Farewell to Gioachino Gobbi, grand Grivel president

Gioachino Gobbi, the Italian alpinist, man of great culture and visionary entrepreneur who relaunched the prestigious Grivel brand in the 1980s and transformed it into one of the world's leading mountain equipment manufacturers, has died at the age of 79.

Born in Courmayeur on August 24, 1945, son of Romilda Bartholier and the famous mountain guide Toni Gobbi, Gioachino began to foster his love for sports products immediately after graduating in Economics. He collaborated with numerous companies in the sports sector and worked for a while in his father's famous climbing shop, Gobbi Sport, an unmissable stop-off for anyone wanting to climb Mont Blanc from what he Italian side of the mountain. In the 1980s and 1990s he also worked in public administration as a councilor for the Municipality of Courmayeur.

Firmly rooted to the small town of Courmayeur and to the entire Aosta Valley, in the early 1980s Gobbi purchased Fratelli Grivel, the historic brand that had been manufacturing mountaineering equipment since 1818 and was in financial difficulty at the time. Gobbi refused the idea that such a tradition could die and consequently took the reins of the company.

With great entrepreneurial skill, verve and eclectic energy - at times even overwhelmingly so - Gobbi managed to lay new, solid foundations for Grivel, transforming it into the world's leading mountaineering brand that we know today.

Gobbi's success was due to his absolute devotion to the company and the Aosta valley, but also to his insatiable curiosity and an unstoppable desire to experiment with things new. His “laboratory” at the foot of Mont Blanc was a constant hotbed of ingenious and wonderful ideas, of prototypes of ice axes, crampons and carabiners that were always new and different, ready to be forged by hand before being produced on an industrial scale. Gioachino’s success was also due, and he loved to repeat this, to the person who had been at his side for decades, namely his wife Betta who with skill and infinte wisdom ensured that the two of them, and Grivel, were visited regularly by the world’s mountaineering elite

In her farewell message yesterday, friend Anna Piunova summed up the importance of the larger-than-life figure as follows "Gioachino Gobbi is gone, and with him, an era. He wasn’t just a brilliant businessman—he was a visionary who carried the soul of the mountains in his heart. Under his guidance, Grivel became more than a brand; it became a symbol of passion and innovation that shaped the very spirit of alpinism."