Daniel Wjuniski and the Business of Going Second

By the time Daniel Wjuniski gave up the CEO title at Sallve, the business had acquired a rather physical vocabulary: factories, trucks, bigger teams, more decisions. Quite a departure for a company that had introduced itself through a conversation on the internet. In March 2026, Luís Coelho took over as chief executive. Wjuniski became executive chairman. The founder had helped make the company larger. He was now changing his own job to accommodate what he had built.

In his public announcement, Wjuniski described the demands of that next stage with unusual specificity. Sallve needed someone close to the team, strategic and disciplined in execution. Coelho had spent five years demonstrating those qualities. The explanation had the pleasing absence of a ceremonial farewell speech. There was work to allocate, and the founder had a view about who should do it.

There is a useful thread running through Wjuniski’s career: an interest in what happens when somebody else gets a turn. A customer gets to influence the product. A partner brings capabilities the young company lacks. An established brand gets another life. Eventually, an executive gets the top job. The thread makes Sallve more interesting than a familiar story about an entrepreneur discovering cosmetics.

A pair of glasses, a pair of shoes, an idea

In 2018, Wjuniski was living in the United States after selling earlier businesses. He began looking at Warby Parker and Allbirds as a customer, then studied the way these companies worked. Direct contact with buyers offered more opportunities to learn what people wanted and to shape the experience around it. For someone accustomed to building businesses online, this was an inviting connection between the browser and the shopping bag.

He brought the idea of a Brazilian digitally native brand to Marcia Netto, an earlier business partner. They were encouraged to talk to Julia Petit, who was considering a cosmetics venture of her own. Their interests converged: Wjuniski and Netto brought their experience of digital audiences, while Petit brought years of conversation with the readers and viewers of Petiscos. The company took shape in 2018 and launched to consumers in 2019.

It is tempting to treat the meeting as an entrepreneur hiring someone with a following. That misses the substance of the arrangement. Petit’s relationship with her audience was a way to hear what people wanted. Juliana Shor, another member of the founding team, brought experience developing products at established cosmetics companies. The undertaking required several kinds of knowledge at once. A large audience could introduce the idea; someone still had to make something people would buy again.

Before its first official product launch, Sallve had 200,000 registered consumers and 87,000 Instagram followers. An early presale moved 5,000 units in less than 12 hours. The sequence matters. People had already spent time answering questions before the company asked them to spend money. The checkout arrived after the introduction, the questions and the replies. Even by the standards of internet courtship, this was taking things slowly.

An audience is a demanding business partner

Wjuniski had arrived at this experiment with a substantial earlier career. He co-founded Minha Vida in 2006 and iCarros in 2007. Minha Vida was acquired by Webedia in 2017; iCarros developed a partnership with Itaú. He also became a founding board member of Tech.fit. These were different businesses, but each gave him experience building a company around people finding something useful online.

His professional network also has a long memory. Fernando Ortenblad, a recurring business partner, worked with him as far back as their time at Johnson & Johnson and WebMotors. A career can look restless when reduced to a list of companies. Look at the names beside the founder and another pattern appears: repeated collaborations. Familiar colleagues were carrying knowledge from one venture into the next.

Recognition came well before Sallve. Wjuniski became an Endeavor entrepreneur in 2009. EY lists him as its 2010 Brazilian honoree in the Emerging category for Minha Vida. By the time he entered beauty, he had already built, partnered and sold. That experience makes his decision to start again worth considering. He was choosing another early-stage business with all the ordinary inconveniences the phrase politely conceals.

By 2020, he was describing a new generation of consumers looking for brands to which they felt they belonged. Sallve’s investors included Astella, Canary, Kaszek and Waldencast. Michel Brousset, formerly president of L’Oréal North America, joined its board. The company was assembling industry experience around its digital beginnings. Belonging might explain why a person paid attention; experienced colleagues helped turn that attention into a functioning cosmetics business.

The conversation acquires a balance sheet

In May 2021, Sallve raised R$110 million in a Series B led by Atlantico. Participants included Quartz, Red Swan Ventures and Endeavor Catalyst. Red Swan’s Andy Dunn had co-founded Bonobos, another company associated with the digitally native brand model. Wjuniski’s early interest in how such businesses worked had become a company backed by people with direct experience of them.

The announced uses of the money were product development and social marketing. Both fitted the existing approach: more things to offer, and more ways to keep the conversation going. Funding also changes the scale of the questions. The founder who once had to persuade people to try an unfamiliar name now has to decide where a portfolio, a team and a distribution system should go next. The shopping bag becomes an organisational chart.

Wjuniski was discussing these questions alongside other founders. In May 2022 he joined an Astella event on product-market fit with Omie’s Marcelo Lombardo and Cayena’s Pedro Carvalho, hosted by Edson Rigonatti. It placed a consumer brand in the same discussion as very different kinds of companies. The practical concern was shared: how to find a repeatable relationship between what a company offers and what customers will pay for.

An old name interrupts the plan

Sallve’s next chapter involved a brand many Brazilian beauty shoppers already knew. Contém1g had built a following long before Sallve existed. After its collapse, the name became available at auction. In October 2021, Sallve bought the brand rather than its factories. The distinction is revealing. Wjuniski and his colleagues were acquiring a name with memories attached, then undertaking the work of giving people a reason to buy it again.

He called Petit about the opportunity; she was enthusiastic. An expansion into makeup had been contemplated for 2024, but the acquisition moved the timetable forward. By December 2022, the return was being announced. For a founder who had started Sallve with an unfamiliar name, Contém1g presented the opposite problem: people already had expectations. Affection is a useful opening, though it comes with a fairly detailed list of opinions.

“Esse é o primeiro passo para o nosso projeto de ser uma house of brands.”

Daniel Wjuniski · December 2022

The ambition was to build a group of brands. In January 2023, Wjuniski described makeup as a way to reach additional consumers and complement Sallve’s existing offering. His longer-term aim was a beauty company serving Generation Z and millennials, with efficiency and inclusion central to the proposition. The two names could address overlapping customers without requiring them to mean exactly the same thing.

Petit explained that Sallve and Contém1g would retain separate identities while sharing values, including vegan products and inclusion. That is a more delicate assignment than applying a new logo. The older name has its own emotional furniture. Rearrange everything and the returning customer may wonder why they were invited back. Leave everything untouched and the relaunch has little reason to exist.

The internet brand goes shopping

The distribution model was changing too. By late 2022, Sallve was selling through more than 2,000 pharmacies and had opened a flagship in São Paulo’s Pinheiros neighbourhood. In a June 2023 Canary Cast conversation, Wjuniski discussed the expanding portfolio, Casa Sallve, customer experience and the evolution of sales channels. The brand born through digital contact was finding more places to meet its customers.

The shift gives a practical meaning to listening. A customer may like a brand online and still prefer to buy it while already out shopping. Makeup introduces the additional pleasure of trying a colour before paying for it. Once those habits enter the calculation, a purely online origin becomes a starting point rather than a complete set of instructions. A company has to follow the purchase as well as the conversation.

Partnerships remained part of Wjuniski’s approach. In a public LinkedIn post, he connected Sallve’s distribution relationship with Raia Drogasil to earlier arrangements involving Johnson & Johnson and Itaú. He described partnerships with large companies as a major growth lever across his ventures. It is a recurring preference for building a relationship with an established organisation when that relationship can help a younger business move.

The founder changes seats

By 2026, Coelho’s account of the business included more than 10,000 points of sale. He had joined in finance and gradually accumulated responsibilities before becoming CEO. The succession followed that progression. Wjuniski’s own announcement credited him with turning plans into results and, especially, developing people. The handover acknowledged work that had already been happening inside the company.

The chairman’s stated remit now covers long-term vision, governance, culture, innovation and AI, and business development. These are areas Wjuniski says he enjoys and believes he can contribute to. The arrangement keeps the founder involved while giving the operating leader authority to run the business. It also requires a change in the founder’s daily habits, however tidy the division may look in an announcement.

“Eu sempre acreditei que legado é sobre as pessoas que você ajudou a desenvolver,” he wrote. He had always believed legacy concerned the people one helped develop. After the launches, funding rounds and acquisitions, it is a striking choice of measure. Sallve’s next stage will involve plenty of products and plenty of trucks. Wjuniski has made another person’s leadership part of his own work. For a career built through partnerships, it is a recognisable next move.