Netherlands’ Hema Arrives in Mexico

Hema, a Dutch brand of sustainable products, set the goal to expand into the Mexican market at the beginning of December. Combining the sort of products it offers and its expansion plan, it has been said that this will be the new competition to the Japanese-Chinese store, Miniso.

Hema’s original strategy to target the Mexican market was to open the first store in Mexico City during the summer of 2020. The second store was supposed to open in Guadalajara, according to El Financiero. The plan changed due to COVID-19, forcing Hema to transform. To start introducing the name into the market, the first step was creating the website and having a corner store in the Van Gogh Alive exposition, all of this during August. The second part of the plan was opening the first official store at Terminal 1 of the Mexico City International Airport and another one at the Artz Pedregal mall. At the latter, Hema’s entire inventory is officially available, as mentioned in a Forbes article.

César Medina, CMO of Hema, mentioned in an interview with Forbes that the company expects to have at least 25 stores open by 2021, not only in Mexico City but also in Guadalajara, Monterrey, Merida, Cancun and Playa del Carmen. By 2025, Hema expects to reach 200 stores and 6,000 direct jobs created.

The expansion plan seems realistic given the results the company has seen so far. When Hema opened its website, sales were 25 percent higher than expected, which is excellent news considering Mexico's current economic situation. "In addition to having green numbers, there is always a flash from the numbers growing toward the positive versus the same days in previous years. It helps us a lot to say that the brand is doing well and that the Mexican economy is also strengthening day by day. That is why we did not want to miss the enormous opportunity that the Christmas season represents," mentioned Medina to Forbes.

César Medina, who was also CMO of Miniso until Aug. 2020, said to MBN in an interview in 2019 that Miniso’s success as a retailer is “partly based on its ability to sort out the logistics challenge that every company in this area faces." During Miniso’s expansion phase, a point was reached when no logistics company in the country could support the number of operations required by the retailer.

Even though César Medina was in charge of Miniso’s expansion project from 2017 to 2020, the strategy that Hema will use can be expected to be different given the current circumstances. However, similarities are to be expected as both companies handle products with a small profit margin at large volumes, as mentioned in the MBN article.