I am a jewelry and accessories designer, born in Uruguay, living in Mexico City for most of my life. Five years ago I started this adventure, and even though I started from scratch, our collections are now being sold at the best hotels, museums and Boutiques all over Mexico, USA, Nicaragua, Honduras, Poland and soon in Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg, London and Spain. When I started this company I didn’t think of it as a business, it was more of a hobby, but after seeing people’s reaction towards it, I felt it was time to show people what I was capable of. At the beginning I started selling Tibetan jewelry combined with my own designs, but after showing them to the director of the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico, she told me: I love your designs, but why can’t you see the beauty that surrounds you? Than was an eye opener, and I started to work with all the beautiful handcrafts that are made in this country that adopted me as a child, which aren’t quite appreciated by the people that are too used to seeing them every dayI use old worn Indian dresses mostly, that come from Southern Mexico and Guatemala. All of this textiles are hand made and woven by waist looms ( I hope it is called this way in English) The dresses and moxevales are originally made for each person that wears them, but after a while they sell them and we use them and combine them with leather, suede, patent leather and we embroider it with seed beads with so much quality that it is impossible to think this is a recycled piece of cloth. Most of the materials we use are eco friendly, and we practice and encourage fair trade, buying our products directly from the people that make them. We encourage the kids of the artisans to follow the work that has been performed for generations by their ancestors, due to the fact that many of our artisans are elderly people.When we started to create our handbags, it was very hard for us to find someone who would work with us, someone we could trust and who could perform the quality we were looking for. A friend of ours referred us to someone who worked for many important companies, and we begged him to sew the first model I designed. It took him about three months to deliver us the handbags, which we sold immediately. But we had one bag remaining. The bags were supposed to be made with cow’s leather. I noticed that the remaining bag had a small hole in it, and I saw like a piece of cloth coming out of it. It took us two months to realize that it was made of …..plastic! After that we became experts in the materials we use!!I have been awarded several times as best accessories designer in Mexico, and have been published in the best magazines in Mexico, Latin America, USA and even Europe and China, but I feel my greatest achievement was to get a loan for one of our artisans from the governor of his state, so he could improve his workplace and teach more people his ancestors techniques.
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