We were lucky to catch up with Miguel Licona recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Miguel thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?

We take work vacations. Cielo Handcrafted Co-founder, Gloria Olazabal is from Peru so we travel there often to visit her family. However, we are always working, making contacts with artists from all over the country and even visiting them in their home communities and studios.

One half of Cielo is locally made crafts from New Mexican artists. The other half is the beautiful, indigenous art forms found in Peru. We work with several communities of women that produce iconic textiles and ceramics representative of the cultural richness of the country. We have also formed relationships with independent artists and we collaborate to produce innovative new crafts. Of course, we always return from our work vacations packed with new art for Cielo.

Miguel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My wife and Cielo Handcrafted co-founder, Gloria has been a silversmith for almost 20 years. When she moved to the US from Peru 13 years ago, she started making jewelry full time. I started woodworking in college and it had always been a hobby and now I have been woodworking full time for six years. We sold our work at local farmer’s markets and travelled to many art shows. Almost five years ago, we opened our gallery, Cielo Handcrafted on Canyon Road, with our work and the work of one ceramic artist. Since then, we have grown to represent about 30 New Mexico based artists and several individual artists and women arts collectives in Peru. Gloria and I still do our own crafts while running the gallery together and raising our son, Joaquin.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We use Shopify for our online store as well as our point of sale in the gallery. All of our products are categorized online so our in store inventory is mostly synced with our online store. We also have our online store linked with our instagram so we can share photos of products on instagram that has a direct link to the item in our catalog. This helps drive sales by streamlining the entire process.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Gloria is my wife and also the co-founder of Cielo Handcrafted.She is from Peru and we met while we were both traveling in Bolivia almost 20 years ago. We kept in touch for several years until I was able to develop my thesis research project in the Peruvian Amazon and hired Gloria as my field assistant. We spent almost a year in the rain forest and shared many beautiful experiences and adventures. After that, I was able to bring Gloria and her two daughters to the US on a fiancé visa. Now we have a son, Joaquin, we have been married for almost 14 years and we have been running Cielo Handcrafted for 5 years.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cielohandcrafted.com
• Instagram: cielohandcrafted

Image Credits
Inga Hendrickson Brandon Soder