Mesbla is back, but only with online sales

The Mesbla brand is back. One of the icons of Brazilian fashion retail in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s now returns in an online version, as a marketplace – a virtual mall, which resells third-party products (sellers).

Previously focused on clothing, footwear and accessories, the new Mesbla now sells electronics, cell phones, appliances, furniture, home and decoration items, perfumery, toys, books and even automotive parts. There are about 250 thousand products at mesbla.com.

The initiative to bring back the brand came from the brothers Marcel and Ricardo Viana. Specialist in logistics, Marcel was an employee of Mesbla, which closed its doors in 1999. Alongside his brother Ricardo, a lawyer, he invested around R$ 500 thousand to launch the marketplace, with the right to use the brand and visual identity in the digital.

The launch campaign began this Tuesday (3), signed by the Rio de Janeiro agency M2BR, which enveloped the Rio subway.

At its peak, in the 1980s, Mesbla had 180 points of sale in the country, with 28,000 employees. Hyperinflation until the early 1990s, however, together with some misguided market decisions, led the company to accumulate debts of more than R$ 1 billion and to file for bankruptcy.

Businessman Ricardo Mansur, who owned Mappin at the time, took control of the company in 1997 and was thinking of merging the two companies. However, in 1999, Mesbla went bankrupt, along with Mappin.

A symbol of department stores, Mappin was also re-launched in the digital environment. The brand came back to life three years ago, in June 2019, being relaunched by the same owners as Marabraz.

The names, nostalgic to consumers of the 1980s and 1990s, try to surf the growth of e-commerce in Brazil, which earned BRL 218.9 billion in 2021, according to a survey by consultancy NielsenIQ|ebit, in partnership with Bexs Pay. Considering only Brazilian websites, revenue totaled BRL 182.7 billion last year, up 27% over 2020.