Kátia Barros waited 17 years before taking Farm Rio beyond Brazilian borders. After launching the brand in Rio de Janeiro in 1997, the designer’s first priority was expanding across its home country. “We extended to the whole of Brazil, which is a huge country with different cultures and a lot of diversity,” Barros says. Farm Rio now has 135 stores in Brazil alone, which account for about 35% of the brand’s business in the country.
In 2014, global expansion came by way of an Adidas collaboration, followed by a capsule with Anthropologie. Farm Rio then opened its first international store in New York in April 2019, marking the brand’s official expansion into the US, which wound up far exceeding expectations, says CEO Fabio Barreto. So the brand ramped up its US expansion, before looking to Europe (beginning with Paris and London).
Now, Farm Rio is heading home, in a sense. “Instead of expanding to Latin America — which would be natural — we skipped that step and expanded to the US and Europe,” Barros says. “But now, we’ve decided to go to Latin America. We are, above all, Latin Americans.”
Farm Rio is marking its Latin American expansion with a new campaign, Buena Gente (translating to “good people”). The campaign features 10 women — including Barros and Mexican artist Ana Leovy, who has worked with the brand — from six Latin American countries. “It’s all about self-confidence, authenticity, and it’s a question of looking to our own culture and beauty values,” she says. “It’s not looking to the trends, it’s not looking to a market that has always come from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere. It’s celebrating this authenticity that comes not from outside, but from inside.”
The campaign offers a lesson into how to approach the region, which is of growing interest for luxury brands. At Vogue Business’s recent Global Summit in Dubai, multiple luxury executives, including OTB’s Stefano Rosso and Chalhoub Group CEO Michael Chalhoub, said that Latin America will be a priority in the coming years. Bain also notes that as luxury markets continue to slow globally, Latin America was among the few that remained robust and offered a lifeline in 2025.
Farm Rio plans to open a string of stores across the region in the coming months. The brand opened in Mexico earlier this year, with a second opening in early December and a third slated for the second half of 2026. The brand also has launches planned in Argentina and Panama in the near term, with Colombia, Ecuador and Peru on the cards within the next 18 months. “[Colombia] is a country that interests me a lot, because I have an aesthetic match with it,” Barros says. “Colombian artistic traditions favor maximalism, emotional vibrancy and narrative-rich patterns. This creates a shared worldview where joy, community and the natural world are central, resulting in a natural aesthetic affinity with Farm Rio’s universe.”
Latin America is a peg in the label’s larger growth strategy. Farm Rio has witnessed a solid five years of growth, with revenues in Brazil up 20% year-on-year since 2020 and up 40% globally. The brand grossed $188 million in sales for fiscal 2024. But how is Farm Rio doing it?
Getting local
The main pillar of Farm Rio’s strategy is to get on the ground.
“This is a long-term project. So we are going to start delicately integrating into the market, contacting the local communities, doing events to meet people in-person over there,” Barros says. “We are very much concerned, when entering a new market, about not having a foreign point of view. We want to look at the market respectfully, in a smart and sympathetic way.” As a large brand, this can be challenging for its marketing and design departments, she says, but stresses that it remains a top priority.
In practice, this involves a multi-tiered approach. Barros offers examples: the Farm Rio team conducts surveys with locals, including wholesalers, retail customers and people on the streets. “We have this very cool method that is talking to locals, regular people; people of interest — artists, designers, students. We have this facilitator who talks and listens to them about the geography, the events, the things that are trending — music, food, bars,” she says. It’s long been part of Farm Rio’s strategy — even when expanding in Brazil. “As I said, Brazil is huge. We have several regions that are very diverse.”
Barros also likes to have an in-person presence across the regions into which Farm Rio expands. “One of my biggest tasks is to travel and be there in the stores, seeing people trying on clothes,” she says. “My team in general travels a lot, to the US, to Europe, to Brazil — and now they will to Latin America as well.”
Whereas US and European expansion has been predominantly online-driven (the US currently has six stores, the UK has three stores and four concessions, and Paris has one store and four concessions; online makes up about half of revenues, with wholesale making up 40% and physical just 10%), Latin America will be propped up by physical spaces. This is because the region doesn’t have the same department store dominance as in the US and Europe, Barreto says. “You have to rely a lot on your own physical stores,” he adds. “And, of course, the economics of the physical stores are easier than in the US, which are much harder because of the price of real estate.”
On the backend, for Latin America, Farm Rio is taking a similarly localized approach to Barros’s on-the-ground strategy. Farm Rio has never worked with third parties when expanding in the US or Europe, but for its Latin American expansion, the brand will work with a local operator in each country. (It also partnered with Chalhoub Group to launch in Dubai in 2024.)
“Every country in Latin America is different,” Barreto says. “Although we’re one continent, it’s very different how you do business [in each country].” The laws differ starkly, he flags. “Taxes in South America, depending on the country, are pretty complicated, especially in Brazil and Argentina; Chile is a little easier. Colombia is kind of in the middle, like Peru and Ecuador. Every country has a different set of rules on how to do business.”
Duties are high, too, he adds. “Americans are just now understanding what high duties are all about, but we’ve been working with high duties for a long time here.” Mexico was a proof of concept. Here, Farm Rio worked with local operator Sordo Madaleno Group to open its first Mexican outpost, and will stick with them for the two upcoming spaces.
Farm Rio’s Latin America expansion doesn’t mean the brand is abandoning its growth play outside of the region. Expansion in the US and Europe remain top priorities, alongside planting Latin American seeds. “We’re taking an approach into the Western world as a whole,” Barreto says. “That’s how we’re approaching our expansion in the next couple of years — before we start venturing into Asia.”
Clarification: Clarifies that Farm Rio’s 135 stores in Brazil account for about 35% of the brand’s business in the country, not total.
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