São Paulo – An association from Pernambuco, Brazil places on the market, every month, around 2,000 to 3,000 educational toys. The wooden pieces by Art Gravatá are distributed to the Brazilian Northeast, besides the states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Bahia. The products already were exported to the Netherlands and Portugal, according to the commercial director of the association, Mário Sérgio Trajano da Silva.
Art Gravatá manufactures products with MDF and pine such as abacuses, boxes with imprinted alphabet letters, small airplanes, bars with geometrical figures, hammers and pegs, small trucks, cars and doll houses to mount, cubes for mathematics, dominos, panels with drawings as fitting pieces, memory games, puzzles, among others. Gifts and handicrafts on demand are also produced.
In Brazil, the pieces are sold mainly via the web. Exports were made through direct contacts or via intermediaries. In the 1980s, Art Gravatá sold to a cooperative from the Netherlands via a person that visited Brazil. In the early 2000s, the association again sold to the Dutch through a company created exclusively to export for groups of craftsmen, and the last sale abroad was made in 2008, to Portugal, after a trip by Art Gravata’s representatives to Europe.
Trajano says that currently the focus of Art Gravatá is to grow in the domestic market. To export again, the association would need the support or advising to deal terms and products, according to the commercial director. Trajano believes that the prices charged at the moment by Art Gravatá wouldn’t be able to compete with those from competitors abroad.
Art Gravatá has seven craftsmen and operates in a much smaller scale than in the 1980s, when it had approximately 40 artisans. The company was founded in 1979 as a social project designed to generate income by Gravatá’s Círculo de Trabalhadores Cristãos, a Christian workers association that currently operates as an NGO. It started making educational toys in the early 1980s.
At that time, Art Gravatá had as many as three stores, two in Recife and one in Gravatá, where the company’s headquarters are located. The two stores in Recife went out of business in the 1990s, but the one in Gravatá is still open. However, it is more of a showroom than it is a primary sales point. Trajano explains that after the Recife shops shut down, the project kept going thanks to the internet – Art Gravatá went online in 2005.
The company sells online via a solidary economy platform named Cirandas. Some sales are closed over the phone. There are plans to modernize the platform in order to give the products more publicity, which the association’s commercial director believes should fuel sales. He is also tapping into social media to advertise the toys and sell more.
Art Gravatá
Website: www.artgravata.com.br (in Portuguese)
Telephone: +55 (81) 3533-0501
Email: artgravata@yahoo.com.br
*Translated by Sérgio Kakitani & Gabriel Pomerancblum
