Chinese platform Alibaba boosts international trade of Mexican artisans

In the workshop of his company “La Casa del Barril”, José Manuel Velador meticulously supervises the manufacturing process of his sought-after oak barrels, ensuring quality at every stage, from the drying of the staves to the closing of the bottom and assembly of the lids.
Velador’s family has been in the wood business for three generations, but he brought the family tradition of hand-crafting oak barrels to the global stage through digital commerce.

With the help of the Chinese platform Alibaba, La Casa del Barril’s exports are growing and its products travel from the mountains of Mexico to the United States, Europe and Asia.

The town of Tequila, where Velador has his workshop, is surrounded by vast fields of blue agave. Walking along its cobblestone streets, you can’t help but notice the distinctive aromas of cooked agave mixed with sweet and smoky notes emanating from the local distilleries.

Photo Xinhua

The air in Tequila is usually filled with the smells of fermenting alcohol and the wooden barrels that age the eponymous spirit, one of Mexico’s most emblematic and world-famous beverages.

Facilitate export procedures

Demand for wooden barrels for aging, as well as for other alcoholic beverages such as mezcal and wine, allowed “La Casa del Barril” to prosper in the local and national markets, but Velador wanted to transcend these margins and export his barrels to the world, he told Xinhua.

It seemed complex and challenging, especially due to the administrative procedures in each country, but the Alibaba platform provided the necessary tools to overcome these obstacles.

Through them, Velador has been able to easily learn about the import and export policies of different countries and use functions such as automatic responses and instant translation to interact with global clients, which has favored the international expansion of its company.

E-commerce has allowed “La Casa del Barril” to triple its company’s sales in the last six years and to export not only to nearby countries such as the United States and Canada, but also to countries on different continents such as the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia and, recently, China.

Photo Xinhua

A month ago, it sent containers with hundreds of its barrels to the Asian country, from a contract for 1,100 barrels for a company that manufactures machinery for distilling spirits, Velador explained.

The internationalization of his company has been such that he is even in talks to send barrels to Oman, “a country I had never heard of” and where he now has potential clients through e-commerce, he added.

Training for digital transformation and rural revitalization

The digital empowerment that e-commerce fosters has not only benefited individual entrepreneurs like Velador, but has also had a significant impact on the formation and training of companies and communities in Mexico.

Daniel González, director of the León campus of the Guanajuato State Training Institute (IECA), described how upon his return from a trip to China before the new coronavirus pandemic, to train in digital transformation, he had only one goal in mind.

This was to train companies and people in their environment to try to achieve transformations similar to those experienced in China thanks to the “Taobao Villages” program and its main axis, electronic commerce.

He explained that the training in China allowed him to see the impact of integrating payment tools, last-mile systems and e-commerce.

“When you can go to China and see for yourself what has been achieved, you really see the value that this training can offer,” he said.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) in Mexico have considered online commerce to be relevant since its entry into the country, even though they may not have ventured into the modality or may not exploit all its benefits if they have already done so.

Photo Xinhua

Among the main reasons that companies that have not made the leap to e-commerce normally give is the lack of preparation or the need for training.

This was already pointed out in 2019 by the Online Sales Study for SMEs prepared by the Mexican Online Sales Association (AMVO), according to which companies that did not sell online were held back by a lack of knowledge about e-commerce and internal training, while those that did feel limited by a lack of investment and training.

This panorama confirmed the importance of the training advocated by González and motivated a group from the Guanajuato Education Secretariat to launch a digital village program five years ago after visiting one of the famous “Taobao Villages” in Zhejiang, China, to replicate the experiences of the Asian country.

Currently, in Guanajuato and other localities in Mexico, there are experiences based on the digital village model, which have allowed small and medium-sized producers to internationally market Talavera ceramic articles, tequila, personalized textile products, leather goods and molcajetes, a distinctive Mexican mortar made of fine-grained lava stone.

Aníbal Zottele, coordinator of the China-Veracruz Studies Center at the Universidad Veracruzana in eastern Mexico, stressed that the importance and usefulness of e-commerce is amply demonstrated in the model being developed in China for rural revitalization.

One of the exemplary themes or the great mechanism of the model is precisely electronic commerce, because “it opens the doors from very marginal regions to all markets,” said Zottele, for whom much of the Chinese model of rural revitalization and digital transformation can be adapted to the Mexican context.

“The experiences that people have when there is a government that cooperates so that these transformative initiatives do not get frustrated along the way are remarkable and are very useful for other countries,” said the academic.

Velador and his company “La Casa del Barril”, like the digital villages of Guanajuato, exemplify how electronic commerce has transformed and globalized traditional businesses in Mexico, fostering the eventual revitalization of rural communities or those far from the large Mexican cities.

Their success stories respectively demonstrate the potential of digital commerce and the Chinese digital transformation model for SMEs.

“Betting on Alibaba has been one of my biggest successes. Digital clients are close to 80 percent of my customers and eight out of ten digital sales are made through the Chinese platform. I am sure that there is still room for growth,” Velador concluded.