Turning nostalgia into a hobby and a business
Do you know that feeling you get, when you are passionate about something, but you cannot explain it? When you get that twinkle in your eye, and a smile to your face when you think about this thing? This is what happens to developer Bruno Pontes when he talks about classic cars.
Bruno founded, with his father and brother, the Itabirito Classic Cars Club (CICA), the first one in town. He also has a website, BP Clássicos, to rent these automobiles for weddings and other special occasions. His activities related to this love of classic cars also involve photography, promoting get-togethers, a track on Sparkle and a lot of study and research about the topic. “I can always bring something that relates to classic cars to my life. Even my bachelor’s degree in graphic design was chosen because as a teenager I liked working on car pictures using Photoshop. When I was a kid, I collected newspaper pictures of cars. When I got married, I made a parody of Mamonas Assassinas with my dad’s yellow Volkswagen Brasília”, he remembers.
Besides his dad’s 1975 VW Brasília, which was the first classic car of the family, our Trooper owns a blue 1968 Volkswagen Kombi, purchased in 2014. In 2018, he sold, “heartachingly”, his 1992 Ford Escort XR3 to a collector in Mato Grosso do Sul. “The love of classic cars is a hobby that was turned into a business. More than buying and selling cars, with my programming knowledge I create the website BP Clássicos. A lot of people asked me for pictures of cars and asked if I would rent them for weddings. I saw a business opportunity, talked to some other friends who also had models and that was it”, he says.
Another advantage to having programming knowledge, according to him, is that many people who really know about classic cars don’t know how to use the Internet in their favor. This made him be one step ahead to create and publish this kind of content. Bruno intends to create, very soon, a web portal exclusively dedicated to the subject matter.
And if his professional abilities help with the hobby, so does the hobby help with his profession. In his journey through the world of classic car culture, the Trooper meets a lot of different people. This enables him to constantly improve his interpersonal skills and to do business, essential characteristics for his current position as a Product Owner (PO) at Hotmart.
The opportunity to meet new people is actually one of the things Bruno likes the most. “We make a lot of friends and play a part in the history of the families. Many people get nostalgic and say things like ‘I once went to the beach on a Kombi like this one’, or ‘My granddad had the same car’. Classic cars bring people together, and offer a different experience from today’s cars”, says Bruno, the car aficionado since he was a little kid.
