Consistency, perseverance, and collaborative work

Estudio Claro was founded in 2008 as a business venture offering services to companies in Uruguay. Our focus was on designing commercial spaces, ephemeral architecture for trade show booths, and display units.

Along the way, we realized there was demand for comprehensive space design; however, the development of that furniture was highly case-specific and didn’t offer much scalability. So, with the goal of making furniture sales more industrialized—and considering our context in Uruguay—we became interested in exploring new opportunities beyond our borders.

We had many hypotheses about what our experience might be like in a much more industrial, focused, and specialized furniture market. This process began in 2013, and it took us about three years to reach our first breakthrough.

One day, we decided to lift our heads and look around. We realized that right next to us was Brazil: a huge country, with a massive market and a design culture that, from where we stood, looked incredibly impressive. We started researching and discovered a strong design culture, with a country home to massive furniture manufacturing operations, where designers were highly regarded—even media personalities.

We came across the Salão Design competition, one of the most important in Latin America, and while researching, we discovered that other design studios from Uruguay were already beginning to establish commercial ties with Brazil. We saw a fertile and promising ground and decided to define Brazil as our target market. One key factor in this decision was proximity—it meant we could transport our furniture by car.

We had taken the first step: we had defined our objective. Now we needed to determine how we were going to engage with it.

After exploring several ideas, we felt that entering competitions was the easiest route. Not because winning is easy, but because it doesn’t rely on third parties and only involves a personal decision to take part in the activity.

We received several awards and recognitions that were very meaningful and validated the work we were doing—especially considering that we had very little experience in furniture design at the time.

Participation in competitions also helped greatly with visibility and media exposure. The Salão Design competition is part of a trade fair that connects the industrial world with the design world. We started attending this fair, and when we won a prize, our product was on display—allowing us to connect more directly, and with tangible material, with potential clients.

Through this journey of participating in trade shows, we learned many things. For example, we gained greater visibility; we were able to showcase tangible products and follow up with contacts—a task that takes a lot of effort and dedication. We realized we needed to create our own materials, like a catalog to explain the service or product we were offering, and of course, we had to find the right words to describe who we are, define the key players, get to know them, and start collecting metrics.

At that time, we received support from Uruguay XXI’s export promotion program, Proexport, for some of these trade missions. They pushed us to start measuring our work. It was a hugely enriching experience, as it taught us that we needed to set clear goals and understand the steps we would take to reach them—and, above all, that we had to measure those steps. This helped us professionalize our approach and better map out the actions required to achieve our objectives.

We did two trade missions and, for the first time, joined forces with colleagues to carry out collaborative work. From this, we learned how powerful teamwork can be. We had little experience, few materials, and only a small product offering, but when we came together with other studios, we were able to put together a large and impressive product catalog.

We traveled to Brazil twice to sell as a group, and in doing so, we generated an incredible critical mass of information—something we never could have achieved on our own and that we still consult to this day. Those missions planted the first seeds for what became a long journey of collaborative work.

It took us three years to break into the market—attending fairs, entering competitions, and investing without earning a single dollar. Then in October 2016, Brazil’s largest furniture company brought together five Uruguayan design studios to create a collection. That marked our first sale, which gave us credibility and opened the door to a second and third sale that came much more easily.

Rosina Secondi and Daniel Appel
Directors of Estudio Claro

Photo credit: Bruno Geraldi / tok&stok