Arezzo Brand Guidelines: A 1972 Belo Horizonte Shoe Factory, a Jute Wedge & Azzas 2154

Two brothers, fifty pairs and a Tuscan name.

Arezzo began in 1972 in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, when the brothers Anderson and Jefferson Birman set up a small shoe factory in the city’s Floresta district, the Estado de Minas newspaper reported in a history of the company published for its fiftieth anniversary in September 2022. Their father, Henrique Birman, was a partner at the start. The brothers wanted a name that honoured Italy’s influence on fashion and design, the paper says: with a map of the country in hand they pointed at random, landed on the Tuscan city of Arezzo and liked the sound of the word.

The first products were men’s shoes. The business started with 50 pairs, made at the back of the family home, and its first sample range was sold to four multibrand menswear shops in Rio de Janeiro, then the centre of Brazilian fashion, Estado de Minas reports. Retailers soon asked for women’s shoes, and the brothers steered the company towards that market. The turning point came around 1978 with a wedge sandal covered in jute, with an upper in atanado, a vegetable-tanned leather; sales rose quickly, and distribution was concentrated in four store chains in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasília and Belo Horizonte, the paper says.

By the 1980s the factory had moved to Belo Horizonte’s Glória district, and in 1986 Arezzo began franchising, which took its shoes and accessories to stores across the country. Because Belo Horizonte was not a shoemaking centre, the company built up its own production of soles, moulds and cutting dies, and bought raw leather to have it finished elsewhere. In 1997 it began moving production to the Vale dos Sinos footwear cluster in Rio Grande do Sul, and two years later it was established in Campo Bom, where the paper describes an integrated research and development centre as central to the business.

Campaigns, a flagship and one creative director.

Much of Arezzo’s public image has been built through fashion photography. Estado de Minas describes a long strategy of linking the brand to models, artists and celebrities, with communication planned from the campaign through to the shop floor. By 2022 the Brazilian art director Giovanni Bianco, whom Veja credits with album covers for Madonna, had been the company’s creative director for more than twenty years, according to the paper.

Recent campaigns follow that pattern. Gisele Bündchen fronted the winter 2024 campaign, “On my Way,” photographed by Gui Paganini under Bianco’s creative direction, O Estado de S. Paulo reported in March 2024; the collection featured tall boots, thin-heeled sandals in gold metals and ballet flats. In February 2025 Veja reported that the actor Fernanda Torres would front the winter 2025 campaign, her first fashion campaign, again directed by Bianco and photographed by Fernando Thomaz.

Retail and the runway have mattered as much. In the 1990s Arezzo opened a flagship on Rua Oscar Freire in São Paulo, which Estado de Minas calls its first concept store, meant to raise the profile of its franchised and own shops. The company also sponsored the Phytoervas Fashion Week, which the paper calls the forerunner of São Paulo Fashion Week, and set up Studio Arezzo, which developed shoes for the runway shows of designers including Alexandre Herchcovitch, Isabela Capeto, Glória Coelho and Reinaldo Lourenço.

The fiftieth anniversary in 2022 drew these threads together. The Oscar Freire store, by then called Galeria Arezzo, was turned into a multimedia exhibition on the brand’s history curated by Muti Randolph; the company published “Arezzo 50,” a book of more than 600 pages led by Bianco; and a campaign called Arezzo Next invited five young Brazilian creatives, among them Meninos Reis and Tete Oshima, to reinterpret a signature model from each decade from the 1970s to the 2010s, Estado de Minas reported.

Brazilian fashion and footwear.

Brazil’s fashion and footwear brands cover a wide range: rubber flip-flops and plastic jelly shoes, women’s shoes and handbags, beachwear and printed dresses, and men’s basics and denim. Many of them sit inside a small number of listed groups, and their corporate pages set out founders, owners and stock-market listings alongside the product ranges.

Footwear is led by large manufacturers. Alpargatas, founded in São Paulo in 1907, has made Havaianas since 1962, and Portuguese Wikipedia describes it as an Itaúsa company since its 2017 change of ownership. Grendene, founded in Farroupilha in 1971 and listed on the São Paulo stock exchange since 2004, makes Melissa, Ipanema and Rider, with plants in the north-eastern states of Ceará and Bahia, according to Portuguese Wikipedia.

Clothing and women’s shoes have consolidated too. Portuguese Wikipedia says Azzas 2154 was formed in 2024 from the merger of Arezzo&Co, the Belo Horizonte shoe group behind Arezzo and Schutz, and Grupo Soma, the Rio de Janeiro group built on Animale and Farm, which had bought Cia. Hering in 2021. Ownership in the sector changes often, so each guide in this series states its brand’s owner as a dated fact.

These brands present themselves through campaigns with well-known faces, collaborations with foreign labels and their own stores and brand spaces, from Galeria Melissa in São Paulo to Casa Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From one shoe brand to a listed group, and a split.

The shoe brand became the core of a larger group. Alexandre Birman, Anderson’s son, created his own label, Schutz, in 1995, and in November 2007 a partnership with the investment firm Tarpon Investimentos led to the formation of Arezzo&Co, joining the two brands, according to Estado de Minas and Portuguese Wikipedia. Four years later the group listed its shares on the São Paulo stock exchange’s Novo Mercado segment under the ticker ARZZ3, and in 2013 Alexandre Birman became chief executive, the paper reports. Portuguese Wikipedia adds the exclusive Brazilian distribution of Vans from 2019, the purchase of the Rio menswear brand Reserva in 2020 and of the Italian label Paris Texas in February 2023.

In 2024 Arezzo&Co combined with Grupo Soma, the Rio de Janeiro owner of Animale, Farm and Hering. The merger took effect on 31 July 2024, the Diário do Comércio of Belo Horizonte reported, and the combined company is Azzas 2154, based in Belo Horizonte and listed on B3, according to Portuguese Wikipedia. The number echoes the goal “Arezzo rumo a 2154,” set in 2004 to carry the company forward for another 150 years, Estado de Minas says.

That structure is now being undone. On 2 September 2026 Azzas 2154 announced a binding agreement between its two main shareholder blocs to split into two independent listed companies, Mercado & Consumo reported: Arezzo&Co would take the shoes and bags brands, including Arezzo, Schutz, Vans and Carol Bassi, together with Hering, while Soma would keep the apparel labels led by Animale, and Farm Rio would sit in a separate company owned by both. Brazil’s competition authority, CADE, cleared the reorganisation without restrictions in October 2026, the Diário do Comércio reported, while board and shareholder approvals were still required. The split was agreed in September 2026 and was not completed at the time of writing.

For a design guide, Arezzo shows how a shoe brand can hold its identity through campaign photography, a flagship store and a long-serving creative director rather than through a single product or logo. Compare Schutz, the label that grew up inside the same group, and Reserva, the menswear brand it bought in 2020. For this guide we use jute beige, a deep atanado brown and ink with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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