Door-to-door saleswomen are fueling Shein’s rise in Mexico

Since 2022, Mariana Garfias Torres, a 30-year-old nutritionist, has been making an additional income by selling housewares from Betterware, a Mexican catalog company. She regularly circulates Betterware’s digital catalog to her close acquaintances, books their orders, and both makes a profit and earns a commission on the sales.

Lately, though, her offering has included clothes and accessories from Sheini Shein Founded in China in 2008 and headquartered in Singapore, Shein is a fast fashion brand that grew rapidly through exposure on social media.READ MORE . Her customers send her screenshots of items they see on the Shein app, and she places the orders.

“Now that Shein and Temu have more ads [on social media], I’ve seen they are putting out more innovative and cheaper products than Betterware,” Garfias Torres told Rest of World. “My customers have noticed too.”

As Chinese e-commerce platforms have gained popularity in the country, some of the 3.1 million people who work in the catalog sales industry have incorporated the platforms’ products into their stock. Bitácora Social, a research center focused on societies and business, estimates that six out of 10 catalog sellers in Mexico now sell products from online platforms. By doing this, the sellers — mostly low- or middle-income housewives over the age of 45 who frequently interact with their customers in person — have inadvertently contributed to the slow demise of catalog sales companies in Mexico, according to industry insiders.

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