São Paulo – Graphic designer Vanessa Wagner already had her company’s business plan almost ready when she moved a small table in the kitchen of the apartment she had just rented in Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro, and underneath it she found the painting of a garden filled with flowers and butterflies. The painting was signed with an uncommon name: Zóia. After a little research, she discovered that the painter was the former tenant, an old lady of Greek origin regarded by all as a very elegant woman. One detail: butterflies are the favourite animals of the entrepreneur’s.
Thus came about the name of the brand Vanessa runs alongside her sister, Alessandra Wagner. They focus on manufacturing women’s accessories that are in between jewellery and costume jewellery, with a focus on design and an exclusive use of shapes and materials. They sell domestically and abroad. Exports, by the way, should pick up steam for Zóia for now on.
“We do this whole research work in shapes and design,” explains Vanessa. “With our intermediate concept, in between jewellery and costume jewellery, we want to be simple, yet different,” she says. Thus, the brand’s catalogue includes products such as a necklace made using capsules taken from Nespresso, an espresso coffee brand by Nestlé, or else accessories whose raw materials range from jeans shoelaces to bread bags. “We are creating a line using these bread bags,” says Vanessa. “We are going to make a kind of crochet using the yarn obtained from this type of paper,” she explains.
Focus on sustainability? “We do not want to be eco-friendly to the point of being a nuisance, but if we can work along those lines and still create new possibilities in shapes and colours, why not?,” says Vanessa. “We want people to see the necklace made from Nespresso capsules and ask themselves why didn’t they think of it before,” she says. “We have even used small tiles made from Tetra Pak packaging.”
Currently, Zóia produces three collections per year: winter, summer, and high summer. According to Vanessa, the starting point for the creations is always the colours chosen for each of these cycles. “Our items are timeless; we do not follow fashion trends set with each new season,” she says.
Out of Rio, the sisters sell their items to all Brazilian capitals. They have exported to Belgium, France, the United Kingdom and Puerto Rico. From now on, the idea is to gain new markets. “Last year, we have mostly targeted the domestic market, but from now on we will go back to investing in foreign sales,” says Vanessa.
One of the actions planned in order to get there is to step up the brand’s participation in Brasil WebTrade, a project by the Bank of Brazil that provides a sort of virtual shop window for national exporters. The project supports small businesses interested in finding more buyers in foreign countries.
Within this prospecting scenario, the Arabs are regarded as potential clients. “We are aware that we can do good business with the Arabs,” says Vanessa. “We need to gain better knowledge of the tastes and preferences of those markets,” says the designer, who wants to spread her creativity throughout the world.
Contact
Zóia
Telephone: (+55 21) 2512-9311
Site: www.zoia.com.br
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
