Nose for Business

Swabs for Covid testing made Copan CEO Stefania Triva a billionaire. Despite countless buyout offers, though, she's snubbing the dealmakers and keeping the company firmly in the family.

- Giacomo Tognini

On a foggy early January day in the northern Italian city of Brescia, which was hit hard by the first wave of Covid-19 in 2020, Stefania Triva, 57, sets out two swabs side by side on her desk. One is a regular cotton Q-tip, the other a special “flocked” swab, studded with tiny synthetic fibers that resemble split ends.

That special swab-made by her family's 43-year-old company, Copan-is the key element in hundreds of millions of Covid19 PCR tests currently being plunged into noses around the world. Sitting in front of a large red-and-yellow abstract painting and a corkboard filled with photos of her three children, Triva delves into the subtle differences that make her flocked swabs the gold standard.

"In a cotton swab, the fibers are twisted around the stick, creating a cage that traps the sample,” she says, pointing to the thickly wound Q-tip. “But it only releases 20% of that sample. In a flocked swab, thanks to the mechanics of how the fibers are attached to the stick, you have the opposite: 80% is released.”

Family Ties

"I can't see myself anywhere else. It's in my DNA," says Copan CEO Stefania Triva, who got her start as a teenager packing boxes for her father's company in the 1980s.

Those swabs-invented by Copan in 2003 and the subject of ongoing litigation with its leading rival, Maine-based Puritan Medical Products-have helped drive the company's enormous growth; it manufactured 415 million of them in 2020, more than double the 2019 amount.