NaturaBrasil opens at Garden State Plaza in U.S. mall launch

NorthJersey

Adriana Duarte, manager, and her workers, Maria Cardona, Danilo Costa and Amy Martinez inside the Natura Brasil store Garden State Plaza

A Brazilian beauty brand that started life as that country's version of Avon and has grown into a global success story has staked out a corner of Paramus for its first foray into the malls of America.

NaturaBrasil has opened a 750-square-foot store at New Jersey's largest shopping center, Westfield Garden State Plaza, as part of a push to make its brand more of a household name in this country.

The Plaza store is NaturaBrasil's second U.S. location and its first mall store. Its first U.S. store opened in Manhattan, on Elizabeth Street in Nolita, last year. The company has 20 stores worldwide.

NaturaBrasil is seeking to give shoppers an Amazon experience — but not the kind associated with the online retailer of the same name. Rather, the Paramus store celebrates the Amazon river and the biodiversity of the Amazon region of Brazil.

Adriana Duarte, manager of the Natura Brasil store Garden State Plaza Natura Brasil, a cosmetics company that promises to save the rainforest as well as sell beauty products has picked Garden State Plaza for its second U.S. store.

The company sells products made with nuts, seeds and fruits grown in the Amazon, and customers can smell, see and touch the exotic ingredients used in its soaps and lotions.

Using a virtual reality headset in the store, visitors can also take a virtual canoe ride down the Amazon or visit farm families as they harvest acai berries and Brazil nuts.

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The store had its "soft" (or unannounced) opening four weeks ago. Tuesday it introduced itself to mall shoppers with a Brazilian "festa," featuring music, food and massages from 6 to 8 p.m.

One of NaturaBrasil's top selling points is that it is an environmentally friendly beauty brand that has helped save some 635,000 acres of Amazon rain forest by working with community farms there to source natural ingredients for its products.

It received a Champions of the Earth award from the United Nations and was the first publicly traded company to be certified as a B corporation by a nonprofit global organization named B Lab, which was created to promote social and environmental awareness in the business community. B corporations are for-profit companies that have been certified to meet rigorous environmental, social responsibility and accountability standards.

"The core value of the brand is to keep the forest standing," said Adriana Duarte, retail manager for NaturaBrasil. "Everything is hand-harvested, hand-picked. The commitment to sustainability is a big one," she said, pointing to signs at the entrance identifying the company as a B corporation and as a member of the Union for Ethical Bio-Trade, which certifies that ingredients are harvested in a sustainable manner.

The brand makes products using such ingredients as oil from the seeds of the andiroba tree, maracuja (passion fruit) and pitanga fruits, oil from the murumura paim tree and Brazil nuts.

Natura Brasil store GSP:
Adriana Duarte, manager of the Natura Brasil store Garden State Plaza Natura Brasil, a cosmetics company that promises to save the rainforest as well as sell beauty products has picked Garden State Plaza for its second U.S. store.

In Brazil and other South American countries, the brand, known there as Natura, is sold widely in drugstores and at beauty counters in department stores, but it isn't well known in this country.

NaturaBrasil originally was mainly sold directly to customers by sales reps, similar to the Avon business model, but it now has stores in South America, France, and the United States and has annual sales of over $2 billion.

It recently purchased The Body Shop chain for $1.1 billion.