Everything’s for sale. From the coffee at the start of your day to the bashful bowel movement that follows, cycling’s institutions have decided that there’s a dollar tag that can be put on it. Surely that’s the only answer to the Very Bad Thing that we just learned at Escape Collective Towers: that there is an official Giro d’Italia toilet paper, and that the company in question paid some probably immense pile of money to associate its loo roll with cycling’s most beautiful Grand Tour.
That company – Regina, a brand owned by the Sofidel Group – has a press release about its new partnership, because of course it does (this isn’t a new deal; we just didn’t know about it until now – apologies to the Sofidel SuperFans that were across this in February). The Sofidel group is “iconic”, apparently, because everything in a press release is obliged to be so. Its bounteous rolls have been “present in Italian homes for over 35 years”, and it is “one of the world leaders in the production of paper for hygienic and household use”.
Checks out. I vaguely recall seeing Sofidel or Regina or both written on European toilet paper dispensers at some point in the past. This isn’t a section of my long-term memory I thought I’d have to draw on in the course of my work day, but every day is a box of chocolates (or box of something, anyway).
Some clever marketer – and an even more shrewd sales executive – became convinced that this is the brand association that the Giro d’Italia, and Regina’s toilet paper, needs. Deal done, they then slid the particulars across the desk to a clever PR person who had to write the press release that claims that “what unites Regina and the Giro d’Italia is the concept of infinity”.
'Infinity'? Yes: you know, like the Giro’s trophy, Trofeo senza fine? You know how it looks a bit like an unspooling toilet roll, thrown by a petulant child across the bathroom, but golden instead of pristine white (or worse, no longer white)? That is the chief mental image conjured by this partnership, but there’s more: Regina’s motto, “I Rotoloni Regina non finiscono mai” (‘Regina rolls never end”), which has apparently “become part of Italian advertising history” and a “genuine earworm”. And while that raises more questions than it answers about the dire state of Italy’s other advertising slogans, it also invites unsavoury thoughts: infinite mess, infinite toilet paper, one never really quite getting to the bottom of the other. An infinity loop of gastric turmoil. You know, like the Giro d’Italia if you get your gels wrong.
Like the infinite toilet paper, this rant is just getting started – but you'll need to be a member to read it. Escape Collective is 100% membership-funded, with no advertising and no affiliate links in our product reviews, and our work is only possible through your support.
Did we do a good job with this story?
