A Guatemalan Used-Clothes Giant Is Coming to the US Market

A Guatemalan used-clothing giant will launch its U.S. website on Friday, Bloomberg reported. It’s banking on expatriates’ nostalgia and the booming thrift market.

Megapaca, the biggest importer and retailer of used clothing in Central America, imported 45 million pounds of used clothing, shoes and other items from the U.S. last year, sorting them at its 475,000-square-foot distribution center, Bloomberg found.

It then sold and shipped 70 million items, both at its 123 stores across Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and southern Mexico, and abroad. Megapaca told Bloomberg that it brought in $200 million last year, and that its sales are looking even stronger this year.

Last year, Guatemala imported 250 million pounds of used clothing — the most of any other country, according to Bloomberg. Now Megapaca, a beloved brand in Guatemala and Central America, is hoping to sell Americans’ clothes back to them.

“My main goal is to open stores in the U.S., because that’s the only way to be the No. 1 used-clothing retailer in the world,” Mario Peña, Megapaca’s co-founder and general manager, told Bloomberg. “And I think we can do better than the U.S. because we can sort clothes cheaply here.”

Reselling offers hope to countries that have been overwhelmed by garment waste flowing from the U.S. and elsewhere, in large part owing to the rise in ultra-fast fashion that encourages even shorter fashion cycles and poorer-quality products that tend to end up in overseas landfills. 

The mountains of clothing in Chile’s Atacama Desert are among the most notorious, and visual, examples of the environmental impact of ultra-fast fashion cycles.

This comes at a pivotal moment for the thrift- and used-clothing market in the U.S., which grew five times as much as the broader retail clothing market in 2022, according to findings from online consignment company ThredUp’s latest Resale Report. The resale market in the country is expected to reach $70 billion by 2027.

And it’s not just the U.S. that is seeing a resale revolution. ThredUp projects that by 2024 secondhand apparel will account for 10% of the global apparel market. It also expects the global secondhand market to nearly double by 2027, reaching $350 billion.