An entrepreneur’s idea on holiday.

Sagatiba was built to take cachaça out of Brazil. Its founder was Marcos de Moraes, a Brazilian internet entrepreneur. The Guardian, in a February 2007 report by Alex Bellos, said the idea came to him on holiday in the Mediterranean in 2003, when he noticed how hard it was to buy a caipirinha, the cocktail of cachaça, lime, sugar and ice. If there was an international market for gin, vodka and tequila, he reasoned, there had to be one for cachaça too. A year later, in 2004, he founded his own label.

The brand’s own timeline agrees on the year. It says Sagatiba was launched worldwide in 2004 with the aim of “revolutionising” the traditional cachaça category, began to be distributed internationally in 2010 and celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2024. Drinks International, reporting in August 2011, also gave 2004 as the founding year and de Moraes as the founder.

From the start the plan looked outward. De Moraes told The Guardian that he chose London as his main international focus, calling it “the world’s cultural capital,” and that Britain had become the brand’s most important foreign market. In 2007, it added, Sagatiba had no ties to any drinks company.

Portuguese Wikipedia places its production in Patrocínio Paulista, a town in the north-east of São Paulo state, and describes the two versions sold in its early years: Sagatiba Pura, a white cachaça made with modern distillation alongside traditional methods to give a smoother taste, and Sagatiba Velha, released in limited lots, aged in wooden barrels and distilled in copper alambiques, the pot stills of traditional cachaça.

A name and a launch campaign.

The name was invented. The Guardian reported that de Moraes chose “Sagatiba” as a made-up word, using the ending “tiba” from the indigenous Tupi-Guarani languages, which he took to mean “infinite.” Portuguese Wikipedia breaks it into saga, the Norse word for a heroic tale, and tiba, and adds a note of caution: citing Eduardo Navarro’s dictionary of Old Tupi, it says the Tupi word tyba means a multitude or gathering, the sense it carries in Brazilian place names such as Curitiba, rather than “infinite.” The name therefore joins a European word for adventure with an indigenous Brazilian one.

Sagatiba was introduced with a large advertising push. According to The Guardian, de Moraes hired Saatchi & Saatchi to launch the brand. The launch became part of a BBC Two documentary about the advertising agency, broadcast in 2005. Portuguese Wikipedia also links to a 2004 report in the British trade magazine Campaign whose headline described the appointment as the start of a pan-European push for the spirit.

De Moraes also used personal contacts to bring in Pelé. The Guardian reported that the footballer appeared in a Sagatiba-sponsored promotional film about Brazil, which it called a coup because Pelé was careful not to associate himself with drinks companies. The brand was selling Brazil itself as much as a spirit — football, the caipirinha and the idea of a national drink — to bars in Britain, where, the paper said, the caipirinha had gone from an obscure order to one many customers expected to find.

The Guardian also quoted de Moraes’s prediction that cachaça would one day be as well known as gin and vodka, and that larger drinks groups would bring out their own brands as the category grew. Within a few years a multinational did arrive — not with a new brand, but by buying his.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all cachaça names: Sagatiba, Avuá, Germana, Yaguara, Pitú, Velho Barreiro and Weber Haus. Cachaça, Brazil’s sugar-cane spirit, is made by producers of very different kinds, from family stills that still carry a founder’s or a family’s name to brands that have been launched, bought or sold by much larger drinks companies, and a single label can be sold everywhere from a corner bar to an export market.

A cachaça brand’s identity is usually carried less by the spirit in the glass than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, changed its name or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its cachaça is actually distilled, aged and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its cachaça is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

“Pura brasilidade.”

The buyer was Italian. Gruppo Campari had distributed Sagatiba in Latin America since March 2010, Drinks International reported, and on 4 August 2011, announcing its half-year results, it said it had acquired the brand. Its chief executive, Bob Kunze-Concewitz, said the deal “significantly strengthens our brand portfolio in that key emerging market.” Portuguese Wikipedia, citing Folha Online, also dates the purchase to 2011. Campari Group has owned Sagatiba since 2011; the brand’s timeline marks 2011 as the year it was acquired, and its website is published under a Campari Group copyright.

The range has changed under Campari. The brand’s website now leads with Sagatiba Cristalina, which the company calls “the cachaça that reinvented cachaça” and says is made by a multi-distillation method for a high degree of purity. Alongside it sits Sagatiba Jabuticaba & Jambu, a lower-alcohol limited edition flavoured with jabuticaba, a Brazilian fruit, and jambu, an Amazonian herb; the company says it is made by hand in small batches in the interior of Minas Gerais.

Its marketing now speaks to Brazil. The website’s line is “pura brasilidade” — pure Brazilianness — and it presents Sagatiba as a cachaça for the caipirinha and for celebrations with friends. In 2023, according to the brand’s timeline, Sagatiba launched a limited edition with typically Brazilian flavours in partnership with Maiara & Maraisa, the Brazilian singing duo, billed as the “donas da cachaça,” the owners of the cachaça.

For a design guide, Sagatiba shows how a cachaça built for export can be turned back towards its home market once a multinational owns it. Compare Ypióca, the Ceará cachaça of 1846, and Leblon, another cachaça launched abroad and later bought by a global drinks group. For this guide we use a blue, a lime and a cane cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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