Made to Order Flatware: Inside the Four Weeks in Italy

Made to order flatware follows a simple sequence: you choose the piece, and then the piece is made. When your order reaches Casa Bugatti, it sets production in motion in Italy, where the company has been making flatware since 1923. About four weeks later, your pieces ship. This article is the plain account of what happens in between: the steel, the color, the assembly, the inspection, and why building the collection this way is exactly what makes it the collection it is.

What Made to Order Means

Every made-to-order piece in the catalog is prepared individually, for the person who ordered it. The color and finish combination you selected is prepared for your order: the components are selected and finished as your pieces are assembled, then inspected at the officina, Bugatti's workshop in Italy. The line on our product pages says it plainly: Made to order in Italy, shipped within 4 weeks.* That one line describes the whole journey, whether the order is a single replacement teaspoon or a complete set for the table.

Why Made to Order Takes Four Weeks

Because four weeks is what the work takes when each order is prepared on its own. Once your order is confirmed, it is handed to the officina, and the work unfolds:

• The steel. Every piece begins as 18/10 stainless steel: 18 percent chromium for corrosion resistance, 10 percent nickel for luster. It is the alloy fine flatware is measured by, and it is the base of every Bugatti color.
• The color. Bugatti color lives in the handles: pearlescent acrylic in a rich, generous palette of colors, every one of them prepared to order. On the Ares line the handle is a resin, brushed by hand at the end so the surface is tactile as well as seen. The metal tells its own story. Where flatware wears gold or champagne, that is a PVD finish: titanium, vaporized in a vacuum chamber and bonded to the steel at the molecular level. It is food safe, not paint or lacquer, but part of the surface itself. And where a piece says gold plated or silver plated (the Kiss tongs, the Portafortuna, the rings on the Ring settings) it means exactly that: a layer of the real metal, 24-karat gold or silver. Your order names the combination, and your pieces are prepared in it.
• The handles. Pearlescent resin handles are matched to your chosen color and fitted to each piece.
• The assembly. The components for your color combination are selected, fitted and finished by the people in the assembly process as each piece comes together: hands that have been doing this work for years, in an officina that trusts them with it. That is the reason a Bugatti piece feels like it was made by someone. Because it was.
• The shipping. Your order is packed and ships, within about four weeks of the day you placed it.

That is the honest anatomy of the four weeks: a schedule, components selected and finished, an assembly, an inspection, a shipment. Each order is prepared as its own job. A piece made this way reaches you as it was chosen: your color, your combination, prepared for your order and inspected before it is packed.

A Generous Palette, Made Possible by Individual Preparation

The Bugatti range spans a large and generous palette of colors, from quiet ivory and gray through burgundy, emerald and royal blue to raspberry, tangerine and rust, and every one of them is customizable for each individual order. Melodia, the largest line, runs to more than 1,300 active pieces on its own. Multiply the lines by the pieces, then by the finishes and the handle colors, and the catalog opens into an exceptional range of combinations: a two-tone serving set in gold and white, a full place setting in one deep saturated color, the exact pairing that completes a table you have already built.

Preparing each order individually is what makes that range possible. Because every combination is made when it is chosen, every color on the site is genuinely available, the popular ones and the particular ones alike, in the smallest teaspoon and the largest serving piece. It is also what lets the range keep growing: offering a new color is simply offering a new combination, and the same four weeks apply to it as to everything else.

This is the cause-and-effect at the center of Italian flatware made to order: individual preparation and an exceptional range are the same decision, seen from two sides. Choose the way of working, and the whole palette follows.

In Stock Now: Limited Volumes in the Most Requested Colors

Made to order is the heart of the catalog, and it is how your color reaches you. But when the calendar is tight, a few favorites are ready now: place settings and serving pieces kept in stock in the colors most asked for, the whites and ivories, a few royal blues and grays, shipping within the week. Alongside them are the gift pieces in gold and chrome: the Kiss salad servers, the bottle openers, the moka spoons, the small sculptural objects the house is known for. When a birthday is close or a dinner party is closer, that is where to look. For any other color, the four weeks are how it becomes yours.

The Officina Rests in August

Like much of Italian industry, the officina takes its annual rest in August, and the work resumes in September. Summer orders are welcome all the same; they are simply first in line when the officina returns, prepared in the order they arrived.

And if the occasion is sooner than September (a wedding, an anniversary, a first dinner in a new home), the in-stock pieces follow their own calendar and ship within the week, all summer long. Everything else follows the rhythm this article has described: chosen by you, prepared for your order, made in Italy, and shipped in about four weeks.

* Four weeks describes the making and dispatch from Italy. Once a parcel is traveling, carriers and customs keep their own calendars, and on rare occasions delivery can take a little longer.