A shoe is an awkward thing to buy from a photograph. It may look splendid on a screen and prove less agreeable on a foot. In 2012, Andrés Lawson was running Dafiti in Argentina, where that small gap between looking and buying presented a considerable business problem. A customer had to believe that an online order would work out. Persuasion could get someone to the checkout. What happened afterward would decide whether the person came back.
Dafiti offered free delivery and a 30-day return policy. Lawson explained that a buyer could change a purchase for practically any reason, including having woken up in a bad mood. There was a little comedy in the example and a serious commercial proposition underneath it. The company would absorb some uncertainty so the customer could take a chance. A return policy had become part of the product.
An engineer with something to assemble
Lawson studied industrial engineering at the Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, known as ITBA, and began his professional career at Bain & Company. His father was an entrepreneur in construction. That sequence supplies a straightforward background for someone who would spend years working on the connection between an attractive business idea and the arrangements required to deliver it.
There is also a rather better detail than a job title. While at university, Lawson built a car from scratch. The anecdote sits neatly beside the engineering degree, though it deserves to be enjoyed before being recruited into a theory of his entire personality. A car contains many parts with strong opinions about whether they will cooperate. Getting them to do so is an education of its own.
His later reading interests range beyond operating manuals. Among the books associated with his podcast appearances are Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Decisions, businesses and other people: an entrepreneur could assemble a fairly demanding syllabus from those three subjects alone.
Built from scratch.Lawson’s university project. Some people join a club.
The customer has to believe you
Dafiti put Lawson inside a developing market for buying fashion on the internet. It belonged to the Rocket Internet world of company building, and its regional footprint extended across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. His own role included serving as co-founder and managing director. Running an online retailer meant learning about capital as well as commerce, a subject he would revisit in later conversations about his career.
The period also exposed an interesting wrinkle in the promise of internet shopping. Convenience was only one reason to buy. People outside the largest retail centers could reach brands that were harder to find nearby. An online catalogue could change the practical geography of a purchase, provided the delivery operation kept its side of the bargain.
Lawson’s explanation of the business paid attention to information and advice alongside the range of merchandise. Fashion brings questions with it. What will fit? What can be exchanged? When will it arrive? A website could display the goods beautifully and still leave those questions unanswered. The customer’s doubts were part of the operating brief.
That makes his early work more interesting than the familiar story of a shop moving onto a screen. Retail had to acquire a new set of explanations. The sales assistant, the fitting room and the reassuring walk back to the counter were no longer within reach. Some of their functions had to be supplied by the company’s policies, communication and execution.
A shop for the people building shops
Emporio Compras was established in May 2013. Lawson, Jorge López and Gabriel Topola were its co-founders and directors. The business, also known as Emporio Commerce, worked on the practical systems brands needed to sell online: website development, fulfillment, customer service, marketing, payments and business intelligence. Here the buyer of the service was a company trying to reach its own buyers.
The shift makes a useful hinge in Lawson’s career. At Dafiti, the shop itself was in the foreground. At Emporio, the work included helping other businesses run their shops. The stock still had to move and the customer still expected an answer. The organization taking responsibility for those tasks had changed.
Mercado Libre and the logistics company Andreani became strategic shareholders and business partners. In 2016, a capital and business partnership with Japan’s transcosmos connected Emporio’s regional operation to a wider international network. At the time, Emporio operated in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay. The company’s offer suited brands seeking a route into markets where they would otherwise have to assemble an unfamiliar chain of services.
Lawson described the partnership in terms of operational capabilities and geographical expansion. Those words can sound bloodless until one considers their contents: a parcel, a payment, an unanswered question, a brand’s reputation. International commerce eventually becomes a collection of very local obligations.
Even television needs a stockroom
In June 2016, Lawson appeared before manufacturers as Emporio Commerce’s executive director to explain its role in a proposed Telefe online store. The Argentine broadcaster wanted to connect products with its programming and multiple screens. Emporio would manage responsibilities including product storage and the relationship with the final customer. Lawson brought experience from more than 30 stores across Latin America.
It is an appealing meeting of worlds. Television is organized around attention. Commerce must eventually account for an object. Between the two sit the people who make sure the attractive thing on a screen can become the correct thing in a box. Lawson’s part in the project put him in that middle space.
His own writing about construction materials online shows a similar interest. He discussed products such as tiles, paint and taps, and argued that e-commerce could complement existing sales channels. He emphasized national reach, more consistent pricing across regions and services that reduced the seller’s operational burden.
These were ordinary goods with complicated journeys. The argument depended on usefulness: help businesses manage stock, delivery and payment, and an unfamiliar sales channel becomes easier to adopt. The language was less romantic than the usual entrepreneurial vocabulary. There is, however, a certain elegance in a system that gets the taps to the right building.
The names that keep turning up
Jorge López recurs throughout Lawson’s story. Both studied at ITBA and worked at Bain. By December 2021, they had known each other for more than 15 years. They had built Emporio Commerce together and then founded Osana in 2019. A long business partnership brings a different kind of continuity to a career often described through changes of company.
Osana began with the founders’ own investment in an initial version of its platform. Lawson and López’s early discussions took place over coffee. By August 2022, the business had more than 100 collaborators and commercial operations in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Those are dated milestones in the company they built together, rather than a claim about its size today.
Another collaboration produced Afroditas. Launched in 2020 by Connie Ansaldi, Lawson and López, it connected brands with women working in direct sales. At launch, more than 2,000 women across Argentina had registered. The proposition included training, community activities and rewards alongside access to commercial opportunities.
The launch photograph is a welcome interruption to the sober vocabulary of operations. López, Ansaldi and Lawson stand before a wall of pink flowers. The businesses differ, and the scenery certainly does, but the recurring commercial problem remains recognizable: bring people and suppliers together, then make participation practical.
A case before a platform
Lawson’s account of building products begins close to the customer. He has described starting with particular use cases, developing solutions with early clients and then working backward toward a more general product. In that sequence, a service can become software, then a platform, then infrastructure. The general system emerges from repeated contact with a particular problem.
There is a practical logic to this method. At the beginning, the work may include tasks that cannot be repeated economically forever. The purpose is to learn what deserves to be repeated. A company can be very efficient at producing something nobody needs; close contact gives the customer a chance to interrupt that achievement.
His recommended reading adds another texture to this practical approach. In one interview he chose Jorge Luis Borges’s Utopía de un hombre que está cansado. Elsewhere, his book recommendations included Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money and Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life? The list allows business decisions and larger questions to occupy the same shelf.
“This partnership will provide value added services in the e-commerce sales channel with clear objectives for the end customer.”Andrés Lawson · transcosmos partnership, 2016
From running companies to backing them
Investing has become another part of Lawson’s work. He is founder and managing director of Proximity Angels, a seed fund, and works with companies as a board member and adviser. His investment activity also includes more than 30 startups. An operating career provides a particular vantage point for those conversations: proposals can be considered alongside the complications of carrying them out.
His current roles extend further. He is founder and CEO of Altimus Capital, a Madrid-based single family office investing over a long horizon in public and private markets, property, energy, infrastructure and frontier technology. He is also founder and chairman of Osana Holding. The combination moves his working life across companies, capital and time horizons.
A title can compress all of that into a line. The more revealing picture includes the earlier details: an engineering student assembling a car, a retailer explaining returns, a director arranging services for brands, and a partnership continuing across ventures. They are different forms of responsibility for whether the parts work together.
The click remains the easy part to see. Lawson’s career invites attention to everything around it: the reassurance before a decision, the systems after it, and the people willing to keep working until the promise arrives.