Stores of 25 de Março Street become chains
O Estado de S. Paulo
From the fourteenth floor office with formica partition walls of a building in downtown Sao Paulo it is possible to listen to the noise made by the people, street vendors screaming as they offer Chinese novelties, horns, and a crowd of shoppers as they bargain. "From up here, I feel the 25 de Março street pulsating", says the businessman Minolo Camicado, as he looks from the top the region that has become a phenomenon of the retail in the country, with annual earnings of nearly R$ 18 billion (US$ 10 billion), according to an estimate of TNS Research International.
It is more than the R$ 14 billion (US$ 7.8 billion) generated last year by the 50 malls of the capital of São Paulo. A former street vendor, founder of a modest toy store in the most important street of popular retail of Latin American, the businessman currently heads a chain of nationwide stores. It is one of the most successful cases of a trajectory of growth pursued by groups that were born at 25 de Março, such as Armarinhos Fernando, Lojas Semaan and Gaivota.
The stories are similar. Those businesses began as small establishments, and they became rulers of local retail and expanded their branches to other regions. The fact they have begun at 25 de Março - today an area that covers 18 streets, with 350 stores, 3 thousand stands, besides street vendors - is another coincidence that helps to understand how those groups have passed from small door stores to one block and, later, to a chain of stores. "This is an area of national influence", says the researcher of retail of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, Edgard Barki. Even though they have distinct nationalities, those companies have other similarities. They are controlled by the founders or their descendants - some of them still open and close the stores on a daily-basis, are discrete in the social environment, neither appear in photos nor disclose their earnings.
In Armarinhos Fernando, the founder continues with his children ahead of the business he started in the 70s. At that time, the retail was restricted to a room rented on the third floor of a building at 25 de Março, initially to sell items such as sewing lines, buttons and zippers wholesale. The chain currently has 16 stores, five of them at the very 25. One of them is still open every day by the owner, Fernando dos Santos Esquerda, who is about to turn 70. He is used to work every day, including assisting the customers. Proof that his strategies worked out is the expansion of the chain to neighborhoods such as Lapa and Tatuapé in São Paulo and to neighbor cities like Santo André and Guarulhos, forming a chain of 14 stores that offer 360 thousand items. The newest branch was open in April, in the neighborhood of Ipiranga, also in São Paulo. Two other neighborhoods are on the plans of the chain, Osasco and Santo Amaro, in the South side. Cities of the interior have also entered in the radar.