São Paulo – Having focused on clothes with unique designs and tech fabrics for seven years, Insider boasts a customer base of 600,000 in Brazil and has exported to 50 countries. The United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia are the three Arab countries that have bought garments by the Brazilian company.
Despite the still shy presence in Arab soil compared to other countries like the United States, the brand has a plan to expand business in the Middle East.
“Our clothes are technological and seek to adapt to the needs of our customers. We have quick-drying, sweat-absorbing, and temperature-regulating clothes. So they end up being ideal to be worn in hot countries like the Arabs. With that in mind, we’ve been figuring out how to expand sales there,” says Yuri Gricheno, cofounder of Insider.
The Brazilian brand is ready with a website featuring all information in English to facilitate the purchase of garments by anyone from anywhere. Furthermore, there has been an investment in marketing to cater to international customers.
According to Gricheno, although Arabs do buy their clothes, Brazilian living in Arab countries lead the sales of the companies in the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia.
“There are Brazilians living in these countries who buy our clothes and Brazilians who buy them to wear them during their vacations there. There are even some stories of customers who recounted how rich their experience was when using Insider products,” he said.
The US, Portugal, Canada, Australia and Germany are the leading global buyers of Insider clothes aside from Brazil. Although it has operated since 2017, the company’s foreign sales started only in 2022, when it was already well established in the domestic market.
Despite the expansion plans, exports started by demand of Brazilian consumers living in the US, and not from direct actions by the company. Brazilians who were used to the brand started buying the clothes while they were living abroad.
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The company now has 120 employees, outsources distribution and has plans to expand exports. “We haven’t considered yet building Insider offices in other countries, but seeing the necessity of our customers, we want to have some points of distribution in other countries in the future to facilitate their experience, making the purchase quicker, more practical, and more efficient,” said Gricheno.
Insider’s history
The idea to create the company, Gricheno said, was prompted by his own daily need to have a t-shirt that could be worn under the button-up shirt and helped absorb the sweat. When he didn’t find a solution in the market, he decided to create it together with his partner Carolina Matsuse. The tech t-shirt, which started being sold in 2017, became a sales success.
“We established Insider aiming at bringing about a change in the fashion industry towards tech, sustainable functional clothing. We started with a single product, a single need, a single audience, which has widened since,” he explained.
Tech clothing
The organic expansion has been such that the company now offers 88 different products. Most items are for women but there are men’s and unisex clothes, too. The flagship is still the tech t-shirt, which is no longer something to be worn under the shirt but a garment that can be worn on its own for any occasion.
Besides the short-sleeved t-shirts, men can also find long-sleeved t-shirts, coats, sweatshirts, socks, shorts, pants, and underwear. Women have various options from sports bras to bodysuits, lingerie, and beachwear.
To handle the sweat in a way that customers can use the same item several times without smelling, the company has invested in technology and unique fabrics. “Made of wood-based fibers, modal, and polyamide, raw materials that are more sustainable and functional than cotton or polyester, and a technology that’s called phase change material, our garments make the heat evaporate off more quickly. So the body remains at least two degrees Celsius cooler.”
Report by Rebecca Vettore, especially for ANBA.
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
