A NORMAL DAY IN THE WORKSHOP

The day starts at 8am and the first ones to come are always the administrative team - Julía, Chonita, Rosa, Elisa and Asael. The rest of the team chooses their own arrival time before 9am. Everyone has their ‘tarea/homework’ and as they finish, they are assigned a new one by Elisa. If we have new designs everyone is supported by Julía and Chonita in learning how to make them by applying the right techniques. When they feel equipped they continue on their own and is only supervised along in the process to secure that the work is made in the right quality and looks good.

We all have lunch together at mid day on the top level of the house and normally each person brings their own food to add to the table for everyone to share. Sometimes we make special lunches to celebrate special occasions.

For the rest of the afternoon we continue working on our individual ‘tareas’ - and not to forget, we have our daily (and most favorite) snack time break around 3pm, where we have a glass of cold coca cola or juice with some snacks before the day ends at 5pm :)

When we co-founded Pura Utz together it felt like the greatest and scariest summer of our lives. One, because we were now fully committing to each other, our vision and most importantly to the women in our team. Who knew if this was going to work? Nonetheless we had the time of our lives that summer creating new designs, developing very difficult pieces for a collaboration, eating lots of food and starting to manage this project as we envisioned it. We went on group trips, built our first inventory bookcase and formalized production processes through the skills of Elisa. 

It was always (and continues to be) our dream to create the most beautiful production place, so Bernabela never rested when it came to developing the physical frame work of our workshop - which by the way is located in her house. Today we have added two additional levels to the house, installed big beautiful windows and are still dreaming of (and working towards) finalizing the last floor for more production place and great lunch views :)

From the beginning we all wanted a larger and more comfortable space and this ended up being more than three years of work. We constantly moved the team to work in the best parts of the house for the team to work all the time. Initially we were in the kitchen, then on the second floor with a little inventory and daylight, the last place was a half covered terrace but it was affected by the climate that was changeable - sometimes the cold or heat was just too much for our team although the light and view was the best. Finally we had build up finances to be able to construct a fourth level exclusively for the ‘workshop’ and we chose to have an open space so we could all work together, we installed large windows that allowed maximum daylight and this was without a doubt the best result. Now have enough space for our inventory, materials, administrative team and above all because now we can receive visitors from any part of the world in our workshop, where we invite them to learn more about our work together with the team and see the beautiful view of Volcán Atitlán from our windows. We also have a small shop in our workshop - so stop by :))