São Paulo – Lili Bag, a company of baby bags, will export to Saudi Arabia for the first time between August and September of this year. The company closed a deal with a Saudi retail chain during Pitti Bimbo, a Italian fair of children products that took place at the end of June. Lili Bag, from Itú, 101 km from São Paulo, displayed its products in the exhibition through Texbrasil, internationalization’s program from the fashion industry in Brazil, carried out by the Brazilian Association of Textile and Apparel Industry (Abit) and the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex-Brasil).
The company’s owner, Sheyla Rocha, is excited with the perspective of selling to the Arab market and believes that the chain could become one of its largest clients. She will ship a large-scale order of bags and the Saudi Arabia company will have the exclusive rights to sell the brand in the local market for three years. Currently, exports are only 2% of Lili Bag’s output, but if the deals with the Saudis continue to happen according to the owner’s expectation, it should go over 10%.
For two years already, Lili Bag sporadically exports small quantities. It sells to the United Arab Emirates, France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Rocha believes that the Saudi chain to which she will export was already interested in her products, but that the exchange rate variation wasn’t encouraging. The current dollar appreciation over the real helped her close the deal, according to the executive. “Now we have price and quality”, she says, reminding that the second feature was always a given in Lili Bag’s products.
The Saudis will buy all kinds of products from Lili Bag’s collection. But the executive said that they asked for a lot of products with boy’s colors. Rocha also wants to sell to other Arab countries and says that the shipment to Dubai was a one-time thing only. “They care about price”, she says, based on her impressions over the contact she made with Arab importers.
Lili Bag manufactures bags, suitcases and backpacks, thermal backpacks, toiletry bags, accessories such as Ipad’s covers and keychains, all of them for babies and kids. The products are made of fabric and leather and are very colorful. They are embroidered by hand and require a lot of manual labor, with figures of bears and even teddy bears sawn over them. The backpacks have figures of the Brazilian fauna, such as monkeys, macaws, alligators, besides other animals such as owls and kittens.
Sheyla Rocha is the one who designs the bags. She says that they are designed with this period of a women’s life in mind, when she gives birth and replaces her personal purse and bag for the baby one. Thus, the bags already have compartments for the mother to store her wallet, car keys and phone. “It has to have a lot of sections”, she says. The company is also starting to manufacture a more basic and budget line, made with synthetic material, in plain colors, and embroidered by machine instead of by hand.
Rocha has plans to expand a lot the exports and says that she’s interested in all abroad markets. The businesswoman is in talks with importers of North Korea and will participate this year still in a fair in the United States, Children’s Club, in which she’s expecting to gain new clients. Lili Bag already attended five editions of Pitti Bimbo, the fair in which it made the contacts of the current international sales.
Sheyla Rocha created Lili Bag after the birth of her second daughter. She manufactured women’s purses and, when looking for a bag for the newborn, didn’t find anything attractive in the market. “They were all the same”, she says. Thus, she decided to manufacture her own bag, which was a hit in the maternity ward. The businesswoman put aside her old business, created Lili Bag in January 2010 and started to manufacture baby’s bags.
Contact:
Lili Bag
Website: www.lilibag.com.br
Phone: 55 11 4025 8059
Email: contato@lilibag.com.br
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani
