Glassware company starts opening of own stores in Sao Paulo
DCI
With the goal of opening 12 own stores in São Paulo this year, Cristalaria Nacional, which handcrafts glassware and had earnings of R$ 36 million (US$ 21.2 million) in 2010, affirms it opened its first unit last December at the São Paulo shopping mall SP Market, and ceased working exclusively for the industry to operate as a retailer. With the new venture, the Industrial and administrative directors, Antonio Carlos Bressan and Carlos Donato Reis, intend to increase by 30% the earnings of the company for 2011 - the expectation is that the stores manage R$ 14.2 million (US$ 8.4 million) a year. To reach such goal, they also plan to install a new furnace and the addition of another work shift, at dawn, in the plant floor.
Currently, 360 employees are involved in the daily production of 23 thousand decorations items, household utensils, and at a lesser scale, technical equipment for the industry - all in handcrafted glass - , in Cristalaria Nacional. The pieces are sold to order, from 600 shape options the company offers. The end consumers range from housewives to restaurants and hotels that find the goods in the retail, catered directly by the plant and, mainly, through 50 distributors. The main markets of the company are in São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro. But there is distribution of parts made by a distributor in Angola. And there is also the rise of new consumer centers of glass articles, in the North, Northeast and Mid-West of Brazil. In Natal, for example, there is already the distribution of products of the company, said Bressan.
The new establishments planned for this year may be open in lots in shopping malls, street stores and kiosks. The first two models consist of places of 60 to 80 square meters, with displays, covering all categories of products of the company (gifts, decoration items, utensils, etc.), and the kiosks, 12 square meters. "The market was concentrated in the Southeast. Today, besides going outside Brazil, we are putting it for the whole Brazilian market, which until then, we did not cover", said Bressan.
Despite its name, Cristalaria Nacional works only with glass. Every month, 300 tons of shards are recycled in the manufacturing process of the company. The raw material comes from Coca-Cola, whose packaging is "nobler than regular glass", according to Bressan, and it represents 40% of the composition of the products made by São Paulo company. The Executive says the remains are reused, returning to the beginning of manufacturing line. Crystal, despite being the darling of the household utensils, is made with a mercury basis, a highly polluting chemical element. "Mercury is very expensive and it damages the environment", said Donato, the Managing Director who also takes care of quality control. The rest of the composition of the glass that is produced by the company is based 30% on sand and 20% on soda ash, a basic component for the product, besides other substances that are responsible for the alloy, merger, density and clarity of the product.