Delivery startup makes Black Friday possible for favelas in Sao Paulo

A start-up based in Sao Paulo’s second-largest favela, Paraisopolis, says it will make some eighty-thousand deliveries around the city’s favelas during this year’s Black Friday.

The company began modestly in 2020, aiming to meet the needs of residents who constantly had their deliveries denied by companies.

Many areas were controlled by drug dealers, and they featured very narrow streets and mixed-up addresses.

“This will be the biggest Black Friday in the history of Favela Brasil Xpress. We had a growth in demand of more than 70% in the volume we normally operate,” said Giva Pereira, a resident of Paraisopolis and the company’s CEO.

The project initially managed 100 deliveries per day, but now the Paraisopolis unit alone handles around 4,000 daily deliveries, expanding operations to nearby upper- and middle-class neighborhoods.

With six new distribution centers and 250 employees, the surge in purchases is creating more jobs to meet growing demand.

Residents of favelas such as Paraisopolis are becoming more integrated into the consumer market and increasing their online purchases every day.

This month, the project reached the delivery of 2 billion reais (around USD 332 million) worth of goods, with almost 3 million deliveries in these four years.

The idea is also to share their knowledge with leaders from other favelas to replicate the successful business model.

According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the total number of favelas in Brazil has more than doubled in the last decade, jumping from 6,329 to 13,151.

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