Tags: Cottage Industries, Entrepreneurship, Handicrafts
By Leo Magno
SILANG, CAVITE — It is a small roadside store without a signage one would likely miss while driving by the highway through sleepy Barangay Lumil in the municipality of Silang, Cavite. Yet within the quaint establishment are Filipino-made handicrafts and home furnishings of indigenous material which bigger, more popular stores are quick to resell.
Should the handicrafts and furniture within this store look familiar, perhaps you’ve seen them in more popular places like SM Kultura in Megamall, Regalong Pambahay, Sonia’s Garden or Balikbayan Handicrafts in Glorietta. Yet these handmade items were the foundations of a business created by Abundio “Dong” Caño from sweat and P300 in capital.
The native handicrafts in this store include various home furnishings, kitchenware, straw bags that range from P200 to P400 (P180 to P350 if you’re a good haggler), curtains and their popular mosquito net, “mosqueterra” or “kulambo” in the vernacular.
Dong began weaving and sewing his products by hand when he and his wife were retrenched by a large bag manufacturing company in the ‘90s. Armed with only P300, they started making household items from native materials originating from Bohol, Cebu, Davao and Cavite — and thus was born BoCeDaCa Handicrafts, named for the source of the materials they create by hand.
Approaching friends and family members as clients, the couple received very little orders, and so Dong had to stroll along Makati under the rain carrying plastic bags filled with his native products, peddling his wares from store to store. Seeking shelter from the rain in one of the shops in Makati, Dong did not realize he was speaking with the store manager, who fortuitously ordered six pieces each of his six bag designs. That was the start of his business relationship with Balikbayan Handicrafts.
With help from the Department of Trade and Industry which saw him exhibiting his products at various provincial trade fairs, the abundance of orders led him to change the name of his P300 startup to Abundant Handicrafts. It also helped that Dong’s real name was “Abundio.”
Dong Caño’s products have even reached Japan. Abundant Handicrafts has exported a few items to Kozmart where curtains which sell for about P350 in their store in Barangay Lumil are sold for an equivalent of about P5,000 in Japan.
“Mahirap talaga sa simula pero lumalaki ang negosyo, (It’s really hard at the start but now business is booming),” says Dong.
Nowadays Dong spends his time attending trade fairs and tending to his other shop on the bypass road of Silang where “Abundant Place” serves native delicacies. Here is where he and his customers shop, dine and relax, and where Dong is known as Pastor Dong because he is a born-again Christian pastor. The times have been abundant for him indeed, far from when he was peddling bags in Makati under the rain.
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