Tags: Furniture
By KC Santos
OTON, ILOILO – This entrepreneur found ways to create fashionable furniture accents from cacao leaves.
Elsa Chavez started her crafts business in 1998 and with constant attendance to trade shows, learned to make lamp shades out of indigenous, yet abundant, raw materials.
“We were thinking of a standout, indigenous material that would improve how our lamps look like, and we thought of the cacao,” says Elsa.
Preserved cacao leaves are being sold in Iloilo, but Elsa with the help of her family, thought of more uses of the abundant raw material. Today, their company, Boyel Marketing, remains the only enterprise in Iloilo selling cacao lampshades.
Elsa explains that cacao leaves are boiled, brushed on with a toughening liquid, and then individually hung to dry. The dried leaves are then overlapped on a plastic base which becomes the lamp shade.
She adds that the unique product is also benefitting craftsmen from her hometown of Oton. “I’m glad how one plant can impact the lives of a huge number of people who once had very limited sources of income,” says Elsa.
Her lamp shades cost from P700 to P5,000 and are distributed locally. She says marketing her product locally makes the business more fulfilling as it being appreciated by her fellow Filipinos.
“It feels good to make your fellow Filipinos enjoy the products found in locally, even if it’s just as simple as a leaf,” says Elsa adding that local consumers have been very curious and appreciative of her cacao lamps.
“It’s amazing how there are vast the opportunities in such a simple indigenous material. Filipinos should be more imaginative so that opportunities become bigger,” concludes Elsa.
Get more information about Boyel Marketing
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