Look Out for LATAM: The Latin Region Is in the Midst of a Digital Commerce Revolution
Two things have become increasingly clear when it comes to shopping: consumers are buying stories with a side of product, and they want things they’ve never had before.
Latin America is delivering on both.
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At the Latin American Fashion Summit, which took place IRL in Miami this week after a two-year COVID-19 hiatus, the message was not only that the LATAM region has more to offer than the global fashion industry has acknowledged — but that it also has a swelling new digital consumer base that the global fashion industry would be wise to pay greater attention to.
In a session Monday (discussions were also available to livestream), Massimo Casagrande, dean of fashion at Istituto Marangoni Miami, gave numbers to back this up.
“In 2021, at the end of the first quarter, we’d seen that 50 million e-commerce customers emerged in the Latin American market,” he said.
Quarantines created a need to go online for goods, which forced a comfort level that wasn’t common in the region before. “If you think back to two years ago, not many people actually were wanting to shop online, mobile phones were becoming much more important but people still were not trusting what was happening with the digital. But they’ve overcome these fears and they’ve actually learned to trust what is happening,” Casagrande said.
It’s a digital revolution happening in the region generally understood to include South and Central America, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
“LATAM is becoming…this geographical area to look at because of all this digital renaissance,” Casagrande said. “In two years, they’ve really become a point of focus to look at.”
This Latin American Fashion Summit, or LAFS, marks the program’s first in the U.S., driving home the need for more Stateside attention to the region.
“We really wanted to create this opportunity and visibility for all the Latinos living in the United States. For us, it is really important — Miami because, first of all, it’s like a melting pot of Latin culture in the United States but also because it marks an exciting phase inside the Latin American Fashion Summit and producing the event for the first time inside U.S. territory,” said Samantha Tams, cofounder of LAFS and digital networking platform Tribu. “I think the Latin American fashion industry has evolved enormously, thanks to success stories like Johanna Ortiz, Esteban Cortázar, who have been trailblazers in the industry and have paved the way for the rest of the creatives.
“It definitely has created a movement within the industry, and all eyes are on Latin America,” she said.
Ortiz told her success story in a talk Tuesday alongside Lauren Santo Domingo, cofounder and chief brand officer of Moda Operandi, whom she credits at being pivotal to her rise. The luxury fashion retailer provided the Colombian-born Ortiz’s first foray into the U.S. market.
“The success story of what Johanna has created and the support that Moda has given to all of you creatives has changed the entire ecosystem of the Latin American industry,” LAFS and Tribu cofounder Estefania Lacayo said in opening the discussion.
Since launching what has become a popular brand worldwide in 2003, Ortiz is now a vertically integrated brand produced in Colombia (though knits come by way of Peru and leather from Argentina) with 380 employees, 80 percent of whom are women. One of the brand’s bestselling styles, the Tulum top (one of Santo Domingo’s early picks for success), now sells nearly 50,000 pieces a year.
Her true-to-herself perspective, “at ease barefoot glamour,” “party in every dress,” and dedication to her homeland and the story it can tell, in Santo Domingo’s words, have been key to Ortiz’s success.
“My culture is what surrounds me, keeps me really grounded as I design,” Ortiz said. “When Latino American designers started looking to their roots instead of looking to American fashion or European fashion, it’s when you really…deliver something from the heart.”
As LATAM designers look more to their roots, the aim at LAFS is to help them find adequate support for that — and pushing for greater inclusion, greater acceptance that high fashion isn’t only found in Europe and the U.S., will be a key element in the undertaking.
“Discussing being a more inclusive fashion industry — that was part of our core mission ever since we created the platform,” Tams said. “We wanted to make sure that we were all represented as a region, and that we all collaborate with each other, and we all create opportunities for each other.”
That’s one reason multihyphenate Pharrell Williams closed out the summit’s sessions Tuesday, discussing Black Ambition, a project he cofounded to provide prize funding for “bold ideas and companies led by Black and Latinx entrepreneurs.”
Latin American Fashion Summit
“There’s a lot of synergy between both our Latin American Fashion Summit and Black Ambition…we’re seeking representation of our communities,” Tams said. “I think it’s about leaders and communities finding ways to give back, and creating platforms to support different minority groups that they care about, and finding ways to also create infrastructure for them so it’s less of a handout but more of a whole community of support.”
In Williams’ words, that support looks like greater ownership.
“There was just a moment where it just sort of dawned on me that we don’t have enough of a voice in this country and that is because there’s not enough businesses and corporations and even small businesses that we own, there’s just not enough,” the rapper, producer, songwriter and entrepreneur said of the impetus for Black Ambition. “When you have ownership you begin to have a voice.”
Getting to that ownership for Black Ambition looks like clearing systemic obstacles that have long posed barriers to Black and Latine entrepreneurs.
“For us, with Black Ambition, it’s the ambition part as much as it is the black part. And when you talk about ambition, it’s permission to dream, to be able to build your company where nothing stands in your way,” said Black Ambition chief executive officer Felecia Hatcher, who also spoke on the panel. Hatcher is an author (“Start Your Business on a Ramen Noodle Budget,” one among her books), a White House Champion of Change Honoree and an NBC Universal Tech Impact All Star, to name just a few things. “What we know to be true is that Black and Latinx start-up founders experience a number of things that are just BS that stand in the way — from racism to systemic issues to redlining in their communities to lack of funding to not having strong networks. And if we can create a pathway where all of those things disappear or we can move them away, we know that these entrepreneurs build amazing companies.”
A motivational speaker who has been called to address companies like Google, Spotify and Doordash, Hatcher left the LAFS audience with this: “There’s such collective power and wealth and community that’s in this room but we also, as a people, have to do better because it’s not just about getting your slice of the pie — we shouldn’t be eating from the pie, that’s what my mentor told me.
“The pie is not big enough. What we need to be doing is eating from the garden, because when you eat fruit from the garden, that fruit has seeds in it. And when you eat from the garden, your consumption actually produces more. And so, it’s not enough to eat from the pie, we eat from the garden. So let’s create more gardens.”
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