Centauro Brand Guidelines: A 1981 Belo Horizonte Shop, Megastores and Grupo SBF

A failed scale factory and a sports shop in Minas Gerais.

Centauro began in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, in April 1981. Its founder, Sebastião Bomfim Filho, was born in Caratinga, in the interior of the same state, and had run a factory making large weighing scales in Belo Horizonte, which he told Exame in October 2011 he had to close when cash ran short. Exame reported in July 2011 that the scale factory had been founded in 1978 and that the first Centauro shop opened a few months after it was wound up, in a space of a little over 60 square metres in a district next to Savassi, one of the city’s smarter neighbourhoods.

The start was modest. According to the same Exame report, Bomfim could only put a sign above the entrance because the swimwear brand Speedo paid for it; in a May 2026 interview with InfoMoney he recalled opening with a makeshift fabric sign because the money had run out before the shop front was finished. He told InfoMoney that the name came to him on a drive back from the coast, after an earlier name, “Sport Shopping,” could not be registered, and that he liked the centaur as a mix of a horse’s strength and a human mind. Grupo SBF’s own investor-relations history says the first shop opened with four employees.

He told Exame in 2011 that his idea came from seeing more people take up regular exercise, such as jogging, at the start of the 1980s. By the end of the 1990s, by his account, Centauro had 22 shops in Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and Brasília.

Megastores, a website and a stock-market listing.

The turning point came in 2000. Bomfim told Exame in 2011 that he noticed Brazil already had bookstores of more than 1,000 square metres but no sports superstore, and decided to try large shops in shopping centres. Exame reported that he visited ten São Paulo malls with prototypes and that only Shopping West Plaza, in the west of the city, accepted, asking for two years’ rent in advance. Grupo SBF’s history describes that first megastore as about 1,000 square metres, and says mall owners soon began asking for one. Diário do Comércio of Belo Horizonte reported in September 2026 that the success of that São Paulo store led to the refitting of the other shops until about 2010; its example is the BH Shopping store in Belo Horizonte, which went from 100 to 320 and then 1,500 square metres.

The company went online in 2003, when Grupo SBF says it launched the centauro.com.br website, and it says it opened its first shop in the state of Amazonas in July 2009, giving it a presence in all five of Brazil’s regions. In 2011 Exame described Bomfim’s holding company, SBF, as the owner of the Centauro, By Tennis and Nike Store names. Grupo SBF says that in 2012, with 233 shops and the founder still holding all of the capital, it brought in the private-equity group GP Investments as a partner, and that in 2015 a restructuring closed most of the By Tennis shops.

Grupo SBF says it opened its first “Generation 5,” or G5, stores in 2017, combining the shop floor with online ordering and collection. Its initial public offering on the São Paulo exchange took place on 16 April 2019, under the ticker CNTO3, according to the group’s investor-relations site. In January 2016 Pedro Zemel became chief executive and Bomfim became the company’s president and vice-chair of the board, Portuguese Wikipedia says; it adds that Zemel left in 2025 and that Gustavo de Lima Furtado took over as chief executive in April that year.

Brazil’s retail names.

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 one brand to a group of businesses.

Centauro is now one part of a larger group. Grupo SBF says that in 2020 it completed a deal with Nike under which its business Fisia became the exclusive distributor of Nike products in Brazil and the operator of Nike’s Brazilian website and shops. In March 2021 the group’s shares began trading under the new ticker SBFG3, and it says it has since invested, through SBF Ventures, in businesses including the sports-media network NWB, the race organiser X3M and the dance channel FitDance. Portuguese Wikipedia lists ByTennis, Almax Sports and Studio 78 among the group’s other names.

Centauro’s owner and Netshoes also met in a takeover contest. In May 2019 FashionUnited reported that Grupo SBF, which it described as Netshoes’ main competitor in online sportswear, had bid against Magazine Luiza for Netshoes; Magazine Luiza’s higher offer was approved by Netshoes shareholders in June 2019.

The name itself gained extra legal protection in 2026. Diário do Comércio reported on 24 September 2026 that Brazil’s industrial-property office, INPI, had recognised Centauro as a “marca de alto renome,” a high-renown mark, a status that extends a trademark’s protection across all fields of activity and that, according to the paper, about 130 marks hold in Brazil. The same report gave Centauro 230 company-owned shops in 26 states plus an online operation, and 11,000 staff, as of September 2026. It also noted that the head office has moved to São Paulo, while 18 Centauro shops remain in Minas Gerais, and that the chain has developed its own product lines alongside the brands it sells.

The founder still speaks for the brand. In the 2026 Diário do Comércio report Bomfim described the title as recognition of a 45-year history, and said that what customers wanted had shifted from sports equipment to sportswear worn through the day, as casual clothing. He also told the paper that the company keeps a Minas Gerais character even as a national business.

For a design guide, Centauro shows how a regional shop name can carry through a change of scale, from a 60-square-metre unit near Savassi to anchor stores in shopping centres and a listed group with other brands beside it. Compare Netshoes, its online rival in the 2019 contest, and Lojas Renner, another Brazilian chain built around shopping-centre stores. For this guide we use a deep red, graphite and a pale pink with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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