Dafiti – executive interview

In our latest interview with the senior management team of Global Fashion Group, Leandro Medeiros, the CEO of Dafiti, discusses the strategic priorities shaping the future of one of Latin America’s leading fashion e-commerce businesses. The conversation explores how Dafiti is strengthening its technology platform to support greater scale and operating efficiency, where the company sees its key sources of future growth and how it is seeking to sustain differentiation in a highly competitive market. Leandro also discusses Dafiti’s priorities for 2026, the areas where AI could move from experimentation to providing a measurable business impact and how changing consumer behaviour may reshape the Latin American fashion e-commerce market over the next two to three years.

How is Dafiti using technology to build the foundations for scalability and its profit outlook?

Leandro Medeiros: We see technology as a foundation for scale, not just a tool for today’s operations. The question we ask ourselves is: are we building systems that will grow with the business, or systems that will eventually constrain us? This is a key part of our strategy, and we are currently executing it with a significant modernisation of our core infrastructure, our back-end systems, our data architecture and, of course, our AI-enablement layer. This is structural, not incremental. This is the kind of investment that only makes sense if you’re building for the long term.

And they are very, very interconnected. When you talk about big systems, the data architecture and infrastructure that you need to get the most out of it – this is the base for any AI evolution that we need in the business. AI readiness is embedded in the foundation of the work that we’re doing from the start. We really think as an AI-first company, so for every change that we’re making now, we think about how we can make it through an AI lens: the data quality, the integrations, the architectural decisions we are making now. That’s what will allow AI to deliver real business value – not just an isolated experience, but real, scalable capabilities across the organisation.

On the cost side, this transformation is also about efficiency. We want to remain efficient with our technology spend, while simultaneously increasing our capacity to innovate and move faster commercially. And of course, we do believe that with this new system and with AI, we can even have a linear organisation for the future. The model we’re building gets more efficient as it scales, and that compounding dynamic is what a platform business like ours should deliver.

What makes Dafiti different in the highly competitive Latin American e-commerce market, and how will it maintain that position?

Leandro Medeiros: Russell, to win in fashion in general, and in this region and this environment specifically, we have to be genuinely better at fashion, not just cheaper or bigger. Latin America may be one of the most complex and competitive e-commerce markets. You have large local generalist platforms with enormous scale and capital in the region, and you have aggressive cross-border players coming in with low prices and fast-expanding logistics. That’s why we need to be very, very focused on what we do better, and not distract ourselves with the other activities that the generalist players are doing.

This is where Dafiti sits. We are a key player fashion platform with genuine depth in curation, brand relations and operational capabilities across the two markets that we are operating in now. There are competitors, and we respect all of them, but the combination of what we do is hard to replicate at our level of specialisation, our level of expertise and our focus on fashion and e-commerce. I’ll give you some examples.

First, assortment. We have built long-term strategic partnerships with the most relevant fashion brands in the region, whether they are global or local companies. And we actively manage that portfolio for quality, not just for breadth of assortment. That takes years and cannot be replicated quickly. It demands expert people. It demands season after season of relationships, commercial agreements and commercial results to build this confidence between a retailer and a brand or a seller.

Second, experience. We are focused on the full customer journey, from discovery to delivery, returns and customer service. In fashion specifically, we know that the post-purchase experience is where trust is built or lost, and we are very focused on that. Customers need to be comfortable and confident buying clothes or shoes this way, which in the region is not that penetrated, as I mentioned in the beginning. Customers are more used to going to a physical store to do that. So this experience throughout the journey is what we have built so far, and that’s where we will continue to focus in the future.

Third, flexible offerings for our brand partners – like Fulfilled by Dafiti, launched in 2024, and our expanding ads platform – create a compounding dynamic. Our relationship is not just transactional; it is strategic, and extends to other aspects of what a platform can offer. The more brands engage with our platform services, the better the data, the stronger the margins and the broader the offer to customers. Each side of that equation – brand, seller, customer or us – reinforces the others when we have this compound effect.

What are Dafiti’s main growth drivers and what key risks does it need to keep an eye on?

Leandro Medeiros: Brazil remains our core growth engine. The opportunity is in deepening customer value, increasing purchase frequency through our loyalty initiatives, continuing to improve our curated mix and scaling platform services, which are still in the early stages of their potential.

Colombia has been a structurally healthy business for years, with significant long-term upside. Like several markets in the region, it hasn’t been immune to macroeconomic pressures over recent months, but the underlying fundamentals remain solid. We see Colombia as a genuine second market for Dafiti, with dedicated strategy and execution behind it. But we need to be clear: Brazil is 80% of our business, and it is where our main focus is.

One of our biggest growth levers is what we call the customer flywheel – how we blend acquisition, retention and frequency, reinforcing each other in a cycle that improves unit economics as it scales. Our cashback initiative, for example – one leg of our loyalty programme – is a central mechanism within that flywheel. We are shifting from broad discount mechanics towards this retention model, which rewards consistent engagement and builds lasting loyalty with us.

The risks I watch most closely are honestly macroeconomic – currency volatility. And by the way, macroeconomic risks are what this region is used to. We grew, and we work, knowing and learning each day how to navigate this kind of volatility. So for us, having these macroeconomic issues is even business as usual. But as I mentioned: currency volatility, consumer confidence, and the competitive intensity of large local and regional generalist platforms with significant capital to deploy, both from the region and from other continents. Also, any political uncertainty. This is what Latin America is about, and we need to know how to navigate it.

Our answer has always been to stay focused on what our competitors cannot easily replicate: fashion expertise, curated assortment, brand relations and an experience built specifically for fashion. Especially with macroeconomic uncertainty, we need to focus on what we can control and what we can do better.

What are Dafiti’s key priorities for 2026, and when will AI move from experimentation to real business impact?

Leandro Medeiros: Russell, first, as I mentioned, this combination of the customer flywheel and a focus on profitable customers is key for us. So we need to accelerate acquisition, deepen retention through our cashback programme, and continue raising the bar on delivery and service across both markets. But we always focus more each day on more valuable customers with higher margins, which ensures that we are focused more on profitability than only on the top line.

Second, we need to keep doing what we’ve been doing – the turnaround that we’ve been carrying out at Dafiti over the last three years. We need to keep building an organisation that funds its own growth through cost discipline, infrastructure cost efficiency, order profitability and, as I mentioned, scaling marketplace and platform services, so they can continue contributing meaningfully to the P&L, not just showing promising results. These activities are key for us to keep our focus on being a sustainable and self-sustaining organisation.

Third, as I mentioned, AI. We are moving from experimentation to real results. Of course, we’ve been trying AI on several different fronts, especially in the last 18 months to two years. But what we are doing, especially in 2026, is moving to activities that are really showing up in our numbers.

I’ll give you a strong example. Our AI virtual studio allows us to produce fashion content at scale – campaigns and the images that appear in our app, for example – without any physical photoshoots. Our product catalogue across both countries is 100% AI-generated, as are our campaigns. This is a huge saving in both cost and time: production costs in Brazil are down 50% in the last year, thanks to this initiative. That’s one of the most important examples that we have – it is a revolution more than an evolution. We even moved our office to smaller premises, because we don’t need all those studios that you normally see in e-commerce businesses like ours. We do everything with AI nowadays.

How will the Latin American e-commerce consumer evolve over the next two to three years, and how is Dafiti positioning itself to serve them?

Leandro Medeiros: The Latin American fashion consumer is becoming more digital, as I mentioned, and more demanding every year. Customers in the region are mobile first, and mobile is already the dominant channel, both for customers and for our business. The question now is how we can make that experience genuinely great throughout the whole journey, not just a functional, transactional relationship between us, our platform and our customers. So this remains key.

Personalisation is becoming a baseline expectation. Customers expect the platform to understand their style, their size, their moments. AI plays a big role here – it’s what makes that possible at scale. It has to feel relevant and trustworthy, not just gimmicky and automated.

And trust and loyalty will matter more over time. In this region, consistency and transparency are what convert a transaction into a relationship. That’s exactly what our cashback programme is designed to build – not discounts, but genuine loyalty that is rewarded over time and can change behaviour.

For Dafiti, that means continuing to invest in the full journey: discovery, delivery speed, free returns. We are building for a customer who wants fashion to be easy, trendy, but also accessible. In Latin America, that customer base is growing fast, and we believe there is still a huge opportunity for the company and the group in the region.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Verbal fillers, false starts and minor repetitions have been removed from the interviewee’s responses only. Punctuation, spelling and formatting have also been standardised in line with Edison house style. No substantive changes have been made to the meaning of the discussion.