Although it was written in the last few months, it seems that Selvaggia Lucarelli collected material on Ferragnez since well before the pandoro case broke out and the Antitrust fine landed on Chiara Ferragni's head which effectively crumbled her reputation and part of her empire. To read The Pandora's Box – The rise and fall of the Ferragnez (Paper First, publishing house of Everyday occurrence on which Lucarelli writes) the impression is that the writer took notes and saved videos that were later deleted by the couple a long time ago, as if she was certain that sooner or later the bubble would burst and all that information would be useful to her.
It is not up to us to judge whether the reasons that led to the publication of this investigative book whether they are right or wrong – for some it is right that Lucarelli, the first to have raised doubts about the opaque operation of the Ferragnez charity, has an economic return on this story, while for someone else it is unfair that he is raging about the couple in such a moment delicate on both a professional and human level – but certainly, reading it, Several interesting considerations and documented evidence emerge. Although the first part, the most substantial, is mainly commentary, with Lucarelli analyzing various aspects that he had already mentioned on his social profiles and in the articles before him on Tomorrow and then on Doneit is the second that reveals something more about how the machine got flooded, revealing more than one previously unpublished detail about Ferragni's companies but also about the internal balance of the control room.
1. The Ferragnez helped each other
Lucarelli, at the beginning of the book, insists on a widely debated concept, namely that Chiara Ferragni and Fedez gave each other a hand compensating for the target that was missingother. Thanks to Fedez Chiara has become a national-popular face, and thanks to Chiara Fedez he has made a name for himself internationally, also managing to garner attention and invitations from brands and fashion houses that previously would have struggled to recognize a position for him. It goes without saying that this union has benefited both of them, and it goes without saying that the double attention led them to understand that it was above all them and their story that worked to gain an impact on the public and followers. The factor behind Lucarelli's success was above all storytelling of their love and, subsequently, of their family. The couple's posts, not to mention those with their children, soon started to work more than those relating to careers – music for Fedez and sponsorships for Ferragni – ensuring that they, the Ferragnez, were the ham to sell in order to obtain the highest profits and the highest engagement.
2. The exposure of children and the breaking of the fourth wall
According to Lucarelli, one of the first episodes to undermine the Ferragnez's credibility was when, inadvertently, the couple posted a video that should have been silent during which the nanny asked little Leone to smile in order to realize the offending Story. Neither The Pandora's Box there is much insistence on the fact that the Ferragnezs have exploited their children in order to gain visibility, transforming their lives into a Truman Show during which, at least for now, they seem to ignore the fact that tens of millions of users have watched their lives and their moments of maximum intimacy and fragility. The reference is also to a video posted on Ferragni's social media in which the influencer showed, through a camera placed in the child's room, the moment when Leone approached his mother and told her he was proud of her. This is a very private moment that for some people should not have been given to the public, let alone Lucarelli insists on the fact that videos and posts about their children have always been used by the Ferragnez family as the main means to get out of possible scandals and possible controversies concerning them. “The Ferragnezs have always avoided responding to the issue of the exploitation of their children on social media”, writes Lucarelli, mocking the justification put forward by Fedez, namely that if they had not exposed their children to them the paparazzi would have done so. Except, Lucarelli notes, the paparazzi would never have crossed the threshold of domestic intimacy by recording Leone's first words, the hugs and the tenderness. «In my opinion it is not true that the more you hide your children, the more you will arouse morbid curiosity. The opposite is true, if anything. The more you give away about your private life, the more the media and the public will think they are entitled to enter your private life.”writes Lucarelli.
3. The relationship between Fabio Damato and Chiara Ferragni
The character Lucarelli focuses on a lot in the book is Fabio Damatowho joined Ferragni's companies in 2017 in an unspecified role but then quickly became the influencer's closest confidant and also his right-hand man. With Damato, Ferragni's companies quadruple their profits because Damato understands that Chiara works above all as brand testimonials, who give her a lot of money simply by lending her image to promote them. Damato's merit – even if on this, as Lucarelli writes, there were doubts even within the company itself – is having accepted that Ferragni also advertised products such as detergents, yogurt and biscuits. Brands willing to pay a lot but which risked clashing with the high positioning among luxury brands that Riccardo Pozzoli had designed for her.
4. The problem of insights
The curious thing that the book about Ferragnez is that Chiara Ferragni's companies prevented the brands with which they signed contracts from seeing the insights, i.e. the actual return of the campaign they had financed – simply the number of users who clicked on the links that Chiara put overlays -. This prevented brands from understanding whether the investment had paid off or not. «We started telling brands: look, if you do something with Ferragni you do it by positioning», reports a former employee of Chiara Ferragni interviewed in one of the final chapters of the book, raising the doubt that many campaigns – there is also talk of 600 thousand euros to show a yogurt for breakfast – they could very well not have worked, except the companies would never have known.
5. Charity
Lucarelli called charity washingand it would be the practice according to which the Ferragnez would always try to include the theme of charity within their own activitiesactivities for better positioning at a reputational level. The thing that emerges from Lucarelli's investigation, which reported all the charitable activities promised by Fedez, by Ferragni and by the two of them together, is that among the clauses there always seemed to be an economic return expected for those who put their face to it. However, many operations proved unsatisfactory. As he tells it, funds that the Ferragnezs had asked for from users as a wedding gift or as the money raised from the concert Love-Mi by Fedez in Piazza Duomo which, according to what Lucarelli reports, would have obtained particularly small profits in the face of an enormous economic and productive effort, not to mention the involvement of the municipality of Milan for organization and public order. In short, charity was the fortune but also the condemnation of the Ferragnez, until we get to the pandoro, the Easter eggs and the rest. The problem was the non-transparent communication towards the potential consumer, who could be attracted by the word charity to buy the advertised product.
6. What should Chiara Ferragni do now to recover?
According to Lucarelli, Chiara Ferragni has made many mistakes since the news of the Antitrust fine arrived. Especially on a communicative level, with that apology video posted on Instagram and went viral online but also with the two interviews following the scandal, those at Corriere della Sera it's at What's the weather like, during which Ferragni seemed to insist on the famous communication error and especially, on public misunderstanding. The crisis management expert and managing partner of Panta Ray Alberto Mattia explains in the book that Chiara made many mistakes in managing the crisis, probably because she was not supported by the right people. «When managing reputational crises, I was taught that the three Rs rule applies: recognize, regret and resolve. If Ferragni does not resolve the first step, i.e. the recognition of the true mistake committed, I find it difficult to think that he will be able to convince the general public of his sincere repentance and therefore achieve a full resolution of the crisis, recovering the trust and power of influence he had.” The mistake would have been, in short, not having made mea culpa, even if the reason is easy to say: fear that, by taking responsibility for what happened, the brands would actually withdraw. Which, in part, is happening even without this admission. For Lucarelli, having reached this point, Ferragni should understand that she can no longer go back to being the same as before, even if the real problem is being able to regain the trust of followers who believed her to be sincere and felt cheated.
7. Chiara Ferragni's fault and the relationship with Fedez
For Lucarelli, Chiara Ferragni's crisis was already written because was unable to count on sufficiently trained and structured people – Damato himself, Lucarelli writes, never completed his studies – in order to be able to advise her well on what to do. It is as if everyone had sailed by sight among the waves of success, always asking for and obtaining more and, above all, stemming the problems like, precisely, that of the Antitrust fine which, as we know, did not fall overnight, but several months before the official announcement of December 2023. The Ferragni team, however, must have taken everything lightly without worrying about putting together a defense strategy: the result is what we witnessed. As for Fedez, the portrait that Lucarelli paints is quite merciless given that it talks about how the rapper, sensing his wife's collapse, decided to abandon ship while there was time, trying to clean himself up and not get dragged to the bottom with her . His attempts to distance himself from Chiara, however, do not seem to have brought him too much luck on the famous reputation front, at least for now. Ultimately the Ferragnez, second The Pandora's Boxthey ended up because they didn't have a broad vision of the business that they had founded and for having made too many mistakes – the primordial one for Lucarelli was the management of Fedez's famous birthday party organized at Carrefour in CityLife, the one in which the Ferragnez family were seen saying that they should have communicated that the wasted food would go to charity to appease the controversies -. We still don't know how the story will end although, having reached this point, it would be good for Chiara, after the book's release, to give her version of the facts to allow the public to listen to both sides and get a more precise idea of ​​everything.
Source: Vanity Fair
I’m Susan Karen, a professional writer and editor at World Stock Market. I specialize in Entertainment news, writing stories that keep readers informed on all the latest developments in the industry. With over five years of experience in creating engaging content and copywriting for various media outlets, I have grown to become an invaluable asset to any team.
