Shapermint Built Its Following Online. For Walmart, It Built a Different Product Line.

Shapermint is adding 1,600 Walmart stores, the brand announced on June 24, roughly a year after it first arrived at the retailer. It entered Walmart in April 2025 with a curated, seven-piece line called Shapermint Core, sold in more than 350 stores and on Walmart.com, and this rollout adds 1,600 more. The Core assortment, wireless shaping bras, high-waisted smoothing shorts, bodysuits, camis, and everyday basics, runs in sizes S through 4XL and is priced from $14.98 to $27.98. Co-founder and chief marketing officer Massimiliano Tirocchi said the expansion lets the brand “meet our community where they already shop.”

The Brand Grew Up Online, Not On A Shelf

Shapermint started in 2018 as a digital-native brand under Trafilea, a Montevideo-based e-commerce group that builds and scales direct-to-consumer labels. It began as an online shop carrying established shapewear names, then launched its own lines, Empetua for shapewear and Truekind for wireless bras, and grew them through the high-volume paid social marketing Trafilea is built around. The model worked. The brand now reports more than 12 million customers, and within a few years it had grown into one of the largest size-inclusive shapewear brands in the country, a digitally born challenger to Spanx and Skims. Tirocchi has described the brand’s advantage as data, a steady loop of customer interviews, reviews, and surveys that feeds what it makes next.

It Built A Different Product Line For Every Tier It Entered

The instructive part for a Walmart supplier is not that Shapermint reached the shelf. It is how. Rather than porting its existing catalog onto Walmart, the brand built a Walmart-specific line. Its department-store and other retail business runs on a line called Shapermint Essentials, which it began selling in 2022 through roughly 125 Belk and 50 Nordstrom doors and now also carries at Macy’s and on QVC. For Walmart, it created something separate, Shapermint Core. When the brand launched there in 2025, WWD reported plainly that it was carrying a different collection at Walmart than at Nordstrom and Belk. Tirocchi has said the brand moved into physical stores in the first place because most sales in its category happen in stores rather than online.

The pricing tells the same story. On its own site, Shapermint runs a classic direct-to-consumer model, listing bras, camis, and shaping pieces at full prices in the thirties, forties, and fifties, then discounting them heavily and often. At Walmart, Shapermint Core carries flat everyday prices from $14.98 to $27.98, with no discounting attached. That is not a smaller version of the same pricing. It is a different pricing philosophy, built to match how Walmart’s shelf works rather than how a direct-to-consumer funnel works.

This is a first-party arrangement. Shapermint Core is a Walmart-specific line sitting under a dedicated Walmart brand page, the kind of exclusive assortment a retailer merchandises and stocks itself rather than a third-party Marketplace listing, and a Marketplace seller could not replicate it. Because it is apparel rather than a perishable, the line ships nationally on Walmart.com instead of being limited to the stores that stock it.

There is also a rare piece of independent evidence that the line moves. Shapermint’s main Walmart shaper-bra listing carries tens of thousands of customer reviews, an on-platform signal of sell-through that does not rest on the brand’s own growth figures. For a category where challenger brands often arrive on heavy marketing and thin proof, that volume is the closest thing to public evidence that the Walmart shopper is buying, not just browsing.

The Following Was Built On Instagram. The Shelf Is A Different Test.

Shapermint built its audience by finding women on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok and converting them with a relentless cadence of ads. The Walmart shopper is a different proposition, one who meets the brand on an endcap rather than in a feed, with no marketing funnel guiding her from awareness to purchase. Whether a brand engineered for the algorithm can hold shelf space the way it held attention, and whether a flat-priced value line at Walmart grows the brand or quietly competes with the higher-priced direct business that built it, is what the next 1,600 stores will begin to answer.

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