Wanny Di Filippo, a former auto-parts sales rep who'd taught himself leatherwork weaving bracelets and belts on trips to Sardinia, opened a small leather goods shop with his wife Nadia in Florence in 1970, naming it after his favorite animal, the bison. A proper store followed in 1973 inside Palazzo Corsini, and the brand has kept production within a 30-kilometer radius of its Florence base ever since, using vegetable-tanned leather made by an old Tuscan process that relies on tree-bark tannins instead of chemical ones. Di Filippo retired in 2019 and sold the company to its longtime Japanese distributor, Look Holdings, which has kept the original workshop-based production model in place.