Sérgio Correia, a family-run textile manufacturer in Rio Mau, northern Portugal, sells bedding and home textiles under the brand Blume for Home.
After joining Temu's Local Seller Program in September 2025, daily orders jumped roughly 15-fold within weeks, with buyers reaching as far as Madeira.
The brand has set up a dedicated warehouse for online orders, running its wholesale business alongside.
For two decades, Sérgio Correia couldn't crack direct sales to homeowners. Then it tried Temu — and saw a 15-fold increase in daily orders.
The company, based in Rio Mau in northern Portugal, has manufactured and sourced textiles since 2001, mainly for wholesalers and resellers. It runs its own factory and employs more than 60 people, most of them hired locally. Its product range covers bedding sets and polyester sheets in summer, coral fleece sets and duvets in winter.
For about two years, Sérgio Correia had tried selling directly to consumers through its own online store and accounts on several marketplaces, with limited results. That changed in September 2025, when it joined Temu as a merchant, listing bedding and sheets under the brand Blume for Home.
"Sales started coming in large numbers overnight, completely unexpectedly," said Inês Barbosa, the company's marketing manager.
The company also started receiving orders from places in Portugal it had never served. In the first months, one customer returned repeatedly, sometimes up to six times a day. They later learned she was running a short-term rental on Madeira, the Portuguese island about 1,000 km off the mainland.
Sérgio Correia is among the hundreds of thousands of European merchants that have joined Temu to sell under its Local Seller Program. Now live in more than 30 markets, the program put the company in front of shoppers it had been chasing.
Like many other small, traditional businesses, Sérgio Correia found it difficult to reach consumers directly before joining Temu. Then the orders came. "The impact on volume was massive," Barbosa said. "It was just me handling everything at first, and I had to ask for help."
When she hit snags during setup, an account manager was on hand to work through them directly, she said.
While online sales are surging, they have not cannibalized Sérgio Correia’s core wholesale business, suggesting Temu is helping the company reach new customers.
Selling direct has changed how the company writes its listings. Home textiles are hard to judge on a screen, so the team started writing more detailed product descriptions, spelling out materials, measurements and finishes. Clearer listings helped customers understand what they were buying, and positive reviews followed.
To handle its direct sales on Temu, the company set up a dedicated warehouse for online orders and is expanding it to avoid running short of stock. It also plans to put thousands more products on Temu, linking its stock to the platform automatically, and to try reaching shoppers in other countries.
Two decades in, the business has finally built a durable line to the person buying its sheets. "We now have access to the final consumer," Barbosa said.