Lola Cosmetics Brand Guidelines: Rio 2011, Lola From Rio & the Bora Brasil Merger

A haircare start-up from 2011.

Lola Cosmetics was founded in 2011 in Rio de Janeiro. Bloomberg Línea reported in June 2025 that its founders were Dione Vasconcellos, Jaqueline Vasconcellos and Milton Taguchi, three people from Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil’s far south, who were living in Rio. The same founders are named by IstoÉ Dinheiro in its report of the same month.

The Brazil-Arab News Agency ANBA reported in August 2026 that the company was set up to serve haircare professionals and later sold products for straight and curly hair to shoppers in Brazil and abroad. Its range is centred on hair, but Advent International, its later controlling investor, listed hair care, body care and home products among its categories in June 2025.

The brand no longer uses its original name in front of shoppers. According to ANBA, the company was founded as Lola Cosmetics and adopted the name Lola From Rio to give itself a Brazilian identity in international markets; the sources used for this guide do not give the date of the change. This guide uses the original name, with the newer one alongside.

The company has described its formulas as vegan. IstoÉ Dinheiro reported in June 2025 that both Lola and its merger partner Skala had portfolios it described as entirely vegan, and ANBA wrote in 2026 that the brand relies on vegan, cruelty-free formulas not tested on animals. These are the brand’s own labels as the publications report them.

IstoÉ Dinheiro and Bloomberg Línea both described Pedro Taguchi as Lola’s chief operating officer in June 2025. At that point, Bloomberg Línea reported, Lola placed itself between the mid-market and premium segments and was sold in about 40 countries, with growth abroad driven by Spain and Portugal.

Names that read like punchlines.

Lola’s identity rests less on a logo than on words. Bloomberg Línea described it in June 2025 as a brand known for a more colourful visual identity and for curious product names, and ANBA called its communication bold and humorous, with irreverent and playful names. The lines that publication cites show the approach: Meu Cacho Minha Vida (“my curl, my life”), Xapadinha, the Morte Súbita treatment mask and Rapunzel.

That style has tested the limits of a joke. In October 2015 InfoMoney reported that Lola Cosmetics had renamed two products shown at a cosmetics fair the previous month, after criticism on social media of their names; the company said the products had not yet reached shops and that it recognised it had not made the right choice.

The name change to Lola From Rio leans on the same idea of place. ANBA reported that, to enter some markets, the company had to meet different local rules, including translating packaging into Arabic. The agency’s August 2026 report said Lola was sold in 50 countries, among them Morocco, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, with Portugal its main market outside Brazil.

In the United States, ANBA reported, the company has its own operation and office, and the brand is stocked by chains including Walmart, Target, CVS and Sally Beauty, as well as on Amazon. In Brazil the same report put it in more than 50,000 points of sale as of August 2026. Advent International’s June 2025 announcement listed e-commerce, department stores, pharmacies and beauty retailers as its main channels.

Design and documentation.

The Brazilian beauty brands in this group introduce themselves through a small set of fixed elements: a short brand name, a plain wordmark, and named lines that run across perfume, make-up and body care, so that a fragrance family or a lipstick range can carry its own name under the house name. O Boticário took its name from the Portuguese word for an apothecary and began in 1977 as a compounding pharmacy in Curitiba; in 2026 one of its franchise shops was refitted with an interior modelled on the old boticas.

The way the products are sold shapes how the brands appear. Some grew through franchise shops and kiosks in shopping centres, others through direct sales, in which representatives order from a catalogue or a service centre and sell to their own customers, and most now combine shops, sellers and online stores. Campaigns follow the same channels, from television spots for Dia dos Namorados to launches timed to a fixed date such as the lipstick day on 29 July.

Group ownership is common, and this guide describes it plainly, by date. Grupo Boticário was formed as a holding company in 2010 and has since launched or bought brands including Eudora, Quem Disse, Berenice? and Vult. Where a brand has passed to another owner, including an international cosmetics group, the entry gives the owner and the date of the deal; where a brand remains independent, the guide says so only where a dated source does.

Each entry draws on corporate pages for founders, owners and franchise networks, and on dated independent press for anything beyond the company’s own word. Product lines are named as the companies publish them; the guide does not describe what the products do, and the palettes and typefaces shown are an unofficial interpretation rather than any brand’s own.

From independent brand to Grupo Bora Brasil.

Lola’s change of ownership came through a merger with Skala, the haircare company from Uberaba, in Minas Gerais, in which the private-equity firm Advent International had announced a majority investment a little over a year earlier, Bloomberg Línea reported. On 6 June 2025, Bloomberg Línea and IstoÉ Dinheiro reported that the two companies would combine under a new holding company with Advent as majority shareholder, through a swap of shares between the founders of both businesses and a further undisclosed investment from Advent. The deal was subject to approval by Brazil’s competition authority, CADE, both publications said at the time.

The terms set out in June 2025 kept the brands apart. According to IstoÉ Dinheiro, Lola and Skala would keep their own head offices, in Rio de Janeiro for Lola and Uberaba and São Paulo for Skala, while sharing production, distribution and innovation. Skala’s president, Luis Delfim, was named chief executive of the group, and Lola’s three founders joined its board.

On 25 February 2026, Mercado&Consumo reported that the two companies had created Grupo Bora Brasil from the merger and integration of their operations. Bora Brasil is the institutional name used with clients, partners and staff, while Skala and Lola remain the names on the products; in Brazil the two brands keep separate sales and marketing teams, with more integration in the international unit. The publication said the group operated two factories and seven distribution centres, and had about 1,800 staff in Brazil and the United States; the sources used for this guide do not say which factory makes which brand.

For a design guide, Lola Cosmetics shows how a brand can be carried almost entirely by its product names and tone of voice, and how a place name can be added to travel abroad. Compare Granado, another Brazilian beauty brand, and Sallve, a São Paulo skincare name. For this guide we use a tropical pink, a banana yellow and a lagoon teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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