🥂 Bling belt

A decade ago, the conventional wisdom on luxury in Brazil read like a cautionary tale. A 2017 thesis at the Getulio Vargas Foundation summed up the mood of the era: punishing import taxes that could double a product's shelf price, consumers who preferred to spend abroad, credit-card interest rates that ran into the triple digits, and a habit among the wealthy of treating service as a contact sport. 

The country was rich in millionaires but poor in conditions — a market, as one luxury executive quoted in that research put it, "definitely not for amateurs."

But the survivors of that era are now thriving. Brazil's luxury sector is currently outgrowing the global benchmark by a comfortable margin. The Brazilian Association of Luxury Companies (Abrael) reports that its members grew revenue by…

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