Santiago Zabala and the business he kept outgrowing

Santiago Zabala once imagined becoming the general manager of a bank. It was a respectable ambition for someone studying accounting: a large institution, a serious title, a career with a recognizable shape. His eventual business would sell intimate apparel to American women. Career planning has its comic limitations.

He had moved from Mercedes, in western Uruguay, to Montevideo at 18. He studied at the Universidad de la República and played professional basketball for Trouville. The combination gives his beginnings an appealing concreteness. Before the international customers and the executive interviews, there were classes, a new city and a team that expected him to turn up.

The banking ambition matters because it makes the later choices less inevitable. There was a conventional path available in his imagination. Entrepreneurship brought a different kind of responsibility, one he would later describe in terms of the people and families depending on a company. A founder gets to choose the direction. Other people have to live with the consequences.

His public professional profile is almost comically economical about all this. Its introduction reads simply: “Entrepreneur.” The education entry runs from 2005 to 2011. Accounting supplied the qualification; the career that followed would require him to keep reconsidering what, exactly, the business should be.

A commission is a beginning

The fascination with computers came earlier. In 1995, his parents brought home their first computer. When he moved to Montevideo in 2005, he sold web hosting to earn extra money while studying. That is a modest first venture, usefully free of the mythology that tends to collect around a successful founder. He had something to sell and a reason to sell it.

By 2012, he was building an affiliate marketing business with an Argentine partner. The arrangement rewarded the ability to send customers toward somebody else’s product. It also left the product and the final customer experience in somebody else’s hands. Knowing how to attract attention could take the business only so far.

Trafilea’s formal founding dates to 2014. Its name now sits above a group of consumer brands, but its beginnings belong to digital marketing. Lucas Vera and Massimiliano Tirocchi were part of the early partnership; Juan Pablo Silvera later joined. The different jobs within that group would become increasingly consequential as advertising gave way to the practical demands of operating brands.

There is an easy version of a founder’s story in which the original idea becomes larger every year. Zabala’s is more interesting because the original activity kept becoming insufficient. The skill survived each change. The business model did not enjoy the same security.

A commission can be an excellent education in what makes somebody click. Owning a brand extends the examination. Now the parcel must arrive, the product must satisfy and the customer must have a reason to return. The attention that looked like the finish line becomes the beginning of the work.

Sixteen months, and a narrower bet

In 2018, Shapermint became the decisive bet. The founders concentrated on women’s shapewear, with the United States as the main market. They were moving toward a business in which they could take responsibility for more of what happened after the advertisement.

By April 2020, when Endeavor selected Zabala into its entrepreneur network, it described Trafilea as operating in 14 countries and recorded more than $100 million in sales in 16 months. The speed is striking. So is the sequence: an established marketing capability, a particular customer category, then a much larger business built around it.

That sequence is more useful than the familiar invitation to “think big.” A broad ambition still needs a specific buyer. Intimate apparel gave the team a defined problem and a product category in which to apply what it had learned. Narrowing the bet made the ambition easier to act on.

The selection also placed Zabala inside a network designed around introductions, mentorship and the obligation to help other entrepreneurs. In November 2022, he appeared among the panelists at Endeavor’s international selection meeting in São Paulo. The entrepreneur who had been evaluated was now helping evaluate other candidates.

It is a small reversal, and a revealing one. The founder’s job had expanded beyond the internal demands of Trafilea. He had become part of the machinery through which other businesses find advice and access. For an entrepreneur working across borders, a useful connection can be as practical an asset as a useful piece of software.

The customer has a vote

Shapermint’s proposition also involved a choice about how to talk to its customers. Its mission centered on body confidence and acceptance. In his New York Stock Exchange interview, Zabala discussed the company’s effort to change beauty standards and reach women internationally. The commercial category was intimate apparel; the language around it concerned how women saw themselves.

That choice carried into the acquisition of The BodCon in 2022. Founded by Jess Hunichen and Emily Ward, the conference and podcast business brought conversations about body confidence into Trafilea’s portfolio. The founders stayed involved, and The BodCon was to operate as a standalone brand.

The purchase is an illuminating detail in Zabala’s story. A conference does not fit into a shopping bag. It gives a company a different setting in which to meet the people it wants to serve. A conversation can continue after the product demonstration has exhausted its conversational possibilities.

There is, of course, a commercial calculation here. A customer who returns to a brand matters more than an advertisement that briefly catches her eye. But the calculation only works if the relationship earns its place. A community is a demanding thing to claim; its members can always decide to spend their time elsewhere.

For Zabala, expansion had come to include the spaces surrounding a purchase. The product, the message and the ongoing conversation were becoming parts of the same operating problem. That is considerably more complicated than sending traffic to another seller and collecting a commission. He had asked for more control. More responsibility arrived with it.

A larger company, a different kind of work

By 2023, Trafilea’s reported annual revenue exceeded $323 million. That figure belongs to that year. Its ambition to reach $1 billion remained an ambition. Keeping the two separate preserves the interesting part of the story: a large business still trying to decide how its next stage should work.

Zabala’s 2025 Endeavor retreat profile lists the work ahead in practical terms: wider use of artificial intelligence, international expansion, more physical retail distribution and growth financing. Those are different assignments. They require different people, different kinds of judgment and money committed on different schedules.

The retail component is especially telling for a business formed online. His stated agenda included expansion across more than 1,000 department store and mass retail doors. That was presented as work in progress, rather than a reason to assume every planned location had already opened. The internet had supplied the starting point; the next shopping occasion might happen in a store.

Trafilea now describes its shared technology as an AI Growth Engine. Its website reports more than 12 million customers and over $100 million in annual media managed. These are company figures, and media spending is a different measure from sales. The distinction matters when a business can produce enough large numbers to furnish a small accounting department.

The company also advertises an Agentic Commerce OS for outside consumer brands as “opening soon.” That wording marks another possible transition. A group that learned marketing, then used it to build brands, wants to offer more of its operating capability to others. The proposition is familiar in Zabala’s history: take something the team has learned to do, then reconsider the boundaries of the business around it.

“Amo Uruguay.”

Santiago Zabala · January 2023
“I love Uruguay.”

The people beyond the dashboard

For all the technology in Trafilea’s current description, Zabala’s public affiliations remain conspicuously human. His LinkedIn profile records membership in YPO from May 2021. Endeavor Uruguay lists him among its mentors. These are places where a chief executive has to encounter other people’s judgment rather than merely inspect his own company’s results.

In 2024, he joined the board of ReachingU. The foundation works on educational opportunities for children and adolescents in vulnerable communities in Uruguay. Its annual report identified him with Montevideo when announcing his appointment. The connection adds another obligation to a career already organized around a company with customers abroad.

ReachingU’s work also provides a concrete answer to the question of what success might make possible outside the business. It supports educational programs, evaluates projects and works with organizations across the education system. A board seat carries work attached to it. The title alone would be the least interesting part.

There are smaller details, too. In his Endeavor retreat profile, Zabala’s fun facts were kitesurfing and fatherhood. The list is short enough to suggest a welcome resistance to executive autobiography. A person need not turn every interest into a leadership principle. Sometimes kitesurfing can remain kitesurfing.

His attachment to Uruguay has been unusually explicit. “Amo Uruguay,” he said in a 2023 interview: “I love Uruguay.” It was a plain statement in a conversation otherwise full of targets and expansion plans. The business could reach customers elsewhere without making his origins an inconvenience to explain away.

The prospective bank manager had ended up with a less orderly career: accounting, digital marketing, consumer brands, a growing network of commitments. The continuity lies in his willingness to reconsider the arrangement when the work changes. That willingness has costs as well as rewards. Every new business model brings another set of promises to keep. By the time an advertisement becomes an order, somebody is already expecting him to deliver.