Netshoes Brand Guidelines: A 2000 São Paulo Shoe Shop, an NYSE Listing and Magalu

Two cousins, a shoe shop and a move online.

Netshoes began as a physical shop. Portuguese Wikipedia says it was founded in February 2000 by the cousins Marcio Kumruian and Hagop Chabab, with a first shop on the street of the Mackenzie university in São Paulo, and that in the following years it opened branches in gyms and shopping centres in the city.

The move online came in stages. According to Portuguese Wikipedia, the company started selling online in 2002 and in 2007 closed its seven physical shops to trade only on the internet. IstoÉ Dinheiro confirmed the long online-only stretch in February 2025, when it reported that Netshoes was opening a physical shop again “after 18 years” of trading only online.

Online, the company leaned on football and team kit. Portuguese Wikipedia says Netshoes runs the official online stores of football clubs in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, among them Corinthians, Palmeiras, Santos and River Plate, and that in 2013 it agreed with the Brazilian football confederation, CBF, to run that body’s online store. In 2009, the same source says, it introduced a 3D scanning system that let customers compare the shoe on their foot with a model they were considering, to help choose a size.

Portuguese Wikipedia also traces how the business widened. It says Netshoes launched a mobile site in 2011, began running the online stores of brands such as Puma and of the NBA in Brazil in the same year, opened an online store for the NFL in 2013 and launched two own brands, Gonew and All4one, in November 2014. In December 2014 it added Zattini, an online store for shoes, bags and accessories. FashionUnited reported in May 2019 that Netshoes also ran a third store, Shoestock, and provided e-commerce services for dozens of brands.

The company grew outside Brazil and then pulled back. FashionUnited wrote in 2019 that it had expanded early to Argentina and Mexico and had recently sold both operations; Portuguese Wikipedia dates the Mexican sale to August 2018 and the Argentine one to 2019.

Investors, New York and a contested sale.

Netshoes was financed by international investors through the 2010s. Portuguese Wikipedia says the US fund Tiger Global invested in 2009 and 2011, followed by Iconiq Capital and Singapore’s Temasek in 2012, the Latin American fund Kaszek Ventures in 2013 and Singapore’s GIC in 2014.

The company then went public in the United States. Portuguese Wikipedia dates its listing on the New York Stock Exchange to April 2017, and FashionUnited reported in May 2019 that its shares had fallen sharply since that 2017 listing and that the business had not turned a profit.

Its sale in 2019 became a contest between two Brazilian retailers. Portuguese Wikipedia dates Magazine Luiza’s agreement to buy Netshoes to 29 April 2019. FashionUnited reported on 27 May 2019 that the deal had been cleared by Brazil’s competition authority, CADE, but still needed shareholder approval, and that Grupo SBF, the owner of Centauro, had made a higher offer; Magazine Luiza raised its bid in reply, and the Netshoes board recommended it.

On 17 June 2019 FashionUnited reported that Magazine Luiza’s final offer had been approved by Netshoes shareholders, that the New York Stock Exchange had been told the merger was complete and that trading in the shares would be suspended from that day. Just Style reported the same day that the merger was complete. Marcio Kumruian was to stay at the company for at least twelve months, FashionUnited reported.

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.

The sports arm of a larger retail group.

Since 2019 Netshoes has been part of Magazine Luiza, the retailer known as Magalu. Valor Econômico described it on 1 June 2026 as the sports e-commerce arm of the Magazine Luiza group, and IstoÉ Dinheiro in February 2025 called Magazine Luiza the owner of the business. Both reports named Graciela Kumruian as the head of Netshoes.

The link with Magalu now shows up in its shops and logistics. On 25 February 2025, IstoÉ Dinheiro reported, Netshoes opened its first physical shop in years: an outlet of about 2,000 square metres beside a Magazine Luiza unit on the Marginal Tietê in São Paulo, with more than 18,000 pieces on show and an area for personalising trainers and shirts. The magazine reported that the site already held a Magazine Luiza shop and an open-box operation for KaBuM!, another Magalu business.

On 1 June 2026, Valor Econômico reported, Netshoes launched NStyle, a premium urban-fashion section aimed at higher-spending customers and built around global brands and exclusive collections. The paper said NStyle would use Magalu’s logistics arm, Magalog, for storage and delivery, and offer collection at more than 1,200 Magazine Luiza shops; it also said Netshoes offers storage and online-sales services to small Brazilian niche brands.

The 2019 deal put Netshoes in the same group as Magazine Luiza’s own shops and KaBuM!, which IstoÉ Dinheiro listed in 2025 among the group’s brands with Época Cosméticos and Estante Virtual. The losing bidder in that contest, Grupo SBF, runs Centauro and Fisia, the Nike distributor in Brazil, according to Grupo SBF’s own history.

For a design guide, Netshoes shows how a name that began on a single shop front can become a purely online brand and then return to physical space inside a larger group. Compare Magazine Luiza, its owner since 2019, and Centauro, the rival chain whose owner bid for it. For this guide we use a deep violet, an amber and a pale lilac with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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