São Paulo, 1969.

Natura began as a single shop. Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1969 by Antônio Luiz Seabra and that it is headquartered in São Paulo. The German business magazine Börse Online, in a profile of Seabra published on 18 October 2019, traced the route there. It said Seabra had worked for the Brazilian arm of Remington Rand, the American typewriter maker, and found the job in a large multinational unsatisfying. He then accepted a management post at Pierre Berjeaut, a producer of beauty products, and the subject of cosmetics held his interest.

Börse Online said that in 1969 Seabra went into business on his own, rented a small shop on Rua Oscar Freire in São Paulo and founded the firm Natura. The magazine said he advised customers in person on how to use his creams and lotions. The early years were hard; Börse Online quoted Seabra recalling them as difficult years. The company name and the street address of that shop are where the brand’s story starts.

The business changed shape five years later. Börse Online said that in 1974 Seabra and his partners moved away from shop retail to direct selling, with freelance consultants selling Natura’s products to customers themselves. Wikipedia gives the same year for the adoption of direct sales, and it describes the people who sell for the company as “consultants”. That word, rather than “store” or “counter”, names the people through whom the brand sells, and Börse Online said they include secretaries, domestic workers and students.

The company later became a listed business with a wider reach. Wikipedia says Natura became a public company on the São Paulo stock exchange in 2004, with its shares on the Novo Mercado listing segment, and that it opened its first boutique in Paris in 2005. Through each change, the company kept the single Latin word chosen for the shop on Rua Oscar Freire.

An ampersand and three brands.

From 2013, Natura’s name began to sit beside other companies’ names. Börse Online said Natura had taken over the Australian skin-care brand Aesop in 2013 and the British cosmetics chain The Body Shop in 2017. Reuters, in a report carried by the Cyprus Mail on 10 April 2023, said it was L’Oréal that had sold The Body Shop to Natura in 2017. Both reports name the acquired businesses under their own names.

The next change to the group’s name came with Avon. Börse Online said in October 2019 that Natura had agreed to take over Avon, then based in London, through a share swap. Wikipedia says the agreement was announced in May 2019 and completed in January 2020, and it gives the group’s name as Natura &Co. The ampersand and the abbreviation “Co” turned a single brand name into the name of a group of companies, with Natura as one of several brands inside it. Wikipedia says the group’s American depositary shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange from 2020 until 2024.

The group then narrowed again. Reuters reported on 10 April 2023 that L’Oréal had agreed to buy Aesop from Natura &Co, describing Natura as the owner of Avon and The Body Shop and saying that Aesop was established in 1987 and is headquartered in Melbourne. The same report said Roberto Marques had stepped down as chief executive and executive chairman in June 2022 to make way for Fabio Barbosa. In November 2023 FashionUnited reported that Natura &Co had sold The Body Shop, founded in 1976 by Anita Roddick and based in London, to the private equity group Aurelius.

FashionUnited said Natura &Co described the sale as a way to “simplify and refocus” its operations and to speed up the integration of the Natura and Avon brands in Latin America. Under Natura’s ownership, the outlet said, The Body Shop had redesigned its stores and introduced a refill service. With Aesop and The Body Shop gone, the group’s name still carries its ampersand, while the brand that started on Rua Oscar Freire remains at its centre.

A shop, consultants and an ampersand.

Corporate identities across Latin America often begin with a long legal title. A founding name that strings together words for development, industry, bank or company is usually shortened in daily use to an acronym, and over time that acronym becomes the name people say, print and search for. For a designer, this means the wordmark often carries letters that once stood for something and now simply stand for the company.

Language is a second layer. A single group can trade in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking markets, and its name, tagline and legal suffix may appear in more than one form. Accents, the cedilla and the tilde have to survive in every typeface the company uses, from a shop sign to an app icon, so letterforms with full Latin character support matter more than they first appear.

Colour does a lot of the work. Store fronts, delivery vans, uniforms, cans, labels and packaging all repeat the same tones, so a company palette is read on the street as much as on a screen. The guides in this round treat those surfaces as part of each identity, and every palette shown here is our own interpretation rather than an official specification.

A brand carried by people.

Where Natura’s identity reaches its customers, much of it travels through people rather than through shops. Börse Online said in 2019 that from 1974 freelance consultants sold Natura’s products directly to customers, in place of the shop that had started the business. Wikipedia uses the same word, consultants, for the company’s sellers, and it describes Natura’s business model as direct selling.

The company’s advertising follows the same idea. Wikipedia says Natura uses ordinary women rather than supermodels in its advertisements, and that the company opened a boutique in Paris in 2005.

The group’s structure also shapes how the name is seen. From 2013 the Natura name sat beside Aesop, from 2017 beside The Body Shop, and from 2020 beside Avon under the Natura &Co name. Reuters in April 2023 and FashionUnited in November 2023 reported the sale of Aesop and The Body Shop. The founding brand’s name, the word Seabra chose in 1969, stayed the same through these changes.

For a design guide, Natura shows how a company can hold its identity in a one-word name from a single shop, a selling network of consultants, advertising cast with ordinary women and a group name built with an ampersand, while the brands it bought kept their own names. Compare Aesop, the Melbourne skin-care brand that Natura owned from 2013 until its sale to L’Oréal, and Embraer, another company founded in São Paulo state in 1969. For this guide we use clay orange, leaf green and sand with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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