Kviar

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Kviar Utilidades Ltda.
Type
Founded	1999
Headquarters	Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Brazil
Key people	Al Costa, founder, president, CEO, chairman Jouni Ala-Melo, senior VP/CFO
Industry	Retail
Employees	170 (2008)
Slogan	"Presentes como você nunca viu!"
Website	www.kviar.com
Type of site	e-commerce
Available in	Portuguese
Launched	1999

Kviar is a a specialty retailer in Brazil which started as an online music distributor. The company has been in business since 1999 and is headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Founded in 1999 by Al Costa (pioneer of the Internet in Brazil: wrote the first book on e-commerce in Brazil in 1997), its history and focus are similar to the U.S. retailer chain The Sharper Image, which started as a Xerox company and gradually changed its focus to retailing innovative goods.

Kviar began as an online system for discovery and sales of music from unknown musicians. At its peak, the website (http://www.kviar.com) had over 20 thousand songs from over 3 thousand musicians, allowing people to build customized radios, burn CDs online, etc. For that it closed a deal in January 2003 with US Company Immediatek, Inc. (OTCBB:IMDK) for its "Netburn" technology, which allowed the website visitors to choose which tracks to burn online using their own CD burners.

Later in that year the company developed a customized CD burning kiosk that allowed anyone to choose from the company's catalogue, pay with bills as with a regular coffee machine, and receive the CD in minutes.

The company then ran a road-show for various investors from Sand Hill Road, but the lack of knowledge on VC's on the music industry, and the lack of interest from record labels on anything to do with the internet forced the company to gradually change its focus to the retail of Chinese imports.

Today the company sells innovative goods through its website (http://www.kviar.com) (which represent close to 60% of the total company revenue), retail stores, and a 1-800 system. The company claims to be the only dotcom in Brazil using an SMS system to keep the customer updated on anything to do with their orders such as payment, delivery, password, the status of their request, and so on.

At the end of 2007 the company opened its first physical store and started a franchise system.