Cardini

Cardini was founded in Omegna in 1916 as a sheet-metal business. Under Ettore Cardini, it entered toy production in the 1920s, with toys produced in Omegna from 1921 to 1930 according to one published history. The company’s range included automobiles, a truck, a locomotive, an electric tram, carousels, a motor ship, an aircraft and a toy kitchen. Metal sheets were lithographed in colour in Milan and sent to Omegna for assembly. At the factory’s mid-1920s peak, the workforce included more than fifty women, alongside workers, apprentices and an office employee.

Cardini’s toys combined clockwork movement with illustrated packaging. A wound steel spring powered the models; cars used click-action steering to travel straight or turn. The cardboard boxes unfolded into play settings such as garages, hangars, tram sheds, tunnels and ports. Illustrator Attilio Mussino designed the box artwork. In December 1924, Ettore Cardini filed a patent for packaging that formed part of the play scene. The firm also made products for other businesses, including a Perugina bus used as a chocolate container in 1925. As toy sales declined around the end of the 1920s, Cardini shifted production to automotive lights and fittings. Between 1937 and 1940 its activities divided into a mechanical workshop and a brass furniture factory; after the war, the mechanical works made household goods. The same history reports that the factory closed after Ettore Cardini’s death, without specifying a year.