Barefoot on the pile of clothes, app driver Adriana Vidal, 48, digs up jeans, jackets and shorts. Last Tuesday, her day off, she left Santo André, in ABC Paulista, early and was the first to arrive at the store that sells clothes by the kilo, in downtown São Paulo. Nearly two hours later, she had seven pieces chosen.
“I intended to spend R$ 25 (the price of a kilo of clothes from the old collection), but I think I’m going to spend more,” he said. She opted for the current collection, which costs R$50 a kilo. She paid R$128 for 2.56 kilos of clothing. “The kilo has always been more economical, in fact I hadn’t found a place that sold it before.”
A frequent visitor to malls and thrift stores, Adriana stopped going shopping when the pandemic started. With the reopening of shops and prices soaring, she decided to try buying clothes by the kilo, which follows the model of selling food by weight in restaurants. The popular “quilinho” is a genuinely Brazilian invention from the mid-1980s, when inflation was also running rampant.
Previously restricted to children’s clothing and bed, table and bath items, the sale of clothing by weight has advanced in retail and for Brazilian everyday clothing items, such as jeans, hoodies, jackets and t-shirts, for example. This type of commerce has attracted consumers pressured by the lack of money in their pockets.
They are looking for parts for their own use at a low cost, amid soaring inflation. In the 12 months through April, clothes were, on average, almost 16% more expensive at retail and outperformed the general rise in prices of 12% in the same period, according to the IPCA-15, the preview of inflation.
A pair of jeans, for example, does not cost less than R$100 in traditional retail. But, in the sale by weight, it is possible to buy two pants for R$ 25, the price of a kilo of past collections. If it’s a current collection, a pair of jeans costs around R$50. In the case of sweatpants, the cost per kilo can represent 25% of the tag price of the piece in a regular store.
Impulse
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we started selling by the kilo in retail of our stocks that were stopped”, said Adriana Silva, manager of the Hamuche Group, who has been working in the clothing sector for more than 50 years, manufacturing jeans and bedding, tableware. and bath. As this form of sale was in high demand, the company began to close partnerships with clothing companies that had balances in stock.
Initially intended to spawn leftovers from old and current collections, selling clothes by the kilo has become a new business for the group. In the last six months, 20 clothing companies became partners, which ensured the regularity of the business. “Without the partners, there would be no replacement of parts and we have more clothing companies interested.”
The sale by the kilo is made by appointment only and for a fixed number, from 30 to 50 people per day. It takes place in a hall that occupies one floor of the building where the company’s office works, on Rua 25 de Março.
Saldão MAG, which sells knitwear and sweatshirts by the kilo in a 2,300-square-meter store located on Avenida Sapopemba, on the east side of the capital, adopts a different strategy. The store is open from Thursday to Sunday and offers products for four specific dates: Mother’s Day, Winter, Children’s Day and Christmas. Only the winter event takes place on ten weekends in a row.
In the clothing industry for over 40 years, Gilberto Gilber, a partner at the company, says that he had a clothing factory and supplied it to large department stores. He started selling clothes by the kilo 14 years ago as a business to sell his leftovers. As the plant closed in 2014, it turned retailing by the pound into its core business, sourcing goods from multiple suppliers. “I buy opportunities.”
He does not reveal the volumes sold, but a clue to the movement is the queue that forms to enter the store, which has a maximum capacity of 300 customers (before the pandemic, without restrictions, the limit was 800).
“I was the first to sell clothes by the kilo in São Paulo”, said Gilber, who receives clients from outside the city, from the Northeast and from the countryside. They are people of all income brackets. The company does not invest in traditional advertising and bets on word of mouth advertising to leverage the business. The performance is so favorable that the company is studying the opening of a second store, less than a thousand meters from the current one.
Crisis
Juliana Oishi, owner of Kilinho Balangandã, a store that sells clothes by the kilo for children, in the north of the capital, said that she noticed the arrival of a new clientele because of the crisis. “It has increased a lot of people coming from other states to buy clothes by the kilo, both for their own use and for resale.”
Today with two teenage children, Juliana opened the clothing store by the kilo when they were little. And the idea was born from the personal realization of the high expenses she had to dress the children. “Buying children’s clothes is expensive, the ratio (of pieces) per kilo ends up being cheaper.”
The president of the Brazilian Textile and Apparel Industry Association (Abit), Fernando Valente Pimentel, said that the model of selling clothes by the kilo is not new. “It exists in some regions of the country with more intensity and in the capitals it is less frequent.”
But he observes that, at times when the population’s consumption capacity is more depressed, such as the current one, this business model stands out to try to attract the consumer, especially when impulse buying loses strength. “After all, kilo, piece, dozen, there’s only one account: how much is each piece of clothing,” said Pimentel. And that’s exactly what the consumer has to do before hitting the hammer.
Hering, the clothing giant, reported that it has specific actions to sell items per kilo in some stores “Espaço Hering” (outlet). But the company declined to give details about this form of sale. The information is from the newspaper. The State of São Paulo.
