How we got here
Five steps,
in order.
We wanted to build a brand.
It started selfishly. We set out to found our own mountainwear label — technical outerwear, made well, made responsibly. The product was the easy part. The factory was where everything stalled.
We could not find the factory.
We went looking for Latin-American manufacturers and found almost no way in. We had always heard the reputation — Colombia, Envigado, Medellín, some of the best apparel work anywhere — but there was no door to knock on. No directory, no intro, no reply. The talent was real and completely unreachable.
So we dug, and found an opening.
The deeper we researched, the clearer it got: this trade is largely untouched, and a structural shift was arriving with EU–Mercosur. A whole sourcing region was about to get dramatically more viable, and almost no one was set up to use it.
And textiles kept getting left out.
We are Swiss. Switzerland already runs an open trade corridor with these countries — for nearly everything except apparel. Across agreement after agreement, textiles are the category that gets carved out, skipped, left behind. The lane exists. It just is not built for what we wanted to make.
That is the gap we are here to close.
Merco is the company we wished existed when we could not reach a single factory: a compliant, auditable, end-to-end path from Latin-American manufacturers to European and US buyers, built precisely for the category everyone else leaves out.