Not the way we'd prefer to start our Monday morning. It has been confirmed that Kartell US president Ivan Luini was killed in a plane crash on Friday in Colorado. Luini's good friend and Dialogica owner Sergio Savarese was also killed in the crash.

As the head of the influential Italian company, Luini nurtured and championed design awareness in the US and was thus respnsible for bringing many European designers to the American marketplace. You can read more about Luini in this article and hear Luini speaking from the ICFF floor in this podcast from earlier this year.

More from the NY Times on Luini and Savarese.