Edgardo Novick: The Entrepreneur Who Learned at the Street Market

From a family produce stand to retail, hotels and major urban developments, a career built on observation, boldness and networks of trust.

THE STREET MARKET AS A SCHOOL

Some entrepreneurs are trained at universities, others in family businesses, and some through the direct experience of selling every day.
Edgardo Novick belongs to the last group.
His school was the street market, where he learned that no customer is won forever and that a merchant must observe, listen and adjust before everyone else.
He was born in Montevideo in 1956, the son of Rita Varela and Héctor Novick, and grew up in the La Comercial neighborhood.
He attended Franklin Delano Roosevelt public school and continued his studies at Liceo Miranda.
At fourteen, he began working alongside his father at a fruit and vegetable stand.
He did more than simply tend it.
He organized the merchandise by quality and price, introduced unusual products, paid attention to customer requests and turned presentation into a sales tool.
The small stand grew until it required numerous workers.
There appeared a trait he would later repeat across different sectors: identify a simple need, organize the offering better and reinvest in order to grow.
At twenty-two, he moved into clothing.
He designed wool garments, developed the Little Stone brand and eventually built a network of stores and wholesale distribution.
Trips abroad showed him a retail format that was still little developed in Uruguay: stores devoted to sports.
That observation led to La Cancha, which connected him with major international brands and consolidated his business expansion.

DIVERSIFYING WITHOUT LOSING HIS INSTINCT

Novick never remained confined to a single line of business.
From sportswear he moved into restaurants, with ventures such as La Mostaza and Don Peperone, and later into hotels and large commercial developments.
The After Hotel, Hyatt Centric and his participation in Nuevocentro Shopping show an evolution from retail toward projects requiring substantial capital, partners and long-term planning.
That diversification was not a random succession of businesses.
His method was to recognize flows of people, consumer habits and locations with potential.
He also knew how to partner with people who mastered areas he did not intend to control personally.
Commercial intuition was accompanied by the ability to build trust and bring capital together around concrete projects.
Along that path, his connection to football took on a dimension that went beyond passion.
The sports world allowed him to meet successful players who, after earning significant incomes during necessarily short careers, needed to turn part of those surpluses into lasting assets.
Some found in the hotel projects promoted by Novick a way to invest in real assets.
It was not simply about raising funds: it was about connecting available savings, personal trust and understandable business opportunities for people who did not want to depend solely on their next sports contract.
The project that best expresses that forward-looking ambition today is Aventura, currently under construction in Sayago.
Built on a twelve-hectare master plan and with an announced investment of close to two hundred million dollars, the initiative is not limited to adding another shopping center.
It integrates more than one hundred stores, housing, services, public spaces and green areas in a part of western Montevideo that for decades remained outside the city’s major urban developments.
Its importance lies both in its scale and in its choice of location: bringing investment, activity and a new urban center to neighborhoods with a large population that have not always received projects of this magnitude.
For Novick, Aventura is the project from which he wants to speak about the present and the future.
It also seems like the natural closing of a circle: the boy who learned at the street market to observe how people move is now creating a new gathering place for a broad area of Montevideo.
In 2015, he transferred part of that personal capital into politics and received a significant vote as a candidate for Mayor of Montevideo.
He later founded the Partido de la Gente.
The experience did not achieve at the national level the expansion he had attained in business, but it revealed another facet of his career: a willingness to put himself on the line, compete and bear the cost of trying.

FAMILY, FOOTBALL AND LOGOSOPHY

Edgardo and Solveig Rettich met as teenagers, when they were in their fifth year of the Economics preparatory program at Liceo Miranda.
She is the daughter of Esteban Rettich Breitenstein, a Hungarian immigrant, and Clydes Gutiérrez, who deserve a story of their own, among other reasons because they founded La Hora Exacta, one of the few traditional watch and clock shops that remains active and connected to the family.
That background helps explain that Solveig grew up not only within Hungarian and Logosophical cultures, but also in an entrepreneurial household shaped by work and generational continuity.
Novick was a disciple of Logosophy, but it would be insufficient to present that connection merely as training he received.
He has been an active collaborator in several Logosophical institutions.
Solveig, an accountant and educator, currently holds an important role in the Logosophical Foundation of Uruguay and has also been a committed advocate of Logosophical pedagogy in education.
That path contains a lesson that goes beyond its protagonists.
In a field where unity is sometimes confused with exclusivity, possible unity begins by recognizing those who work toward the same ideal from different institutions.
His Logosophical education, generally absent from public profiles of the businessman, also helps explain the place that discipline, self-knowledge, will and individual responsibility have held in his life.
Football completed that family fabric.
Novick was a candidate for the presidency of Peñarol, and two of his sons, Marcel and Hernán, wore the club’s jersey.
For him, Peñarol was passion, belonging and also a sphere of human relationships that ultimately connected with his business activity.
In that convergence of family, sport and business appears one of the most personal features of his journey.

On October 27, Novick and two of his children (in yellow, in the center) received a visit from President Yamandú Orsi at the construction site.

FROM THE STREET MARKET TO AVENTURA MALL

Edgardo Novick’s career does not fit the model of an entrepreneur emerging from a large inheritance, a prestigious profession or a technological innovation.
It grew out of the most elementary form of commerce: buying, presenting, selling, listening and starting again the next day.
From that neighborhood street market to Aventura, his growth rested on a combination that is difficult to teach: attention to reality, speed in deciding, willingness to partner and the ability to inspire trust.
In the history of Uruguayan business, Novick represents the entrepreneur who transforms everyday experience into practical knowledge.
His work cannot be explained only by the businesses he created, but also by his understanding that the most decisive capital is often formed long before money itself: in work, reputation, family and relationships built over a lifetime.

Commerce as education
Diversification and trust
Aventura and urban development

Continue reading in From Lafone to Jodal

Update note, October 24, 2026. One day after this profile was published, Forbes Uruguay featured Edgardo Novick on the cover of its 26th edition. The coincidence once again brought Novick’s entrepreneurial journey into focus, from his beginnings in Montevideo’s street markets to his current investment projects.