Standout color and bold designs are the secret ingredients for Farm Rio, a 27-year-old Brazilian brand known for its tropical prints and vibrant hues, making it fun to slip on a piece of clothing.
The world of color is evident at the new Farm Rio store at 8551 Melrose Avenue, the burgeoning West Hollywood shopping stretch where nearby boutiques including Toteme, Rag & Bone, The RealReal, Wolf & Badger and Glossier.
This is the second Los Angeles outpost for the clothing and accessories brand that last year generated $105 million in U.S. sales from just three stores. One of those stores is in L.A.’s oceanfront neighborhood of Venice. The other two stores are in New York City and Miami where fashionable styles including dresses, tops, pants and swimwear are carried.
“California in general has been a very successful market for us,” said Fabio Barreto, Farm Rio’s global chief executive officer, who is based in London.
Inside the new Farm Rio store. Courtesy: Farm Rio
Farm Rio’s newest retail splash is filled with Brazilian touches inside a 1,700-square-foot location more than one year in the making. On the interior is hand-painted wallpaper created by French artist Dominique Jardy, who captured Brazilian landscapes and animals with a poetic touch.
The dressing room interiors incorporate sustainably sourced Buriti straw, a type of palm tree rooted in Brazilian culture. In Indigenous communities, the Buriti is known as the tree of life and is the habitat for various bird and insect species.
Much of Farm Rio’s store designs are influenced by the custom, one-of-a-kind furniture created by artisans working with a Brazilian influence. “Every store has a different feel,” Barreto said. “We don’t have one single interior design. It is not cut and paste.”
That different feel was seen last year when Farm Rio opened a pop-up inside the Liberty London department store. It marked the occasion by installing a 40-foot-tall tree covered with bright decorations in the atrium. The Liberty London pop-up location led to the Brazilian brand’s first permanent London location unveiled on King’s Road in Chelsea last December.
Farm Rio was founded in 1997 by Kátia Barros and Marcello Bastos in a small open-air marketplace booth in Rio de Janeiro. At the time, Barros had no training in fashion. She earned her degree in accounting and worked as an auditor. Yet she always had a passion for color, vibrant designs and whimsical styles now carried in the U.S. by Anthropologie, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue.
Her Brazilian roots are very important to her. Recently, the brand announced it was partnering with the country’s Yawanawá community in the jungle for a capsule collection that pays homage to the Indigenous culture’s connection to nature and vibrant culture.
The collection includes beaded jewelry crafted by Yawanawá women, as well as three exclusive prints Farm Rio’s team crafted after talking with the Yawanawá women about their experiences in nature.
Today, the brand is still helmed by Barros, who is the creative director, and Bastos, who is the CEO, even though the company is owned by Grupo Soma, the South American country’s largest fashion retail group. In Brazil, the label has become a household name with more than 100 of its own stores and 2,000 employees, including 30 designers dedicated to creating proprietary prints. Revenues last year in Brazil totaled $269.4 million.
After so many years of concentrating on Brazil, Farm Rio began its global expansion in 2019 with a pop-up in New York City, followed by another pop-up at Westfield Century City in L.A. It is now sold through 1,000 global doors and 1,500 wholesale outposts in Brazil.
An outside look at the Farm Rio store on Melrose Avenue. Courtesy: Farm Rio.
The company is continuing its expansion in California and New York. For California, it is scouting locations in Orange County, south of L.A., with plans for a store by the middle of next year. Other venues could materialize in San Diego and San Francisco in the last half of 2025.
In New York, where Farm Rio has one store in Manhattan’s SoHo district, a new location is expected to debut in Brooklyn this fall along with an outpost in Washington, D.C. By next year, another site could be up and running in New York City’s Upper East Side.
In Europe, Farm Rio will christen a new venue Tuesday in the Marais District of Paris, and pop-up stores this summer are appearing in resort areas including Mykonos, Greece, and Bodrum, Turkey.
It’s all part of Farm Rio’s way of spreading the word about happy dressing in colors evoking a sojourn in the jungle. “We want to be present in all these capitals of the world where we can communicate our brand very well,” Baretto said. “We feel in these places the word about us gets spread faster and easier.”
