Retail giant fills two C-suite roles as it accelerates omnichannel strategy
Grupo Éxito (BVC: EXITO), Colombia’s largest retail operator, has appointed two senior executives to newly defined C-suite roles as part of a long-term strategy centered on commercial competitiveness and digital transformation. The company named Paula Sanabria as Chief Commercial Officer and Juan Camilo Suárez as Chief Digital and Technology Officer, effective immediately.
Sanabria holds a degree in business administration from the Universidad Internacional de las Américas in San José, Costa Rica, and brings 26 years of experience in the retail sector. Her background spans strategic category management, high-performance team development, and results-oriented commercial execution.
Suárez is an industrial engineer from Universidad EAFIT in Medellín, and has supplemented his academic preparation with studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University, and Stanford University. He has more than 28 years of experience directing digital operations and enterprise transformation processes across Latin America, with a focus on strategic planning, innovation, customer experience, and business transformation.
The appointments come as Grupo Éxito continues reorganizing its senior leadership following the January 2024 acquisition of a controlling stake by Salvadoran conglomerate Grupo Calleja, which now holds approximately 86.84% of the company. The retailer operates stores under multiple banners in Colombia, Uruguay, and Argentina, including Éxito, Carulla, Surtimax, Super Inter, Surtimayorista, Devoto, and Disco, among others.
According to the company, the two appointments are intended to reinforce capabilities in commercial management, innovation, customer intelligence, and technological evolution — areas the company has identified as central to strengthening its regional position and generating greater operational synergies across the markets where it operates.
Grupo Éxito, formally known as Almacenes Éxito S.A., completed the process of delisting its American Depositary Shares from the New York Stock Exchange and deregistering from US securities reporting obligations in early 2026. The company’s shares continue to trade on the Colombian Stock Exchange (Bolsa de Valores de Colombia) under the ticker symbol EXITO, which remains its primary market.
In a city where fashion retail can often feel hurried, transactional and beholden to the churn of seasonal algorithms, WHITMAN builds its universe around a radically different proposition: that clothing should invite pause. Step inside one of the Colombian fashion house’s softly lit stores in Bogotá, Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Medellín, and there is an immediate sense that time has slowed by several degrees.
Harris Tweed jackets rest beside pastel-hued linen shirts, and Italian Merino wool jumpers hang near tailored overcoats fastened with tagua-nut buttons. A carefully curated playlist hums somewhere in the background. The experience resembles less a conventional boutique than the private library of a well-travelled aesthete.
Named after the great American poet Walt Whitman, whose seminal work Leaves of Grass celebrated the sacred beauty of the everyday and humanity’s intimate relationship with nature, WHITMAN has emerged over the past decade as one of Colombia’s most compelling premium lifestyle brands.
The label advances a philosophy its founders describe as “Slow Made”, though the phrase extends beyond tailoring or craftsmanship into a broader meditation on how people inhabit time itself. There is an unpretentiousness to the WHITMAN community — a quiet rejection of excess and spectacle — rooted instead in simplicity, permanence and a profound connection to the natural world.
Founded by brothers Felipe and Sebastián Falla, who hail from the southern Colombian city of Neiva, WHITMAN began modestly in 2014 designing outerwear for men. Colombia’s fashion industry at the time was still heavily associated with mass-market denim, fast-growing textile conglomerates and tropical resort wear. Menswear, particularly tailored menswear, often occupied a conservative and uninspired corner of the market. WHITMAN entered that landscape with something altogether more literary and contemplative.
“From a very young age we were curious about art and music,” Felipe Falla says of the brothers’ early influences, which ranged from cinema and gastronomy to the melancholic lyricism of Leonard Cohen. Before launching the label, Felipe worked in advertising campaigns for major brands while Sebastián studied gastronomy in Buenos Aires, another passion that would later shape the sensory universe surrounding WHITMAN stores. “Life gave us the opportunity to serve,” the brothers explain of the company’s mission, “and this project exists as a platform for growth and transformation.”
WHITMAN co-founders Felipe and Sebastián Falla. Photo: Courtesy WHITMAN
That language might sound grandiose were it not so carefully embodied in the garments themselves. WHITMAN’s tailoring is meticulous without becoming rigid. Jackets in Harris Tweed wool retain a reassuring weight and texture rarely encountered in contemporary ready-to-wear. Their made-to-measure suits, inspired by Savile Row traditions and constructed using top-tier textiles, favour timeless silhouettes over exaggerated cuts.
Each blazer is designed to age gracefully rather than remain pristine. Even their shirts — including guayaberas intended for that “magic hour” between afternoon and evening — are treated with near-ceremonial attention. Clients are encouraged to personalise collars, cuffs and fit through WHITMAN’s in-house tailoring service. Rather than pursuing relentless seasonal turnover, WHITMAN releases limited-edition “capsules” built around fabrics, textures and moods, reinforcing the brand’s philosophy that clothing should be collected slowly and lived in fully.
Increasingly, WHITMAN has evolved beyond clothing into a broader lifestyle proposition. Its “Home Collection” introduces visitors to hand-painted ceramics, artisanal candles and small-batch chocolate sourced from carefully curated cacao harvesters across Colombia. Guests visiting the stores are often offered cups of “La Molienda”, a Huila Arabica coffee that reflects the founders’ attachment to their Andean roots and tradition of hospitality. The atmosphere feels intentionally domestic rather than commercial — a place designed to make clients linger, converse and reconnect with slower rhythms of living.
The company’s commitment to craft extends deeply into Colombia’s artisanal traditions. WHITMAN works closely with women artisans from the department of Cauca, incorporating delicate embroidery into its women’s wear collections and preserving techniques passed through generations. In doing so, the brand positions craftsmanship not as decorative nostalgia but as a living cultural dialogue between fashion, territory and memory.
The company’s flagship boutique near Bogotá’s upscale Centro Andino shopping district has become something of a pilgrimage site for Colombia’s emerging creative class: architects, filmmakers, restaurateurs and musicians who regard clothing less as conspicuous consumption than as an extension of cultural identity. WHITMAN’s expansion to five stores in Bogotá, as well as boutiques in Cartagena, Barranquilla and Medellín, reflects how successfully the brand has tapped into a regional appetite for understated luxury rooted in authenticity.
Crucially, WHITMAN’s refinement does not exist in opposition to sustainability but alongside it. The brand works with organic cottons and Indian block prints while openly acknowledging the contradictions inherent in the fashion industry. “We do not believe sustainability is an absolute claim,” the company notes in its manifesto, “but a constant exercise of consciousness, revision and responsibility.” It is a refreshingly nuanced position in an era when many fashion houses deploy ecological language as little more than marketing varnish.
The WHITMAN approach instead suggests that sustainability begins with permanence: clothing designed not to be discarded after one season. In this respect, the label belongs to a wider international movement challenging the disposability of modern consumption. Its “Slow Made” philosophy prioritises craftsmanship over industrial repetition, quality over quantity and emotional attachment over instant gratification. To purchase a WHITMAN “Loretto” overcoat or dark-blue “Poet” blazer is, in some sense, to reject the accelerated rhythms of fast fashion altogether.
There are also echoes here of the old-world ateliers that once defined European tailoring culture. WHITMAN’s made-to-measure programme remains entirely hand-finished, preserving artisanal techniques passed from one generation of tailors to the next. The process unfolds deliberately: fabric selection, inner lining, structure, stitching and finishing all treated as rituals rather than stages of production. “The true value of bespoke tailoring,” WHITMAN argues, “lies in its capacity to reflect authenticity.”
WHITMAN blends tailoring, craftsmanship, music and slow living into a quietly elegant experience. Photo courtesy WHITMAN
That sensibility extends beyond clothing into cultural patronage. WHITMAN has positioned itself as an active supporter of Colombia’s artistic ecosystem, sponsoring emerging cultural initiatives and independent artists. At Bogotá’s prestigious ARTBO art fair, the company awards the annual Premio Whitman to emerging artists participating in the ArteCámara section, reinforcing the brand’s dialogue with contemporary art and design. The label has also forged close ties with Colombia’s film world, dressing the jury for the “Cine en los Barrios” category at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Cartagena de Indias, better known as FICCI, the oldest film festival in Latin America.
International expansion has followed organically. In 2024, WHITMAN announced its arrival in Mexico with two stores and hinted at ambitions extending towards the United States, Spain and wider European markets. Yet unlike many Latin American brands eager for overseas validation, WHITMAN appears less interested in aggressive scale than in cultivating a community united by shared values: appreciation for music, art, nature and intentional living.
That perhaps explains why WHITMAN feels distinct within Colombia’s increasingly sophisticated fashion landscape. The brand is not merely selling jackets or linen shirts. It is offering a slower tempo of life — one in which elegance is measured not by spectacle but by permanence, texture and thoughtfulness. And if WHITMAN represents a new kind of menswear energy emerging “from Colombia to all of Latin America”, it also channels something of the Scottish Highlands, the understated elegance of Bond Street and the urban edge of St Urbain Street in Cohen’s fabled Montreal.
For a label named after a poet who celebrated beauty in ordinary existence, that feels entirely fitting. Or, as WHITMAN’s Brand and Partnerships Lead, Laura González Saavedra, puts it with understated simplicity: “wearing a WHITMAN makes you feel at home.”
Apple's retail operation turns 25 years old today, marking a quarter century since the company opened its first stores on May 19, 2001.
Steve Jobs personally guided members of the press through the Tysons Corner store four days before it opened, after Apple announced the retail initiative on May 15. Some 500 visitors lined up before dawn on opening day, with the queue growing to over 1,000 by the time the doors opened at 10 a.m. The two stores, located at Tysons Corner Center in McLean, Virginia and Glendale Galleria in California, welcomed over 7,700 visitors and recorded $599,000 in combined sales across their opening weekend.
The decision to enter brick-and-mortar retail came at a precarious moment for Apple. With a market share hovering around 2.8%, the company was struggling to showcase its products through third-party retailers, where Macs were routinely relegated to dusty corners staffed by clerks with limited product knowledge. Jobs believed Apple would never shed its "cult" image unless it controlled the entire customer experience right down to the point of purchase. As he told Walter Isaacson for his biography: "Unless we could find ways to get our message to customers at the store, we were screwed."
To lead the retail push, Jobs recruited Ron Johnson, who had transformed Target's image with his designer merchandise line. Together they refined the store concept in a secret warehouse prototype, working through every detail from the single-entrance layout to the Genius Bar, which Johnson modeled on the service experience at Ritz-Carlton hotels. Gap CEO Mickey Drexler, who had joined Apple's board in 1999, also played a key role in shaping the retail vision.
Skepticism was widespread at the time. Apple's sales had dropped 29% the previous year, Gateway had just shuttered 40 of its own stores, and Channel Marketing analyst David Goldstein publicly predicted Apple would be "turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake" within two years.
By 2003, Apple was recording $3 million in profit per store, per quarter, with approximately 60,000 visitors at each location. Apple Retail hit $1.2 billion in revenue in 2004, breaking the record for the fastest retail operation to reach a billion-dollar milestone. The company today operates more than 500 stores across 27 countries, with each location generating approximately $5,500 per square foot annually, among the highest figures in the retail industry.
The original Tysons Corner store relocated and reopened in a larger, redesigned space within the same mall in May 2023. Apple retail stores in both Tysons Corner and Glendale Galleria locations remain open today.
The Colombia-founded company has processed more than 100 million transactions and works with nearly 100 retailers and marketplaces
Instacart, a US grocery technology company serving more than 2,200 retail banners and nearly 100,000 stores, announced the acquisition of Instaleap, a Colombia-founded fulfillment and retail technology platform operating in nearly 30 countries, in a deal whose financial terms were not disclosed.
The transaction represents one of Instacart’s most significant international moves since going public in 2023 and strengthens its expansion outside North America, particularly in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.
Instacart, which trades on Nasdaq under the ticker CART, is seeking to expand its enterprise technology platform focused on omnichannel commerce and the digital transformation of supermarkets and retailers.
“We see a meaningful opportunity to expand internationally through an enterprise-led strategy that empowers retailers across the globe to meet the evolving omnichannel needs of their customers,” Ryan Hamburger, chief commercial officer at Instacart, said in the company’s statement.
Global expansion driven by Latin American technology
Instaleap develops software solutions for supermarkets, pharmacies and consumer goods retailers, enabling them to manage orders, logistics, picking operations and customer experience across digital channels.
The company has processed more than 100 million transactions and maintains commercial relationships with nearly 100 retailers and marketplaces outside North America, including Cencosud, Éxito, Makro, Continente, Jerónimo Martins (owners of Tiendas Ara), Lulu, and SPAR.
The acquisition also allows Instacart to accelerate its presence in regions where it previously had limited operations. The company had already begun deploying products such as Storefront Pro and its AI-powered Caper Carts in Europe and Australia but lacked a consolidated network in Latin America and the Middle East.
Instaleap to continue operating as subsidiary
According to the companies, Instaleap will initially continue operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of Instacart to ensure continuity for existing customers during the integration process.
“We’ve built our platform with a deep focus on the unique needs of grocery retailers across diverse international markets. Joining Instacart enables us to scale our impact with the support of a trusted partner that shares our commitment to retailer success,” said Antonio dos Santos Nunes, CEO and co-founder of Instaleap.
The company was founded in Colombia in 2019 by Portuguese entrepreneurs Antonio dos Santos Nunes and Margarida Freitas, the company’s current COO. Both joined the global entrepreneurship network Endeavor in 2025.
The companies did not disclose whether Instaleap’s current management team will remain in place after the transition period.
E-commerce growth fuels regional expansion
The announcement comes amid sustained growth in e-commerce across Latin America, particularly in Colombia.
According to figures cited in the statements, Colombian e-commerce grew 19.9% in 2025, reaching $684.6 million USD transactions, while the regional online grocery market surpassed $3.62 billion USD last year.
Instacart reported adjusted EBITDA of $1.09 billion USD in 2025, representing 23% year-over-year growth, along with 312 million processed orders.
With the acquisition, the company expects to gradually extend additional solutions to Instaleap’s clients, including e-commerce services, retail media, artificial intelligence and in-store technology.
Economic activity in Colombia expanded at an estimated annual rate of 2.1% during the first quarter of 2026. According to the latest NowCast report issued by the Grupo Cibest, unit of Bancolombia (NYSE: CIB, BVC: BCOLOMBIA), this outcome reflects a loss of momentum compared to the rolling quarter ended in February. That previous period recorded a growth of 2.2%, which was revised downward by 10 basis points from an initial estimate of 2.3%.
The 2.1% growth rate for the quarter indicates a slowdown relative to both the market consensus average of 2.7% and the internal growth forecast of 3.3% held by the bank. On a month-over-month basis, the seasonally adjusted series of the NowCast index posted a 1.3% contraction in March 2026. When compared to March 2025, economic activity grew by 2% year over year, representing a 50-basis-point decline from the 2.5% reading recorded the previous month.
“Overall, these results suggest that the economy is beginning to lose steam, amid multiple sources of uncertainty.” — NowCast Bancolombia Report
Analysis at the sector level reveals a broadly weaker growth profile, with deceleration appearing across most productive areas. Slower momentum was identified in trade, manufacturing, recreation, real estate, and financial services. Manufacturing expansion cooled to 1.0% in March 2026, while financial services recorded marginal growth of 0.6%. The real estate sector maintained a steady growth rate of 1.9%.
Construction and communications were the only sectors to record negative growth during the period. The construction sector saw a significant downturn, contracting by 2.3% in March 2026 after having posted 1.4% growth in February. The information and communications sector contracted by 0.4%, marking its fourth consecutive month in contractionary territory. Conversely, acceleration was noted in public administration, which grew by 5.1%, agriculture at 3.7%, and mining at 0.8%.
The NowCast family of indicators is prepared by Grupo Cibest through the processing and aggregation of transaction data from the bank’s various payment channels. Using advanced quantitative tools, the index provides high-frequency estimates of Colombian productive activity to complement official data from the Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística. The report was authored by Arturo Yesid González Peña, Head of Quantitative and Analytics, and Sebastián Ospina Cuartas, Data Controller.
The report also incorporates data from the Bloomberg platform and FocusEconomics Consensus Forecasts to provide broader economic context. While the national economy remains in expansionary territory, the analysts suggest that the current results indicate the market is losing steam due to various sources of domestic uncertainty.
Apple has previewed Apple Borivali, its sixth store to open in India, and the company's second store in Mumbai. The store opens on Thursday, February 26, at 1 p.m. IST.
The store is in Sky City Mall, a large new shopping and entertainment complex in Borivali East, located off the Western Express Highway near the Devipada Metro Station in the Khande Rao Dongari area of the city.
"We're thrilled to open Apple Borivali, and bring the best of Apple to life for even more customers in India," said Deirdre O'Brien, Apple's senior vice president of Retail and People. "We're so inspired by the creativity and enthusiasm of communities across India, and our dedicated team members are excited to welcome and connect with customers in this extraordinary new store, our second in Mumbai."
The store will have more than 70 team members to provide guidance and support for Apple customers, as well as providing retail services like Apple Trade In, flexible financing, safe data transfer, and Personal Setup. Like all Apple facilities, Apple Borivali operates on 100 percent renewable energy and is carbon neutral.
Apple's new Borivali store is the latest addition to its retail presence in India. The company opened its first two Indian stores in 2023 in Mumbai (BKC) and Delhi (Saket), then expanded to Bengaluru (Hebbal) and Pune (Koregaon Park), with a Noida location opening in 2025.
In the past, CEO Tim Cook and other Apple executives have remarked on the importance of India, which is home to the world's second biggest smartphone market. In 2020 Apple opened its online store in India, offering Indian customers a way to purchase products directly from Apple without having to go through an authorized premium reseller.
A newly surfaced resale operation is seemingly offering Apple Store–exclusive display accessories to the public for the first time, potentially giving consumers access to Apple-designed hardware that the company has historically kept confined to its retail environments.
Apple designs a range of premium MagSafe charging stands, display trays, and hardware systems exclusively for displays in its global retail stores. They have never been made available through Apple's online store or physical retail locations.
"AppleUnsold" surfaced this week as an Australia-based seller that has begun offering Apple Store display hardware for sale through both an independent website and an eBay storefront. From company's website:
AppleUnsold exists because too many people were asking the same question: "Where can I buy that?" The store display stands, retail accessories, Genius Bar tools and employee gear, and until now, the answer was always the same: you can't. Despite large demand, Apple simply won't sell them. That's where we come in. Display models, store exclusives and Apple-only equipment are exactly what we specialise in.
We give you access to products you simply can't find anywhere else. Every item is genuine Apple, carefully inspected and graded before listing.
Items currently offered or previously listed for sale include iPhone MagSafe demo chargers, Apple Watch charging docks, AirPods Max display stands, Apple Pencil trays, iPad ring stands, and display trays designed for Apple Vision Pro. The catalog also extends beyond presentation hardware to include diagnostic cables and service-related accessories, such as Apple Watch restore docks and HomePod debugging cables, which are typically reserved for Apple Store back-of-house use or authorized service environments.
AppleUnsold says on its website that all items are genuine Apple products and that inventory consists of both new and used hardware. The company also notes that supply is limited and dependent on availability, with many items frequently selling out.
The seller originally operated exclusively through eBay and continues to maintain a presence there alongside its standalone storefront. The AppleUnsold eBay account shows a 100% positive feedback rating based on a limited number of completed transactions. Customer feedback on specific listings includes confirmations that purchased items appear to be authentic Apple hardware.
Apple's retail fixtures and internal tools are not authorized for consumer resale, and the company treats such hardware as proprietary retail property. Historically, Apple has taken action to restrict unauthorized sales of internal-use products, and it is not clear where AppleUnsold is sourcing stock from or how its business model works.
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