1. Follow Your Passion: André left a fast-track executive career to pursue his interest in enlivening daily life at home through innovative product design. He believes that most successful entrepreneurs combine passion and curiosity with smart business practices.
2. Think-Outside-the-Box: All Top E-Commerce Brands/Companies have one quality in common: Drive to think-outside-the-box. André credits innovative thought to designing some of Prana’s most original products.
3. Align Business with Humanity: Prana established itself as a leading global home and kitchen goods E-Commerce company committed to making people’s lives easier. André stresses that to build a successful company, especially in uncertain economic times, it's essential to prioritize smart financial practices in relation to uplifting humanity.
4. Leverage AI: André's top priority for Prana is the strategic integration of AI across operations, product development, and customer service—not only to enhance innovation and efficiency but also to foster a culture of learning, creativity, and human connection in adapting to future technologies.
5. Establish a Dynamic Company Structure: A dynamic structure helps companies adapt and navigate an ever changing E-Commerce landscape. André built Prana with a lean internal structure centered on product value, leveraging extensive global outsourcing—including sales, logistics, and design—to efficiently scale and manage operations.
A successful young executive listing Volkswagen and Santander Bank as resume highlights, André Luis Criscione dreamed of owning his own company committed to making people’s homelife easier and joyful. A risky career switch led to André working with Chef’n and Bugatti and in 2006, he founded Prana, a global E-Commerce company offering high-quality home and kitchen goods. You’ll be inspired learning how André scaled his company through brand and retailer partnerships, innovative product design, and aligning business practices with humanity.
Meet André Luis Criscione, Founder of Prana!
Founded in 2006, Prana is focused on developing differentiated products that bring ease and fun to our everyday, wonderful experiences and memories that enhance the human experience, and making everyday life lighter and richer. In each product, we seek to awaken visual sensibilities while offering functionality and high-quality. Prana products bring family and friends together, whether around the table, cooking in the kitchen, having a barbecue, or tasting good wine.
Originally from Brazil, André started his career on an executive fast-track working for Volkswagen Group in Germany with placements in the US, France, Spain, Mexico, and China. Always the youngest one at the table surrounded by high-level directors, André envisioned starting a company of his own one day. The concept: Inject happiness, color, and joy in the homes of Brazil – at the time, the country’s design trends tended toward “classic” and “old fashioned.”
Eventually, André left his executive career to partner with cooking brands Chef’n (American) and Bugatti (Italian) with the goal of bringing high-quality kitchen products to Brazil. After 2 successful years, the venture hit financial difficulty stemming from the global financial crisis of 2008. Having demonstrated a viable business idea in combination with relationships in the banking and automotive industries, André managed to receive support, developing his own brand, Prana. “We designed products for problems that people have daily in the home,” he explains and goes on to say, “and we started to grow 22% a year on average.” TV appearance invitations followed, and Prana kitchen products were praised for the innovation and efficiency they brought to the home. André elaborates, “practical things to make life easier for people, for moms that work the whole day and want to cook something very easy.”
After a high-profile consulting project for the reality TV show Big Brother, Prana was contacted by the Whirlpool Group right before the Pandemic. “They did a survey and decided that we were the best company to take the KitchenAid brand to distribute to Brazil,” Andre says. A partnership with Lifetime Brand Homes followed. A demand for cooking products surged as COVID forced everyone to stay home, establishing PRANA as the one-stop-E-Commerce-Shop for every culinary need from wine to barbecue to confectionery.
André constructed his company with an objective to “aggregate value on the product.” With a lean internal structure focused on management of third-party relationships and product development, Prava uses extensive outsourcing support for all its departments including logistics, accounting, legal services, and sales, which includes over 200 contractual representatives based in Brazil’s major cities. “We also have designers and product developments in Asia, Europe, and the United States,” André adds.
Andre’s is quick to note the differing views of customer experience philosophy between Latin America and the US, revealing that in his home country, it's common to ignore product complaints. “So, we did exactly the opposite,” he says. Prana trains customer service reps to treat each person as a ‘loved one’ – no matter how large the purchase. If a customer has an issue, they receive a product replacement or refund – immediately. “This is the best marketing you can do. Because it’s not usual in Brazil, people start to speak about it” André says about how the company was able to build customer trust through word-of-mouth.
When Going the Extra Mile Pays Off
Prana’s dynamic partnership structure means that alongside its own kitchen goods, the E-Commerce company sells products from other brands. So, when a customer reached out repeatedly about her disappointment over a cake container from another retailer, Prana stepped in and had contracted a specialist to go to her house. “The woman was older and hadn’t noticed that her oven wasn’t working properly. The specialist called the oven company and got it fixed,” André says. Going the extra mile paid off – the woman’s daughter turned out to be a social media influencer who shared her mother’s experience with Prana to her followers.
André has always placed high value on creativity and innovative thinking at his company. Early on, he focused on partnering with young product designers “who don’t think inside-the-box – people who see a problem and think about the problem” to find a solution. One such designer created a light-up ball for a woman’s purse that was adapted for other applications). Prioritizing making daily life in the home easier continues to be at the core of Prana’s formula for product development. “Today, many companies call us to give lectures on training and how to go outside-the-box, because we brought these new ideas to market,” André finishes.
Prana’s dynamic outsourcing structure has allowed for quick adaptation to market changes, André says. That Brazil is a country focused climate change action has greatly influenced the company’s business practices, specifically product design and operations. “We work in new solutions, clean solutions for energy,” Andre adds, noting that Prana helps partnering brands to develop solar, wind, and energy saving products. He gives an example of sustainable product innovation, “We developed a travel bag with a special device that when you roll it through an airport or on the street, it’s creating energy for batteries from movement… It also has solar panels.”
Asked what his key priorities and goals for Prana are, André goes straight to the topic of AI. Disclosing that AI technologies are not as widespread in Latin America as in the US, he wants to integrate AI into both customer service and across all aspects of company operations and product design and development. Prana is being intentional about AI applications, using it to attract bright thinkers and educate staff. “We are training people to use artificial intelligence to adapt to the future,” he says. “To learn, above all means about creativity and humanity. We want to teach people to not be afraid of it but to connect with it.” André goes on to highlight that Prana is collaborating with larger E-Commerce companies on AI initiatives.
André believes that to build a successful company, you must focus on 2 key factors – humanity and financial control. He emphasizes that this is especially critical now when the global economy is in tumultuous flux. “To be competitive, you have to pay attention to finance. Every step,” he maintains. “Even if we are not having economic problems, we save money and invest very carefully… If you don’t have good financial control, you break very easily.”
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