Panini

Panini is a company headquartered in Modena, Italy, named after the Panini brothers who founded it in 1961. The company produces books, comics, magazines, stickers, trading cards and other items through its collectibles and publishing subsidiaries. Panini distributes its own products, and products of third party providers. Panini maintains a Licensing Division to buy and resell licenses and provide Agency for individuals and newspapers seeking to purchase rights and comic licenses, respectively. Through Panini Digital the company uses voice-activated software to capture football statistics, which is then sold to agents, teams, media outlets and video game manufactures. New Media operates Panini's on-line applications, and generates income through content and data sales.

History
Benito and Giuseppe Panini were operating a newspaper distribution office in Modena, Italy during 1960, when they found a collection of figurines (stickers attached with glue) that a Milan company was unable to sell. The brothers bought the collection, and sold them in packets of two for ten lire each. They sold three million packets. Having had success with the figurines Giuseppe founded Panini in 1961 to manufacture and sell his own figurines. Benito joined Panini the same year. Panini sold 15 million packets of figurines in 1961. 29 million units were sold the following year, and brothers Franco and Umberto Panini joined the company in 1963. Umberto Panini died on 29 November 2013 at the age of 83.

It became famous in the 1960s for its football collections, which soon became objects of wide interest and are now considered a juvenile cultural phenomenon of the following decades. Rare stickers (figurine) can reach very high prices on the collectors' market. Some popular games were invented which used stickers as playing cards. The slogan "Stick with Panini" could once be heard in a jingle following the television advertisements that Panini aired during children's programming.

In 1970 Panini began publishing “L’Almanacco Illustrato del Calcio Italiano” (The Illustrated Guide to Italian Football), after purchasing the rights from publishing house Carcano. Panini also published its first FIFA World Cup sticker album for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, in addition to using multilingual captions and selling stickers outside of Italy for the first time. Another first for Panini, in the early 1970s, was introducing self-adhesive stickers; as opposed to using glue.

In 1986 Panini created a museum of figurines which they donated to the city of Modena in 1992.

May 24, 2006, Panini partnered with The Coca-Cola Company and Tokenzone to produce the first Virtual Sticker Album for the FIFA World Cup. The album was viewable in at least 10 different languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

In January 2009, Panini acquired an exclusive license to produce NBA trading cards and stickers effective with the 2009-10 NBA season. On March 13, 2009, Panini acquired the Texas-based trading card manufacturer Donruss Playoff LP. With it, Panini inherited Donruss' NFL and NFLPA licenses.

On March 26, 2010, Panini acquired a license from the NHL and NHLPA. The 2010-11 hockey season was the first in five years that more than one company (Upper Deck) has produced hockey cards. The classic stickers today are complemented by collectible card game Adrenalyn XL.

In 2010, Panini acquired a license to create an official sticker collection for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London 2012.

Panini Family
Giuseppe Panini, the eldest brother and the founder of this business, and a collector himself, financed the creation of the Raccolte Fotografiche Modenesi (Modena's photographic collections), a precious archive containing more than 300,000 photographs and a similar number of postcards, describing the life of the city and the evolution of photographic art.