Alessi is a contemporary design juggernaut founded near Italy's Lake Orta in 1921. By the 1950s the Alessi family was specialising in stainless steel manufacturing and today its hundreds of products are sold in over 5000 outlets in over 60 countries.

Since the 1980s the company has pursued a strategy of collaborating with well known architects and designers such as Sir Norman Foster, Philippe Starck and Frank Gehry. Many of the resulting products have made their way into the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York and other design galleries and museums worldwide.