Fussioni
It tells the story that the ‘totumo’ (gourd) had enormous popularity in America; At the time when the Indians were the inhabitants of South America, there could not be a lack of a wild tree of totumo in the villages that provided the raw material to make ornaments and containers to serve ‘chicha’ (traditional beverage made of corn).
This is how Constanza León, investigating history, found in the manufacture of ornaments the perfect idea to rescue this tradition, which led her to create Fussioni, a microenterprise, which as its name says, merged handicrafts with technology for creation of earrings, necklaces, bracelets, pins and key chains, having as a raw material the ‘totumo’.
Totumo (gourd)
Is a fruit of a tree of the same name that grows in warm weather, in this case in Melgar and Ibagué, whose fruits when dried have a hard shell and usually left at the foot of the tree for several months, time in the They lose a lot of their moisture. Then they send them to Bogotá where they arrive totally peeled and processed. There they are broken into pieces and cut according to the design that is previously made in the computer.
The laser machine allows the organization of texts and images. Thanks to a design program and through a memory, it saves the information of the drawing and the impression through a ray that at the same time cuts the ‘totumo’; then the piece is polished to give it color. Finally it is varnished, armed and packed.
“Thanks to the laser machine, everything is faster, because it takes a minute to cut each pair of earrings, while it took a lot of time and precision, so we made our work much easier,” says Esteban Cortés, machine operator.
80% of domestic and foreign buyers contact each other through the business conferences at the Expoartesanías, Jóvenes Emprendedores and exhibitions at the International Fashion Week in Bogotá. There are customers who are mostly distributors, who buy the product wholesale and distribute it in countries such as United States, Spain and France.
Similarly, Fussioni has a dissemination strategy in the social network Instagram and the Web with the Internet page, which allows to show the virtual community, the entire range of products, reaching customers far beyond the areas of traditional commerce.
“The first year is hard and although the Emprender Fund has given us a lot of support for financing with 74 of our initiative, starting a business is a very complicated thing because you start earning more or less after two years. we are in the heights we have been working for two and a half years and now we are seeing the economic results and collecting everything we sow, “says Constanza.
Currently the company generates employment for ten people; most of them are young people between 18 and 25 years old and mothers who are heads of families, those who have orders from the months of September to be able to deliver them in November, which means that the crafts have lists in the stores for the season from December.
The idea is a short term is to open your own store in a commercial area of Bogotá. To preserve the type of public to which the product is directed, this store manufactures and sells everything that can be produced with the ‘totumo’.