We are an editorial fashion platform for Caribbean design, and a Dominican company. At shopparos.com we sell the work of the region’s design houses to customers around the world, starting with the United States. The houses make the clothes. We choose which houses to carry, and we build what a house needs to sell abroad, from the relationship with each house to the delivery at your door. The company behind it is Get Paros SRL, registered in the Dominican Republic in 2025.
How it began
The idea began in Barcelona. Our founder, Luis Alfonso Abreu, was studying there and kept having the same conversation. Whenever the Dominican Republic came up, some version of the same reply came back: “You live in paradise.” Heard often enough, it stopped sounding like a compliment and started sounding like a signal. If that was the country’s reputation abroad, then it was something the country could export, and nobody was building the way to do it.
The Caribbean has never been short of design. It has houses with decades of work behind them, and women who have trusted those houses for a generation. Many of those women now live far from home. What those houses have lacked is a way to sell straight to a woman in another country. That takes work that has nothing to do with clothes, and few of them have ever had reason to build it alone.
We founded the platform to build it.
What we ask of a house, and what we give one
A house earns its place here with decades of proven work and a design language no one could mistake for anyone else’s. We judge every house on the integrity of its design and the quality of its craft. We carry no fast fashion, as a category or at any price. The first house shows what that looks like.
Camila Casual, opened in Santiago de los Caballeros in 1986 by Alba Luz Díaz, has won the Marca Dominicana prize at every edition of the Premios a la Moda Dominicana. Its prints and colors are its own, and so are the fabrics it develops. For forty years, the surest way to buy it was to be in the Dominican Republic; we are the first platform to sell it online in the United States. Its story has its own place in this Journal.
For a house like that, we are the export partner, the international storefront and the digital infrastructure in one. The house keeps its name, which stays on every piece, and its designs remain entirely its own. We take on the rest. We prepare the house’s own photographs of each garment and write every page from the facts the house gives us, so the piece on the page is the piece that arrives.
How an order on shopparos.com reaches you
An order placed on shopparos.com goes to the house that made the piece. The house packs it in the Dominican Republic and hands it to UPS, and the tracking number reaches you by email.
Payment runs through Azul, the payments business of the Dominican Republic’s Grupo Popular, by Visa or Mastercard. Checkout shows your total in Dominican pesos, because we are a Dominican company, and on Azul’s payment page you can pay in your own currency. The shipping and refund policies hold the details, and a person answers contact@shopparos.com.
Where we go next
The roster grows the way it began. Dominican houses come first. Puerto Rican and Haitian houses follow, and others from across the region, each admitted on the same terms as the first; some we go looking for, and others introduce themselves to paros. In time, the platform that carries the region’s fashion will carry its craft as well.
Why the name paros.
Paros is an island in the Greek Cyclades, and for centuries its name has stood for the same thing our founder kept hearing in Barcelona. We borrowed it in kinship, one island lending its name to another, so that Caribbean design could travel under a word that already carried that meaning somewhere else. A search for Shop Paros still finds the island first, and the shops on it. The platform is at shopparos.com. We write its name in lowercase, with a period, and let it close a sentence rather than open one. That is also the simplest way to tell the platform from the island.
