harmonizing aesthetics, engineering, and market demands takes time and a methodology that sees no shortcuts. From the initial concept to the final product, a full 11 months go by. Behind the purity of our design lies a long, complex development process entirely devoted to refining every single proportion. Every model is prototyped, evaluated, and modified countless times. We debate over tenths of a millimeter, adjust seemingly imperceptible curves, and recalibrate titanium thicknesses until we achieve absolute precision in every detail. The ultimate goal is one: reaching the perfect equilibrium between technical rigor and aesthetic elegance. When a Blackfin frame is finally presented to the market, it encapsulates the highest technological expression of titanium—but above all, it carries those 11 months of shared effort, the relentless pursuit of perfection, and the genuine dedication of the people who brought it to life.
Innovation often comes from questioning established processes. Can you describe a recent moment when your teams challenged a long-held assumption and the result changed the final product? “The perfect example of this is the recent creation of our new Vitra family. For years, our longest-held assumption—and our strict internal rule—was that Blackfin was 100% focused purely on titanium. It was the absolute center of our entire R&D vision. With Vitra, we completely challenged that paradigm. We introduced a frame featuring an incredibly resistant, innovative polymer front, perfectly combined with our signature titanium components. Stepping away from pure metal was entirely outside our traditional comfort zone, but we executed it in a way that is absolutely coherent with the Blackfin soul. Our R&D team applied the exact same rigorous, mechanical approach we use for titanium to this new polymer, ensuring there was zero compromise on design or robustness.
The launch was a success far beyond our highest expectations. But the most important takeaway for me isn’t just the product’s performance. It proved that Blackfin has reached a new level of maturity. It means that the trust of our clients is no longer tied solely to the specific material or the single product, but to the brand itself and our overall philosophy of premium excellence.
How is a colour palette developed at BLACKFIN and what are your special capabilities in terms of colour techniques for titanium? As I hinted earlier, our approach to colour has undergone a massive evolution. Years ago, our color research was primarily instinctive and emotional. We developed new colors very quickly, focusing almost entirely on the immediate chromatic impact. The main goal was simply to excite the wearer.
Today, that artistic and emotional element hasn’t lost an ounce of its importance. In fact, since Blackfin is recognized as the benchmark brand for color on titanium, the search for highly evolved, sophisticated, and less ‘instinctive’ hues is more crucial than ever. However, the process behind it has become incredibly methodical, structured, and scientific. We now have a dedicated color team. To give you an idea of our rigor, our Scientific Director of Color Development is actually a Materials Engineer. When working with titanium, you need to understand color down to the molecular level to guarantee a finish that is not only beautiful but exceptionally strong and durable. We run endless technical tests and trials before a new tint or combination is ever approved for production.
To give you a sense of the sheer effort involved, today we manage 183 active base colours and 644 colour combinations in our portfolio. In the last year alone, we conducted 308 specific trials for new colors and ultimately created 163 brand-new color combinations. Managing this staggering level of scientific complexity and artistic freedom requires absolute control over every single variable. And once again, achieving this is only possible because we do absolutely everything in-house, under one roof.
What is your ultimate goal in terms of customer satisfaction regarding design and quality performance? When it comes to design, our ultimate goal is to continuously elevate our premium perception. We want our wearers to feel that uncompromising level of sophistication and excellence, not just in our most complex frames, but equally in our new minimal and timeless models. True premium design often speaks loudest through the purity of its most subtle details. Furthermore, as our business expands on an increasingly global scale, a major objective for us is to deeply understand and anticipate the unique expectations, cultural tastes, and color preferences of the diverse international markets we serve.
Regarding technical quality and color performance, we are driven by an obsession with excellence, but we are also honest. We know that absolute perfection is technically impossible to reach—you can only continuously strive to get as close to it as humanly possible.
Because we are aware of this, our total in-house control becomes our greatest asset once again, extending beyond manufacturing and into customer care. Doing everything under one roof allows us to provide an enviable after-sales service directly from our headquarters here in Italy to all the markets we operate in worldwide. If a client needs support, we don’t have to rely on third-party suppliers; we manage it directly with the very same team that engineered and crafted their frame. For us, providing that profound, uncompromising reliability is the true definition of customer satisfaction.
When is your next big launch or collection presentation? Right now, our product portfolio across our existing families is extremely solid, mature, and comprehensive. So, our daily work isn’t about chasing loud ‘wow’ effects or temporary gimmicks. Instead, our goal is to surprise people through extreme sophistication in the details—subtle, highly refined craftsmanship that reveals itself upon closer inspection.
That being said, we have two major, high-impact launches tucked away in the drawer for next year. Both are limited editions designed to raise the bar to the absolute top and showcase the ultimate expression of what Blackfin is capable of achieving. The first will be officially presented at MIDO, and it is a prestigious project born from a collaboration of absolute international excellence. The second will premiere at SILMO—a brand-new limited edition following in the footsteps of our current Prometheus series, created to push our engineering and artistic boundaries even higher. We can’t wait to reveal them to the market.
Find out more at https://www.blackfin.eu
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