Through Dorica, Giampietro Zonta has achieved a dream of reknown. To be celebrated for your achievements is the goal of most inventors and creators of new techniques, processes, technologies and products.
Often inventors will create a new term to describe their work, with the hope that it will catch on. One example was Stan Ovshinsky, the first to realize large area flexible solar cells, who termed his technology Ovonics; but it did not really catch on, whether through jealousy or lack of application.
Some inventors are remembered after their lifetime by having measurements named after them. Examples include Newton, Tesla and Kelvin. Some even have elements named after them though many of those have shorter half lives than the inventors – Einsteinium, Rutherfordium, Bohrium. Others are blessed with names of minerals that often they discovered such as wollastonite.
For the few, prizes are named in their honour, such as Nobel, but these are often linked to generosity of the named person.
To achieve positive notoriety in your lifetime is rare, but this is what has happened to D’Orica, the Nove based jeweller. Over 25 years ago, Gianpietro Zonta and his small team invented a technique for producing tiny hollow spheroids of gold and putting facets in them to make them shine like diamonds.
When assembled in hundreds on strings and wound into geometric shapes, these jewels ’shine’ light in all directions. Zonta and his wife Daniela Raccanello, the designer, have produced designs that particularly capture the imagination of people from the Far East, the Gulf and Russia.
It was during a ’blind’ survey that, when a client was asked to comment on the market potential for these facetted gold spheres, he puzzled for a short while and then said ’Oh, you mean a ’Dorica’, that is what we call them here.’
When he was told Giampietro just shone from his multi-facetted smiling vista. The name of his company has become a neologism in the jewellery world. A Dorica
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