We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lourdes Oquendo-Oria a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lourdes, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

My mission is to bring permanent joy to an adult or child’s life by creating custom pieces of laser engraved wood and acrylic that they will cherish forever.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I’ve worked in the corporate world for over 20 years in a field that I fell into right out of high school. During that time, I graduated from the university with a Bachelor’s degree in business and always had the desire to be my own boss. It wasn’t until 16 years later that I decided to take a leap of faith and leave the corporate world to fulfill that desire and start my own business.

Although I’ve had numerous ideas of “what I want to be when I grow up”, it wasn’t until one day that I saw someone creating personalized items using a laser engraving machine, which inspired me to start creating my own – so I purchased the machine. I’ve always had a passion personalized items and I realized that I too wanted to spread that love and create custom items for others that will always be remembered.

I’m most proud of the joy I’m putting in people when they first see what I’ve created for them and then they share it with their family and friends.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

After working for almost 12 years for the same company and being unfulfilled in my role, I decided it was time for me to take the next step and pivot in my “career”. I also just became a mom and I had my son a few months before Covid hit. Thanks to Covid, my job at the time changed our work schedule to a hybrid setting and that not only gave me the opportunity to be with my son more often, but also allowed me to thrive at my work. But almost a year after, my job at the time decided to revert us back to our old schedule of being in the office 5 days a week. I begged my boss to please let me continue with a hybrid schedule and showed him how much more productive I was working this way, but no matter how much I tried, he wouldn’t budge.

Essentially, the combination of being unfulfilled at work and the lack of care for how much better I was at performing my job when I worked in a hybrid setting, ultimately let me to decide it was time for me to leave and do my own thing doing something I actually enjoyed and brought me joy. I guess you can say that I was part of the Great Resignation.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

The majority of my sales are through Etsy. The pros of Etsy is that they’re a well known platform that many buyers are automatically drawn to for personalized items. The cons of Etsy is that they charge a lot of fees and they do not have a phone number to speak with someone in case a seller is in need of help with their account, etc.

My other sales are through personal networking on Facebook groups and with other moms at my sons school. I tried to list my items on Amazon, but I found their platform to be too cumbersome. In the near future, I hope to transition into my own ecommerce site.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.casaoria.com
• Instagram: @casaoria
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/casaoria