Schutz Brand Guidelines: Alexandre Birman’s 1995 Shoe Label, Now Part of Azzas 2154

A shoe label started at eighteen.

Schutz is a Brazilian brand of women’s shoes and accessories founded in 1995 by the designer Alexandre Birman. Its owner, Azzas 2154, lists the founding of Schutz in 1995 in its company history, between the creation of Animale in 1991 and of Farm in 1997, and the brand’s US website gives the same year and founder. The Belo Horizonte newspaper Estado de Minas reported in August 2026 that Birman, at eighteen, chose not to join his father’s company, Arezzo, and built a label of his own instead.

The family business behind it is older. In a September 2022 article for Arezzo’s fiftieth anniversary, Estado de Minas recounted how the brothers Anderson and Jefferson Birman set up a shoe factory in Belo Horizonte in 1972, starting with fifty pairs of men’s shoes made at the back of the family home, and chose the name Arezzo by pointing at a map of Italy, as a nod to Italian design. The paper says the company’s breakthrough came around 1978 with a wedge sandal covered in jute, that it began franchising in 1986, and that in 1997 it moved production to the Vale dos Sinos, the shoemaking region of Rio Grande do Sul.

Schutz joined that business in 2007. Azzas 2154’s history describes it as a merger of Arezzo and Schutz that created Arezzo&Co. Estado de Minas links the change to a strategic partnership with the investment firm Tarpon Investimentos in November 2007, and says Arezzo&Co listed its shares on the Novo Mercado of the São Paulo exchange four years later. After Schutz, Birman created a second label under his own name, which Azzas 2154 dates to 2009, and in 2013 he moved from vice-president to chief executive of the group, the paper reported.

Heels, platforms and a push into the United States.

Schutz sells a broad run of women’s shoes rather than a single signature product. Its US website lists high heels, platform sandals, boots and booties, pumps and mules, and names the Keefa sandal, with a platform sole, a chunky high heel and straps, and the Mikki boot, on a stiletto heel, among its signature styles. The website describes Schutz as trend-driven, turning runway ideas into wearable designs; that is the company’s own description.

Where the shoes are made is documented for the group rather than for the brand alone. In November 2023 the Porto Alegre newspaper Jornal do Comércio reported that Arezzo&Co had three production units in Campo Bom and one in Novo Hamburgo, in the Vale dos Sinos, where prototyping, pattern-making, stitching, manufacture and finishing were carried out, and that production in the state made up half of the group’s output. The same report said the Arezzo, Schutz, Alexandre Birman and Anacapri brands were exported to the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia.

The United States became the brand’s main market abroad. Brazil Journal reported in May 2018 that Arezzo&Co had been in the American market for five years, selling through department stores such as Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s, and had opened two Schutz stores, on Madison Avenue in New York and in Beverly Hills. Schutz already sold online in the US, the paper said. The same month the group hired Wayne Kulkin, for seventeen years chief executive of the shoe brand Stuart Weitzman, to run Arezzo USA, Brazil Journal reported.

The store network then shrank. In September 2020 IstoÉ Dinheiro, citing Exame, reported that Schutz had closed three of its six US stores, and the Alexandre Birman label one of its three. The remaining shops would also hold stock for online orders, and the brand would merge its separate Brazilian and American collections and release new products every month in the US, the magazine said.

How the category presents itself.

Brazil’s fashion and footwear brands cover a wide range: rubber flip-flops and plastic jelly shoes, women’s shoes and handbags, beachwear and printed dresses, and men’s basics and denim. Many of them sit inside a small number of listed groups, and their corporate pages set out founders, owners and stock-market listings alongside the product ranges.

Footwear is led by large manufacturers. Alpargatas, founded in São Paulo in 1907, has made Havaianas since 1962, and Portuguese Wikipedia describes it as an Itaúsa company since its 2017 change of ownership. Grendene, founded in Farroupilha in 1971 and listed on the São Paulo stock exchange since 2004, makes Melissa, Ipanema and Rider, with plants in the north-eastern states of Ceará and Bahia, according to Portuguese Wikipedia.

Clothing and women’s shoes have consolidated too. Portuguese Wikipedia says Azzas 2154 was formed in 2024 from the merger of Arezzo&Co, the Belo Horizonte shoe group behind Arezzo and Schutz, and Grupo Soma, the Rio de Janeiro group built on Animale and Farm, which had bought Cia. Hering in 2021. Ownership in the sector changes often, so each guide in this series states its brand’s owner as a dated fact.

These brands present themselves through campaigns with well-known faces, collaborations with foreign labels and their own stores and brand spaces, from Galeria Melissa in São Paulo to Casa Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One label among many in a larger group.

Schutz has belonged to Azzas 2154 since 2024, when Arezzo&Co combined with Grupo Soma, the Rio de Janeiro fashion group behind Animale and Farm, according to Azzas 2154’s company history. Portuguese Wikipedia says the merger was completed in August 2024. The group’s name comes from “Arezzo rumo a 2154,” a long-term goal set for the company in 2004. Estado de Minas wrote in 2022 that the goal grew out of a talk on how long companies last, and set the challenge of keeping Arezzo going for another 150 years; the paper called it a mantra of the business. In August 2026 the paper reported that Alexandre Birman was chief executive of Azzas 2154 and that the group brought together more than twenty brands, among them Arezzo, Schutz, Farm Rio, Hering and Reserva.

Inside the group, Schutz sits next to the label that carries its founder’s name. Estado de Minas wrote in 2022 that Schutz and Alexandre Birman both had points of sale in Europe and the United States, including department stores. The brand’s US website calls Schutz part of Azzas 2154 and says it has a significant presence in the United States; that is the company’s own description.

For a design guide, Schutz shows how a designer-founded label can sit inside a family shoemaking business and keep its own name, styles and stores. Compare Arezzo, the older label in the same group, and Farm Rio, which came to Azzas 2154 through Grupo Soma. For this guide we use oxblood, nude leather and black with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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