São Paulo – Elis Julião was raised barefoot, climbing trees and crushing small leaves to make “medicines” in the farm in Porto Seguro, Bahia, where she lived until she was ten. As her parents didn’t have anyone to leave her with, sometimes she followed her father, who was a farmer, to the sugar-apple orchard, and sometimes she stuck to her mother, who stayed in the office, keeping the accounts.
“She let me participate in her daily life, counting coins, separating invoices, and I even had my own piggy bank, which was emptied every now and then to pay for something,” Julião, now 31, recalls. Everything was fun, and later with her cousins, she played businesswoman and put everyone to work. “I called it Elisão Industries,” she said, laughing.
Julião grew up and moved to Vitória, where she studied Pharmacy in the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) and has lived since. After working in both regular and compounding pharmacies, she decided to start her own business. In the middle of the pandemic, she went to spend some time with her father in the farm, who by now had moved on from sugar-apples to soursops (graviola).
“My goal was to help him rethink the fruit planting while planning my own career transition,” she said. One day she received from her boyfriend an article on the use of soursop in natural products. She liked what she read and delved deeper in the topic. Soon after in 2021, her first product was born, a facial foam made from the extract of the fruit. And so was born her company, Co.re.
As a one-person business started in the pandemic, it was established as an e-commerce. Now it features another product, the soursop see oil, which will be the base for her future products: clay mask and shampoo and conditioner bars. The Co.re’s website also includes tools like wooden toothbrushes and facial massage rollers.
Julião’s company is a farm-to-face, with minimal environmental impact and processing. Its suppliers – from the producer of the oil extract to the packaging manufacturer – are chosen with the same regard. “Now I outsource production to a local plant as most sales are carried out here, but if tomorrow I sell more to São Paulo, I’ll seek a plant there with a ecologic approach to cut logistics costs,” she explains.
Another concern of the businesswoman is that her products are multifunctional. The facial foam, for instance, can be used for the whole body. The soursop oil can be used on the hair, but also on the skin to avoid dryness. The oil, which is light and full of Omega (3, 6 and 9), is easier to moisturize than the coconut oil, for example.
From Bahia to Dubai
Responsible for all areas of the company — from product creation to marketing (Julião even does livestreams on Instagram to promote the brand), the business has known two things from the start: She wanted to make an exportable product, and she wanted her marketing to be the good old-fashioned word of mouth. Designed as a gift item, the facial foam was first bought by her family and friends, who then gave them to their own family and friends.
“This was the idea: That a person impacted by the product would present it to another, and so an audience loyal to the brand was created.” It was so successful within two years the sales exceeded the first expectations.
And so, through who she jokingly refers to “the cousin of the cousin of her cousin,” her first creations landed on the United States, Canada and the United Arab Emirates. A Brazilian who lives in Dubai brought them home as a gift to begin with, and now they always ask them for those who come to Brazil. This same “ambassador of the brand” asked her to make an English material as the fans of Co.re are no longer limited to the Brazilian community in Dubai.
Actually she already had an English pamphlet as the mother of a friend who lives in a B&B in Cumuruxatiba, Bahia, put Co.re’s products for sale and wasn’t managing to explain to her foreign guest the wonders of the facial foam she had created.
Now the businesswoman is working on the translation of all her material, starting by the website, to facilitate exports. She’s also studying the bureaucratic process and each country’s requirements on skincare products. Fans outside Brazil she already has. Now it’s to really export them and take the soursop of her barefoot childhood farm to the whole world.
Contact info:
Co.re
Website: https://www.corenatural.com.br/
E-mail: sac@corenatural.com.br
WhatsApp: +55 (27) 99267 8090
Report by Débora Rubin, especially for ANBA
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
