Pernambucanas Brand Guidelines: A 1908 Recife Textile Family, Painted Gates & 472 Stores

A Recife textile mill and its shops.

Pernambucanas — for decades called Casas Pernambucanas — dates its founding to 25 September 1908 in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco in north-eastern Brazil, Portuguese Wikipedia says. The family behind it were the Lundgrens. Herman Theodor Lundgren, a Swedish-born businessman from Norrköping who had settled in Recife, bought a textile mill, the Companhia de Tecidos Paulista, at Paulista, then a district of Olinda, and the shops grew out of that mill. He had left Sweden in 1855 and worked in the port of Recife as an interpreter for arriving foreigners, later serving there as honorary consul for the Nordic countries, according to the same article.

Sources describe the founding slightly differently. Portuguese Wikipedia’s article on Lundgren credits the 1908 shops to his family, led by his eldest son of the same name; Brazil Journal, in July 2026, described the elder Lundgren as the family patriarch who founded the company in Recife in 1908.

The name itself changed. The shops were also called Lojas Paulista, after the mill, and from 1932 the family made Casas Pernambucanas — “the Pernambuco houses” — the name of every store in the country, Portuguese Wikipedia says. The chain moved south early: a shop opened on the Praça da Sé in São Paulo in 1910, and by 1915 there were stores in Porto Alegre, Florianópolis and Teresina.

It spread, the same source says, by selling popular textiles at low prices and by advertising heavily. In the interior of several states its ads were painted on rocks, roadside banks and farm gates, and those painted signs became widely recognised. A 1962 advertising film became well known, Portuguese Wikipedia says, for its lines “Quem bate? É o frio!” — “Who’s knocking? It’s the cold! No use knocking, I won’t let you in.”

A family split and a São Paulo company.

The chain peaked in the 1970s. Portuguese Wikipedia gives more than 700 stores in that decade, including the Lojas Muricy, founded in 1976; its article on Lundgren puts the high point at about 800 stores and 40,000 staff.

A dispute among the heirs then divided the business. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Portuguese Wikipedia says, the operations in the Northeast disappeared and the Rio de Janeiro business, Lundgren Irmãos Tecidos Indústria e Comércio, went bankrupt. Only Arthur Lundgren Tecidos, the São Paulo company, prospered, and it is the company that runs Pernambucanas today.

Family governance stayed complicated for decades. Before a 2024 agreement, Brazil Journal reported in July 2026, control was split into blocs belonging to six family branches and 35 individual shareholders, each with its own decision-making process. The 2024 agreement gave the six blocs equal voting power, set quorums for major decisions and created a board of directors, replacing a system in which the families deliberated directly.

The store network grew fast in the years before that. The chain opened about 200 stores in five years, the publication reported, mostly in the North, the Northeast, Rio de Janeiro, the Centre-West and Rio Grande do Sul. As of July 2026 it had 472 stores in more than 300 cities, across 15 states and the Federal District.

Its range is broad for a clothing chain. Portuguese Wikipedia sorts it into home textiles — bed, table and bath linen, rugs and curtains; clothing for women, men and children, with lingerie, footwear and accessories; small and large electrical appliances; and a beauty category covering perfume, make-up and personal care, with glasses and watches.

Design and documentation.

Brazilian retailers present themselves first through the shop. Many national chains grew by buying regional ones and then putting their own name over the door, so a single shop name, painted on façades in towns across the country, often carries decades of mergers behind it. Shop names are usually plain: a founder’s first name, a family name or, in the case of Casas Bahia, a tribute to the customers the business first served.

Characters do much of the talking. Several chains use a mascot or spokes-character in television advertising, on social media and in their apps. Magazine Luiza’s Lu began as a virtual sales assistant in 2003, according to Portuguese Wikipedia, and now appears in product videos; Casas Bahia’s Baianinho, a cartoon boy, was redrawn as a teenager in 2020 and restored to his classic look in 2026, trade press reported. Such characters can change with the company, and their redesigns are often discussed in public.

Screens now sit beside the shop. Apps and websites carry the same name and colours as the stores, and many retailers run marketplaces that sell goods from outside sellers under the retailer’s own banner. Television campaigns, seasonal sales events with their own names and printed or online catalogues complete the picture, as the companies publish them on their own channels.

Behind the shop fronts sit corporate pages. These usually give a founding story, name founders and owners, and, for listed companies, link to investor pages with filings on the B3, the São Paulo stock exchange. Restructurings, renamings and changes of control appear there as dated notices, which is often the clearest record of how a shop name has passed from one owner to the next.

From Avenida Paulista to Barra Funda.

The name now appears on the São Paulo Metro. English Wikipedia records that Paulista station, on Line 4-Yellow, was renamed after ViaQuatro, the line’s operator at the time, signed a naming-rights contract with Pernambucanas in April 2023.

The company has been reorganising. Its online shop was shut after years of losses and is being rebuilt around store hubs, with the focus on clothing and on bed, table and bath, Brazil Journal reported in July 2026. The same report said the head office had left Avenida Paulista, where it had been for more than 50 years, for the Barra Funda district of São Paulo, and that in March 2026 the auditor’s report on the 2025 accounts included a paragraph on a material uncertainty over the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.

The leadership changed that summer. From 30 July 2026, Brazil Journal reported, Marcelo Pimentel, previously chief executive of GPA and of Lojas Marisa, replaced Ricardo Doebeli, who had led the company since August 2024, and a new board chairman took over at the same time. The company turns 120 in 2028.

The turnaround programme behind those changes is practical rather than visual. Brazil Journal described more than 400 separate initiatives under the outgoing chief executive: restocking by individual product line, finer pricing, segmented customer-relationship marketing, radio-frequency tags, store-by-store management and a more disciplined return to e-commerce. The company also reviewed the mix of goods in its stores and set up a separate unit to work on branches performing below average, the publication reported in July 2026.

For a design guide, Pernambucanas shows how a retail name can outlive the mill and the family structure that produced it, from painted farm gates to a metro station. Compare Lojas Renner, another Brazilian clothing chain, and Riachuelo, another Brazilian clothing retailer. For this guide we use a brick red, a mill cotton and an indigo with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pernambucanas’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.