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Standing atop several long, sturdy wooden tables in an industrial park in Escuintla, Guatemala, some 40 young men and women scavenge shirts, dresses, pants and other garments from a three-meter-high wall of imported U.S. clothing. They wear the garish orange T-shirts favored by their employer, Megapaca, the largest importer and retailer of used clothing in Central America.
In a seven-hour shift, they will sort thousands of garments into garbage cans destined for shoes, garbage and men's, women's and children's clothing. It is the first stage of an intricate sorting process at this 44,000-square-meter distribution center.
Last year, Megapaca imported 20.4 million kilos of used products from the United States and sold 70 million items. To achieve this, it employed 6,000 people in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and southern Mexico, where it manages a combined 123 stores. The money is very good: Megapaca says it generated $200 million from its face-to-face and online retail business in 2022, and this year it aims to do better.
Mario Peña, the company's 53-year-old, boyish-faced co-founder and CEO, walks around the wall of clothes. On the other side, workers load 36-kilogram bags of sorted clothing into a shipping container bound for a thrift store in Gold Coast, Australia, a new facet of Megapaca's growing wholesale business.
"We buy the clothes in the U.S., sort them, sell them and ship them," Peña explains. "We are cheaper than sorting on the Gold Coast, and we do it better." According to Peña, there are 29,540 garments in those bags bound for Australia, sorted to appeal to Gold Coast surfers and others who like secondhand clothing.
On Sept. 15, Megapaca will open a website in the United States, aimed at Central American expats who grew up loving the brand. It won't be easy. Online thrift stores like ThredUp have struggled to turn a profit.
But Peña is not discouraged: within three years he hopes to open Megapaca's first physical store in the United States....