We were lucky to catch up with Lula Azorey recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lula, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

Escaping Cuba on a small boat or leaving your home country Venezuela in the search for Freedom and Safety may be the riskiest thing we (Lula and Jose) have done in our life (Respectively), but the decision was obvious and there was no much to loose, but after working hard to ramp up to a some sort of stable financial situation in the land of the free, to take the risk of starting ARKA – a furniture store in Houston, TX was a different type of risk.

As you know, starting a business in the USA requires much higher level of discipline and creativity nowadays, and just the idea of competing against a wonderful model as IKEA or a great businessman such as “Mattress Mack” and his Gallery furniture, bring us chilling memories of living poor. But instead of letting the past to push us down, We used it as our motivation and inspiration, “we took risk back then and got rewarded, we can do it again”.

It is how We took the leap of faith to start ARKA Living back in 2015, but bootstrapping a new business project is almost never easy and ARKA is not the exception.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We knew our business project needed to be different and it needed to be related to something we actually love to do, While living in Malaysia, and travelling to places with artistically rich interior styles such as Morocco, Indonesia, Thailand and Greece, the Idea of ARKA Living started to develop, as we have the opportunity to deeply experienced the spiritual energy and vibes of the natural handmade products.

Based on the mentioned experiences, we understood that our mission was to facilitate others to experience the interaction with one-0f-the-kind interiors, natural wood, stone, fabrics and handcrafted metals and tiles, as part of the raw materials and antient craftmanship techniques from around the globe.

And that is what we have been doing the last 6 1/2 years, we have learned about what designs make natural pieces an artistic piece able to create special experiences, we have specialized in most of the hand crafting techniques, so we can work with multiple artisans to increase our circle of influence, we have learned to blend different cultures craftmanship and now we have the ability to custom made in the USA through a wide spectrum of techniques, but the Journey just starts, we have been expanding and serving more customers year by year and we continue to strive how we can achieve our mission and the experience of our customers. In general thank you to all the customers that have supported our project and be our inspiration that our mission is valuable and that we occupy an especial place in their hearts.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Two years after we open our doors to the public, the underpass in 59 got “invaded” by a major homeless population, it reduced the traffic of costumers to our brick and mortar, so we have no choice than to go online, selling bulky and heavy natural items online is not easy, especially when every piece we make is different, but we found the way to do it, after multiple trial and error experimentations. So, when the COVID hit the brick and mortar industry, we were more than ready to serve those customers that were looking for unique home furniture over the internet.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson we had to unlearn was to use initial actual cost to assess whether to pursue or reject a business opportunity, we learn with time that business offering did not appear attractive at the beginning, and later became viable by the optimization of the processes, for example some of the shipping preparation and crating when shipping to places as far as Alaska or Puerto Rico was extremely expensive and cost prohibited to customers, but by optimizing and streamlining the process we were able to reduce the cost by 80% (in some cases) and made the business opportunities feasible, so now, we stay open minded, creative to find ways to identify savings and improve reliability before rejecting business opportunities.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.arkaliving.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/arka.living/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arkaliving/
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/arka-living/
• Yelp: www.yelp.com/biz/arka-living-houston

Image Credits
All pictures belong to ARKA, no additional credits