How GPA's in-house agency scaled 3x without doubling the team

GPA House is GPA’s in-house agency, responsible for marketing assets and digital communications for brands like Pão de Açúcar and Extra. In a retail operation of this scale, a creative delay means a wasted promotion, particularly during seasonal peaks and Black Friday.

Before Pipefy, requests poured in through email, WhatsApp, and a free workflow tool. Briefs arrived incomplete, forcing constant back-and-forth just to capture basic information. With no standardization and no traceability, the team burned hours hunting down requests, identifying owners, and chasing deadlines. During high-demand windows, assets slipped through the cracks and promotions failed to launch on time.

Scaling under this model meant hiring designers and copywriters at the same pace as request volume grew. An unsustainable path for an in-house agency that had to serve multiple business areas in parallel.

GPA House rolled out Pipefy as the single point of entry for every creative request. Customizable forms with required fields ensure every brief comes in complete on the first touch. The requester fills everything in through the portal, with no parallel channels in the mix.

From the brief forward, routing automations send each card to the right professional. If the asset needs copy, the request goes to the content team. If not, it moves straight to design. The team configures every workflow on the platform’s no-code model, without depending on IT, and adapts the operation as new internal areas come on board.

With real-time visibility into status, ownership, and deadlines, creative leadership now plans team capacity with confidence. New hires are operational within a week because the workflow speaks for itself.

In three years, GPA House jumped from 675 to 2,017 assets delivered in the comparison month. That growth absorbed a 219% rise in request volume without a matching expansion of the team. Black Friday, once the operation’s biggest pressure point, posted 80% more assets delivered and 90% more briefs managed, with real-time control of deadlines and ownership.

With 60% of the creative flow running on Pipefy, areas like Media, Marketplace, Special Projects, and Trade Marketing now operate under the same briefing standard and traceability. For GPA, that translates into promotions live at the right moment and an in-house agency that scales alongside retail complexity, without inflating headcount.

GPA is one of South America’s largest retail networks and a member of Groupe Casino. With more than 50,000 employees and a presence across every region of Brazil, the company operates brands including Pão de Açúcar, Mercado Extra, and Compre Bem.