Lighted leaves

Arts and Crafts Industries, Inc. has been through several transformations.

Its latest one involved a capital of P20,000 to make lamps for last year’s National Trade Fair. Using fossilized leaves and flowers as the starting point, the company glued the skeletal leaves of guyabano, narra, and alibangbang to resin panels attached to wall and table lamps.

Today, the company’s total assets have grown to almost P400,000.

Based in Tuguegarao, Cagayan, the company uses leaves which are stripped of all their flesh, leaving only the delicate-looking web-like network of veins. The processing for 50,000 leaves takes three months, with a spoilage rate of up to 40% when it rains.

"No two lamps are the same. Each is a unique hand-made signature art," said general manager Alexander Salvador Luzano. "The multi-colored leaves have to be manually pasted on the resin panels, one by one. My wife and I do not entrust the pasting and arranging of the leaves on the panels to anybody else. The same colors cannot overlap. It is a craft which requires thinking, not just manual skill."

Slow work

Arts and Crafts took the fossilized leaves fad and ran with it.

"The lamp was the idea of my wife, Jessica. It took her a whole year of endless experimentation to develop the technology to make the leaves adhere to the lamp’s resin panels," said Luzano.

The company sub-contracts the processing and dyeing of the leaves as well as the wood cutting, assembly, sanding, and finishing of the panels to a handful of families in five satellite areas. The Luzano couple do the assembly and packaging.

"We are capable of producing 200 lamps per month. It’s slow work. I can do 30 lamps per day. My wife averages five to 10 panels daily because she’s meticulous. I work in the living room, installing the electrical and attaching the paneling. She prefers the kitchen," said Luzano.

The bulk of production is sold in local trade fairs geared towards the mid- to high-end customers. Prices range from P850 for a wall lamp to P9,500 for a panel divider. A small volume is shipped to Australia, Greece, and Germany as filler in container vans.

"We sell anywhere from 50 to 100 pieces per shipment," said Luzano. " Of course, big-time clients order customized designs. My wife, who will often wake me up in the middle of the night to get pen and paper before she forgets the designs that pop in her mind, executes the special orders herself."

Next year, Arts and Crafts intends to come up with lamps for the mass market, priced at between P500 and P1,000. It also intends to come up with new product lines like ladies’ accessories, table wares, food grade plates and tiles.

Advice

"Being on your own is admittedly scary but it is also more exciting," said Luzano, who quit his job as a medical representative for a multinational pharmaceutical company at age 30."You are on your toes all the time. What you earn is the result of what you put in the business. In the company I used to work for, I worked like a carabao but didn’t even get 2% of the total sales I generated."

Arts and Crafts started with a capital of P5,000, all of which went to buying skeins of thread of every color for cross-stitch hobbyists such as Jessica Luzano, who is a cosmetic dermatologist by education.

"We were fortunate. Because of the network of friends that I developed in the drug industry, we were able to borrow money to buy a vehicle and a copying machine for our designs and to find a place in the market," said Luzano.

After six years, the company was generating sales of between P5,000 and P20,000 a day, selling patterns, threads and accessories.

When the cross stitch hobby market became crowded in 2000, Arts and Crafts shifted to candle making and woodwork before settling on lamp making.

"It was total risk-taking but I have set my goals in life. I wanted my own business," said Luzano. "My wife and I see our earlier failures as opportunities. If there is any business secret at all, we have survived because we believe that it’s better to do business with two heads rather than with one. We have never given up."