Agency
Mindgruve And Outlandish: Bringing TikTok Shop To Latin America
Carlos Corona Betancourt
Mindgruve secured a first-mover advantage in Brazil’s social commerce market by becoming the country’s first agency to offer end-to-end TikTok Shop services. The agency collective, which operates offices across the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and London, expanded its existing partnership with U.S. TikTok Shop agency Outlandish to capture market share as the platform launched in Latin America’s largest economy in May.
Carlos Corona Betancourt, Chief Growth Officer at Mindgruve, led the expansion that established a dedicated Brazilian team within three weeks of TikTok Shop’s local launch. Carlos has spent seven years with Mindgruve, originally joining when it operated as Macarta before the companies merged.
“There is a first mover advantage that we wanted to take care of,” Carlos explains. “Especially for our local partners that were working on retail media, we knew that social commerce was going to impact their overall strategy, and we wanted to make sure that as soon as TikTok Shop landed in Brazil, we would be able to take care of them in the proper way.”
Mindgruve’s approach builds on expansion into Mexico, where they first partnered with Outlandish to capitalize on TikTok Shop’s initial Latin American launch. The Brazil expansion is a step forward in this relationship, but with significantly higher stakes given the country’s market size and social media penetration.
“Partnering with Mindgruve to launch TikTok Shop in Latin America marks an exciting milestone in Outlandish’s strategic expansion,” says Outlandish CEO William August. “This collaboration combines our shared passion for culture, commerce, and creators, and allows us to build meaningful connections between brands and consumers across LATAM, a vibrant, high-growth region. We’re proud to help shape the future of social commerce here.”
William August
Having established the company’s Mexican operations from the ground up and later expanding into Brazil for Amazon Advertising, Carlos understands the cultural nuances that determine platform success in each market.
“Brazil is in a league of its own,” Carlos explains. “It’s a very powerful nation. It’s difficult to understand for foreigners, but it is also very welcoming.”
He notes that the Brazilian market exhibits unique characteristics that distinguish it from other TikTok Shop markets worldwide. “In Brazil, there was a platform already called Shopee that’s already made a big impact with Live Shopping,” Carlos observes. “I believe Live Shopping is going to have a faster impact in Brazil than it did in Mexico.”
These market differences prompted Mindgruve’s strategy of maintaining local teams rather than managing Brazilian clients remotely. “When we went to Brazil, we made sure it was a Brazilian team taking care of our Brazilian clients,” Carlos emphasizes. “We replicate the ideology of our best practices adapted to the local cultures, and that’s where success comes from.”
Mindgruve’s Value Proposition
As Brazil’s first TikTok Shop agency, Mindgruve’s value proposition centers on being a full-service provider while competitors remain specialized in individual aspects of social commerce.
“We take care of content creation, live shopping, ads, affiliate program communities, everything,” Carlos says. “Even setting up on TikTok Shop from scratch when companies need to do so.” This approach addresses a gap Carlos identified in the Latin American market, where brands historically worked with multiple specialized agencies for different aspects of their digital presence.
While traditional agencies might prioritize platform-specific metrics, Mindgruve focuses on integrated outcomes across multiple touchpoints. The strategy is tailored to TikTok Shop, where success depends on coordinating content creation, community management, advertising, and fulfillment simultaneously.
The company’s established presence across retail media platforms, such as Amazon and Mercado Libre, provides additional context for TikTok Shop strategies. “We’ve seen the trend, the transition from third-party cookies to first-party data and understanding the audiences and the client persona in a more detailed manner,” Carlos explains.
Operations Through Cultural Integration
Mindgruve’s methodology for entering new markets emphasizes a combination of technical expertise and cultural sensitivity.
“Technically, we know what we’re doing. We are familiar with the platform inside and out. And that’s the most important part,” Carlos explains. “When you want to expand globally, that platform knowledge needs to be at its highest level. And then we start looking into the cultural aspect, and there we have a very talented local team that has already taken foreign platforms and adapted them to the Brazilian market.”
Team development represents another area where Mindgruve seeks an advantage. “The challenge has been more of training our local team to be as knowledgeable on the platform as we are in other countries,” Carlos notes. “This is a solution that did not previously exist in Brazil or Mexico, for that matter. We have to do extensive training on the team.”
Within three weeks of TikTok Shop’s Brazilian launch, Mindgruve assembled a dedicated team comprising nearly 70 employees across its global organization.
Market Misconceptions and Client Education
Carlos identifies persistent misconceptions that Brazilian brands harbor about TikTok Shop success.
“The misconception is that you’re easily going to go viral and sell a lot of things,” he explains. “The reality is, you may be lucky with something that is completely unrelated to you that just drives your product with a video, but really it’s more likely that unless you put in the work of following all the technical aspects of the platform, success is going to be more complicated.”
Carlos believes that this educational role requires balancing optimism about TikTok Shop’s potential with realistic expectations about execution requirements. He draws parallels to earlier platform launches to provide context.
“We saw it with Amazon and Mercado Libre. Some people would start selling products one day, and next thing you know, they’ve already made millions of pesos for dollars, and everyone thinks it was easy. In those cases, it’s because they put in a lot of work and focused on the technical aspects of the platform very well.”
The complexity of TikTok Shop operations requires Mindgruve to bolster its services. “There are so many variables that can impact your potential on the platform,” Carlos details. “Making sure you have the proper inventory, stock, that the product is properly arriving at the customer, that your branding is there, that the messaging is following TikTok shop guidelines. The more you dig into it, the more things you’re going to find that you need to take care of.”
Making an Impact on Latin American Social Commerce
Carlos positions Mindgruve’s Brazil expansion within the broader transformation of Latin American marketing and commerce.
“This will transform our market,” Carlos predicts, touching on the longstanding friction in Latin American e-commerce that has limited conversion rates despite high social media engagement. “There’s a famous ‘TikTok made me buy it’ phrase; you’re scrolling TikTok, you see something, and you purchase it. Previously, you had to go to Amazon or Mercado Libre to find it.”
TikTok Shop eliminates this friction by enabling direct purchases within the discovery environment. Carlos views this integration as particularly useful in expanding social media markets, such as Mexico and Brazil. “You’re taking Mexico and Brazil, which are two of the fastest growing markets for social platforms, and you’re mixing it with the commerce aspect of it. It can be powerful.”
The platform’s impact extends beyond individual transactions to influence broader marketing strategies. “We’ve identified that when brands do live shopping events on TikTok Shop, it impacts the traffic and the volume of sales on other platforms,” Carlos explains. “We’ve started measuring that. Not only are you going to have a faster way to reach the customer in a place where they may not even be looking, but you’re also going to be able to see how it impacts all your other platforms.”
For creators, TikTok Shop offers tracking and monetization opportunities that will accelerate the development of the Latin American creator economy. “Here, the content creators are essentially directly selling their product to you because they can [advertise] on the platform and you can trace back the sale to the exact content creator that helped you get to that decision, that impulse buy that TikTok shop creates,” Carlos notes.
This measurability, he adds, will drive increased brand investment in creator partnerships as results become more attributable. “When you can actually follow the data, it gives the brands more of a reason to want to invest because if they see positive numbers, they’re going to go for it, they want to invest more,” Carlos observes.
Next Step in the Expansion
Mindgruve’s success metrics focus on client outcomes rather than traditional agency growth indicators, reflecting their partnership-oriented philosophy and long-term market development goals.
“I would say that the success, if I were to look back a year from now, would be that our current agency partners have successfully established a presence on TikTok Shop and the other platforms simultaneously,” Carlos states.
The company’s analytics-focused approach provides the foundation for evaluating its market position. “Mindgruve and Outlandish focus strongly on analytics,” Carlos explains. “As soon as we start seeing the trends backed up by numbers, we’ll be able to give you a more straightforward answer.”
Given that performance standards virtually don’t exist for Brazilian TikTok Shop, data is key. Mindgruve is on a mission to create the metrics and benchmarks that future agencies and brands will reference. For Carlos, “It’s making sure that we create a solid solution for the market that is profitable for the agency, but taking care of our partners is at the front of my objectives,” he emphasizes.
Carlos sees Latin America’s creator economy still in early development stages, with room for growth as platforms like TikTok Shop provide better analytics and monetization tools. “As a region, the content creator economy still has a long way to go,” he explains. “The countries where TikTok Shop is coming in are only going to increase the impact of content creation because now you can put even stronger analytics behind it.”
As Mindgruve embarks on its Brazilian expansion, Carlos teases major developments, “We’re only scratching the surface of what’s to come.”