With scent, music and even hearth: entrepreneur creates luxurious invitation enterprise and earns BRL 6 million

Samara Costa is the founder of SCards, a company that produces party invitations and also luxury corporate kits

Leading a company is something that requires much more than technical skills. It takes doggedness, passion and, of course, a healthy dose of creativity. And it was based on these behavioral characteristics that entrepreneur Samara Costa created a millionaire business selling creative party invitations full of props that today earns BRL 6 million🇧🇷

Costa is the founder of SCards, fruit of the union between his enterprising talent and passion for crafts. Together with her sister, Mayara Costa, she leads the company that today sells party invitations and personalized kits to influential companies and celebrities, including digital influencer Virgínia Fonseca and footballer Neymar.

Who is the entrepreneur

Advertising and graphic designer by training, Samara Costa decided early on that handling a dozen papers, scissors and glue would be something more than a hobby. At the age of 19, still in college, she began to produce invitations for classmates, mostly students looking for invitations to graduation and debutante parties with something different besides the bold letters and bold colors.

From this desire — and from a frustration of her own with “half-assed” invitations to her own graduation — came the first handmade invitations, a hobby that she maintained simultaneously with her work as an intern in advertising agencies, as a designer.

Times later, entrepreneurship spoke louder, a desire that comes from family. “I always wanted to have my own company, I never saw myself being an employee”, she says. Inspired by the example of her father, a longtime entrepreneur with experience in door-to-door sales and management of a metallurgical company, which she maintained for 25 years. “In our family, this was very common. My dad loved to throw parties for whatever reason, so I always had invites for everything,” she recalls.

Costa founded SCards in 2006, following a growing demand for the production of invitations and the need to formalize the business. “Customers wanted invoices, we needed to do things right”. To start the company, Costa invested around 20,000 reais.

Currently, Samara is in charge of the company’s customer service, marketing and creative direction areas, while her sister, Mayara, takes care of the business’s financial and operational issues.

These are complementary skills, says the entrepreneur. “Mayara’s entry was the necessary shift for the business to take off. I understood a lot about creativity, and little about management,” she says. According to Costa, the average growth of the company follows the rhythm of 50% in the last two years.

What does the company

SCards currently has 30 employees dedicated to the production, sale and delivery of cards, in addition to the marketing, administrative and human resources areas.

The core of the business lies in creating luxurious and creative party invitations, with unusual features for these items. The unit price per invitation can reach R$ 1,500. Some of the differentials of Scards invitations are:

• invitation showing the data after firing;
• invitations that show information after contact with water;
• invitations that release “butterflies” when opening;
• invitation with interaction with holograms;
• wedding invitations with sensors capable of identifying music
• Who are the customers
• The eye-catching invitations have already attracted the attention of artists from all over Brazil. SCards has already sold its products to names like Alok, Neymar, Larissa Manoela, and the digital influencer Virgínia Fonseca — who hired the company to create invitations for her daughter’s birthday party (the invitation reeked of Tutti-Frutti).
• With the pandemic and the interruption of events, SCards had to reinvent itself. The solution was to abuse creativity and launch new products capable of moving the company’s cash. Faced with this, SCards began to assemble corporate kits and personalized boxes for other companies that wanted to send treats to their employees.
• In the meantime, it began to serve companies such as
• Itau
• Rede Globo
• sanofi
• channel
• asus
• samsung
• In common, these brands began to create experiences in personalized kits sent to the homes of employees and customers. “This wasn’t even our flagship, but today we can’t even distinguish what we sell more: the kits or the invitations”, he says.
• In the last year, the company earned something like R$ 6 million reais. In 2022, the expectation is to reach R$ 10 million. “Today, what sets us apart is what goes outside the box,” he says. “Working with experience is being in a market with infinite possibilities”.

Source: Exam