SURCO
Brand Identity & Digital Marketplace for Emerging Mexican Design
SURCO is a curated digital marketplace connecting emerging Mexican fashion, jewelry, and accessories brands with design-conscious urban consumers. Built from scratch as my NYU capstone — brand, strategy, and business model included.
Brand Strategy · Brand Identity · Editorial Design · Fashion · Entrepreneurship
The Idea
Mexico City is home to 500–1,000 emerging fashion brands that are founder-led, design-driven, and operationally invisible beyond Instagram and Shopify. On the consumer side, design-conscious urban shoppers aged 22–38 have no single destination to discover Mexican design. SURCO was built to solve both sides of that problem.
The Brand
SURCO — a word evoking furrows, roots, and the act of cutting through terrain — positions itself as the definitive digital home for Mexican design. The brand identity centers on cultural pride without nostalgia: modern, editorial, and grounded in the energy of Mexico City's creative neighborhoods (Roma, Condesa, Polanco).
The editorial voice is curatorial and direct. Every brand on SURCO has a story; every collection has a cultural context. The platform competes not on price or selection breadth, but on curation, identity, and shared infrastructure.
The Strategy
SURCO operates as a two-sided marketplace: emerging brands gain access to scalable distribution, credibility through curated association, and operational support (logistics, payments, analytics). Consumers get a single, trusted destination for Mexican design — mobile-first, editorially driven, and culturally intentional.
The competitive strategy differentiates against mass marketplaces (Amazon MX, Mercado Libre) on editorial positioning and cultural identity, against department stores on accessible entry terms, and against individual DTC channels on aggregated traffic and shared infrastructure.
Brand & Content Strategy
The content strategy was built around three pillars: designer stories (behind-the-scenes features on brand founders), curated collections (seasonally and culturally themed editorial drops), and cultural commentary (SURCO's perspective on Mexican design, craft, and identity in the global market).
Physical brand activations — quarterly pop-ups in rotating Mexico City locations — were designed as immersive extensions of the editorial identity, with modular displays, fitting areas, and checkout experiences that brought the platform's curation to life in physical space.
The Numbers
Year 1 projections: 100 brands, 10,000 active customers, $32M MXN GMV, $11.2M MXN revenue. Year 3: 300 brands, 50,000 customers, $204M MXN GMV — with geographic expansion to Guadalajara and Monterrey.
My Role
Sole founder and strategist. Responsible for brand identity, editorial strategy, competitive positioning, market research, operations planning, financial modeling, and full business plan development.