About the studio
A family in Rio, making the Brazil material we could never find.
My name is Luciano Moreira. I am 52, I live in Rio de Janeiro, and Brazilian Goods Studio is my family: my wife Luana, our sons Lukas and Luan, and me. I write, test and lay out the files. Luana has the last word on how they look. Lukas and Luan take the photographs and check things on the ground — the price, the hour, the address, on the day it is printed. Not a content farm, not a licence we bought. Four of us, in Rio.
Luciano, Luana, Lukas & Luan · Rio de Janeiro · Brazil
How this started
I have sold real estate in Rio for most of my working life. That job is mostly one thing: explaining a place to someone who does not live in it. Which street is safe at night, which building floods, what a price actually means once you add the fees nobody mentioned.
After twenty years of that, I noticed I was doing the same thing for friends abroad — explaining Brazil to people who wanted to teach it to their kids, cook it in their kitchen, or visit it without getting fleeced.
The material they could find was thin. Recipes converted badly: a Brazilian measuring cup holds 190 ml and an American one holds 236, and nobody warned them. Homeschool packets about Brazil recycled the same four facts and the same stock photo of Carnival. Travel guides quoted prices from four years ago.
So I started making the versions I thought should exist.
Who makes it
Brazilian Goods Studio is four people in one house. Nobody here is a stock account, an agency or a freelancer paid by the word.
Luciano Moreira
Founder. Writes, tests and lays out every title. Carioca, 52, twenty years explaining Rio to people who do not live in it. Nothing leaves here without him reading it first.
Luana Castro
Creative consultant and design supervisor. She has the last word on how a cover, a page or a photograph looks before it reaches you.
Lukas Castro
Photography, field research and the tools on this site. The trip cost calculator and the trip planner both have his hand in them.
Luan Castro
Photography and field research. He is the one who walks to the beach, the bus station or the market to check what a thing actually costs today.
How a file gets made
Researched at the source
Ticket prices come from the operator’s own site. Rules come from the government page that publishes them. The date I checked is printed on the page.
Tested with my hands
Every recipe is cooked and every ingredient weighed, in grams and in cups, with the sensory cue written down for the step where timing lies to you.
Laid out to print at home
US Letter and A4, 300 dpi, ink-aware. You print the pages you need, not a 300-page brick.
Checked against itself
Answer keys are re-checked line by line against the book. That pass has caught errors in my own material more than once, which is exactly why it exists.
What you get, and what you will never get
Printables, not subscriptions
You buy the PDF, you download it, it is yours. No app, no login, no monthly fee, no file that stops working when a company changes its mind.
Both measuring systems, same line
Grams and cups, Celsius and Fahrenheit, centimetres and inches. Nothing is lost in conversion because nothing has to be converted.
Brazil as it is
Not the postcard, not the crime documentary. The country I walk around in, including the parts that are boring and the parts that are complicated.
No invented numbers
When a figure comes from a source I cannot verify, I take it out. An empty field is honest. A confident wrong number is not.
The promise
If something in a file is wrong, I fix it and send you the new one.
Free, whatever you paid, even if you bought it a year ago. Tell me what you found and I will correct it, republish it, and email you the corrected file. That is the whole warranty, and it is the only one a four-person family studio can honestly offer.
Why the blog exists
Some things do not fit in a product. Why your first batch of brigadeiro turned to caramel. What Festa Junina actually is. Which beach in Rio is worth the bus ride in February. Those go on the blog, free, and most posts end with something you can print.
Start with something free
Work out what a trip to Brazil actually costs — four destinations, three travel styles, three seasons, converted at today’s exchange rate. No e-mail, no sign-up.
Say hello
If you need a printable that does not exist yet, tell me. Half of what I have made started as somebody’s e-mail.