In the late 1930s,  Egidio Cressi left a career in banking to spend his time closer to the sea. He and his brother Giovanni Battista, known as Nanni, had grown up in Genoa, a port city on the Ligurian coast where the relationship between people and the water runs deep and practical rather than romantic. They were not dreamers building a brand. They were two men who liked being in the water and found that the equipment available to them was not good enough. So they made their own.

Their early workshop was a room in their home. The first masks were cut from recycled inner tubes. The first speargun, which they called the Saetta, was built for the kind of hunting they were actually doing in the waters off Liguria. None of it was designed to sell; it was designed for a specific environment by people who knew these waters well enough to know what was missing.

That origin matters because it set the terms for everything that followed. Cressi did not begin as a company with a product line and a distribution strategy. It began as a workshop with a philosophy: build gear that works, test it in the sea, and don’t add anything that doesn’t need to be there.

From Workshop to Company

The official registration came in 1944, and by 1946 the business had a name: Il Pescatore Subacqueo Cressi, which translates roughly as “Cressi the Underwater Fisherman.” The choice of name is telling. Cressi wasn’t positioning itself as a technology innovator or a performance brand; the brothers knew exactly who their customer would be because it was essentially themselves. 

The postwar years boomed for recreational diving. Jacques Cousteau and Émile Gagnan patented the Aqua-Lung in 1943, and the idea of exploring the underwater world for pleasure rather than professionally was beginning to take hold. Cressi was well-positioned for that moment because Egidio and Nanni had already been thinking seriously about underwater equipment for nearly a decade.

The products came quickly in those early years. The Rondine fin appeared in 1951 and changed the geometry of how fins worked by reducing the physical effort of moving through the water. The Pinocchio mask appeared in 1953, giving divers a practical way to equalize at depth. It went on to become one of the most recognizable pieces of dive equipment ever made. The ARO AR47 rebreather, introduced in 1947, signaled that Cressi was paying attention to where diving was going, not just where it already was.

The most striking thing about this period is how much ground a small family workshop in Genoa was covering. These were not incremental improvements to existing scuba products. They were genuine solutions to problems divers were actually experiencing, developed by people who understood the sport from the beginning.  

What Family Ownership Actually Means

Cressi is now in its third generation of family leadership. Antonio and Marco Cressi run the company today, and the connection between their work and what Egidio and Nanni started in that Genoese workshop is not merely symbolic. It shapes how decisions get made, how products get tested, and what the brand puts its name on.

Marco Cressi has spoken directly about what that means in practical terms. Every Cressi product carries the family name, and that creates a different kind of accountability because when your own name is on the gear, the standards are personal.

That accountability shows up in how Cressi tests its products. The waters around the Portofino promontory, about 40 minutes from the company's Genoa headquarters, have been part of the testing process for decades. The company keeps two boats at the port of Santa Margherita Ligure specifically for product development dives. 

New gear is tested in real conditions throughout the year, in cold and temperate water, on recreational profiles that reflect how divers actually use equipment. The feedback loop between the people making the gear and the sea it is made for has never been broken.

That is genuinely unusual in an industry where design and manufacturing are often separated from the environments the products are meant for by thousands of miles and several layers of corporate structure. For Cressi, the sea has always been close by and the people doing the testing have always had skin in the game.

The Philosophy That Has Not Changed

Marco Cressi has described the design philosophy his family has carried through eight decades in terms that are easy to understand but surprisingly difficult to execute consistently: less volume, less weight, less mass, less effort. The goal has always been to reduce what stands between the diver and the experience, not to add features that make gear look impressive on a spec sheet.

That philosophy produces a particular kind of product. Regulators are designed to breathe smoothly without demanding constant adjustment. Masks seal reliably and stay out of the way. BCDs offer divers control without overcomplicating the mechanics of buoyancy. Dive computers offer key information at a glance, without requiring a manual to operate.

It also produces a particular kind of relationship between the gear and the people who use it. Divers who find equipment they trust tend to remain loyal to that brand, and long-term use is something Cressi has always designed for. Durable, reparable gear that earns trust over years of diving is both a sustainability argument and a product philosophy argument. The two happen to point in the same direction.

Genoa, Still

Cressi is still based in Genoa, still family owned, and still testing gear in the same waters where the company's founders first learned what good equipment should feel like. That continuity means the institutional knowledge of the brand is tied to a specific place, a specific sea, and a family whose name has been on the gear since the beginning.

Egidio Cressi left banking in the late 1930s because he wanted to build something closer to the water. What he and Nanni built turned out to be one of the most enduring dive equipment brands in the world, now celebrating its 80th anniversary with the same family at the helm and the same Ligurian coast out the window. 

Most companies with that kind of longevity can point to smart strategy or favorable timing, or both. Cressi can point to those things too, but the real answer is simpler: they built gear they believed in, tested it where they loved to dive, and put their name on it every time.