Tatiane Vita Learned Global Growth From the Shop Floor

In November 2006, Tatiane Vita was studying journalism at the Federal University of Minas Gerais and needed money for household bills. She took a sales job at Chilli Beans, the Brazilian eyewear chain. The beginning was ordinary: the register, the customer, the daily discipline of a store. The career it opened was not. Vita would be promoted five times in six years, move from marketing into franchise development and eventually take responsibility for the company’s international business.

Her route to the executive floor kept the shop floor in view. Vita has recalled bus trips through Mato Grosso and Goiás, visits to a mosque in Kuwait, a trek in Thailand and a stop at the Santa Monica stand where the Chilli Beans story began. These are colorful travel details, but together they point to a harder business lesson: a global brand is never experienced globally. It arrives locally, across a counter, through a franchise partner, in a particular language and at a specific price.

That lesson has followed her through three businesses that could hardly look more different. Chilli Beans sells eyewear. ChopValue turns discarded chopsticks into furniture and materials through a microfactory network. CEFA Early Years School operates in education. In each case, growth depends on distributing a promise without losing control of what the promise means. Vita’s specialty is the machinery between the two: brand, sales, franchise support, local execution and the feedback that moves back to headquarters.

The reporting instinct

Vita’s journalism education did not disappear when she entered retail. It became a way of operating. When Chilli Beans set out to repair its international business, the work began in 2018 with diagnosis. She visited countries, ran focus groups and examined inventory, finance, staffing, locations and back-office capacity. The investigation preceded the answer.

By 2019, the company was changing its international product offer, adapting monthly collections and visual merchandising, creating dedicated inventory and giving franchisees a way to place pre-orders around important launches. Store and kiosk designs followed, as did a clearer view of which franchise partners fit the job. The three-year case helped Chilli Beans win the Brazilian Franchise Association’s 2020 award for best internationalization strategy.

The award is the clean line on the résumé. The more revealing part is the method underneath it. International expansion can tempt a company into abstraction: population charts, addressable markets, dots on a map. Vita’s work moved in the other direction. What did customers say? Which collection reached which country at which moment? Did the local partner have the required structure? Was a store profitable, not merely open?

“The rules determining who gets trusted, heard and chosen are rarely written down.”Tatiane Vita, on the focus of her writing

Her current writing uses a similar reporting lens on careers. The subject is no longer inventory or store format. It is sponsorship, visibility, courage and the quiet systems that decide who advances. Vita is interested in the difference between being recognized for reliable delivery and being selected for work not yet done. She writes about the person whose competence makes her indispensable in one position but oddly difficult to imagine in the next.

A mission with a deadline

The public side of Vita’s work sharpened during maternity leave. She set herself a deadline: by 2033, she wanted to reach one million women and girls. Her vehicle would be media. She wrote articles in English for Thrive Global and published in Portuguese and Spanish on LinkedIn. She developed a concept she called mulherizar, a process in which a woman releases other people’s expectations, recovers her voice, faces fear and then works to bring other women into decision-making spaces.

In 2021, she brought that argument to TEDxBeloHorizonte. Her talk, “My Awakening to Feminism,” paired a personal account with a compact call to action: advance, bring other women forward and keep the cycle going. The video has since passed 100,000 views. Vita’s audience on LinkedIn has grown beyond 175,000 followers, large enough to turn a weekly post into a meaningful distribution channel of its own.

Her publishing is not separate from her executive identity. It extends it. The same person who studies why a franchise model travels also studies why a person’s authority does or does not travel from one room to the next. Both questions involve unwritten rules. Both require an eye for context. Both benefit from a journalist’s refusal to accept the official version as the complete one.

There is also a tactical lesson in the consistency. A goal measured in one million people sounds distant. Vita translated it into a repeatable practice: a newsletter, an article, a post, a talk. The audience arrived through cadence rather than a single launch. Her recent work examines global leadership, women and power, international expansion and the changing nature of work. The languages and formats vary; the central question remains recognizable.

Marketing as infrastructure

Vita moved to Vancouver’s business community through ChopValue, joining the company in 2022 as Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing. The product was a striking shift from fashion retail: used chopsticks, collected and engineered into a durable material for furniture and interiors. Yet the commercial puzzle was familiar. ChopValue’s model depended on a network of local microfactories. Growth had to connect a global story about waste and resources with operators, hospitality clients and local demand.

By 2024, Vita had been named to a list of 50 women leaders in Vancouver. That year, she left ChopValue and became Vice President of Marketing at CEFA. She also continued advising Canadian entrepreneurs on international expansion through work associated with the Business Development Bank of Canada and her advisory firm, Illuminas Global Partner.

At CEFA, the title changed to Chief Marketing Officer in May 2026. More important than the title is the scope. Vita describes responsibility for enrollment growth, school performance, franchise expansion, brand demand and the systems needed to make growth consistent. She says she expanded marketing from a two-person function into a ten-person internal agency spanning growth, CRM, digital, public relations, content, design, local school marketing and franchise marketing.

The work included a new CRM, stronger reporting and lead management, marketing for school openings and a year-long brand refresh involving outside partners. In an ordinary company profile, these might read as separate projects. In a franchise network, they are connected. A family’s first search, a follow-up from a school, a tour, an enrollment decision and the experience at a location all either reinforce the brand or expose a seam in it.

“Ability gives us options. Courage makes one of them real.”Tatiane Vita, writing about the sentences leaders delay saying

Education has also given Vita a new arena for thinking about technology. In a 2025 podcast conversation about learning after AI, she discussed critical thinking, soft skills and the role of educators as new tools change how knowledge is produced and accessed. It is a fitting subject for an executive whose career began with journalism: when information becomes abundant, judgment becomes more important, not less.

The career inside the career

A conventional reading of Vita’s résumé tracks industries and promotions. A more useful reading follows her proximity to the point of delivery. She began face to face with the customer. At Chilli Beans, she investigated country operations before prescribing changes. At ChopValue, she helped a distributed manufacturing idea find commercial form. At CEFA, she is building the systems that connect a national brand to individual schools and families.

That pattern helps explain why she calls herself both an executive and a journalist. Her work depends on moving between two scales: the network and the person inside it. Strategy without the person becomes a diagram. A personal story without the system becomes an anecdote. Vita’s particular territory is the point where the two meet.

Her ambition is similarly doubled. She wants to help organizations grow across borders, and she wants more women to understand the codes that govern advancement. One is commercial and one is social, but neither is satisfied by visibility alone. A store must work. A school must earn a family’s trust. A talented person must be named for the opportunity. The promise counts only when it survives the handoff.

Twenty years after that first Chilli Beans shift, the counter is still there in the way Vita sees a business. It is the place where brand language meets a human decision. It is where a global plan becomes local, measurable and real. For a CMO shaping an education network, an advisor helping a founder cross a border and a writer examining who gets heard, that is not a small beginning. It is the durable center of the work.