We recently connected with Matilsha Marxuach and have shared our conversation below.

Matilsha, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? The world needs to hear more realistic, actionable stories about this critical part of the business building journey. Tell us your scaling up story – bring us along so we can understand what it was like making the decisions you had, implementing the strategies/tactics etc.

Concalma started as a strong desire to be part of the ecosystem of slow fashion and companies making a difference to offer local, quality designer products to compete in the market as a real option of conscious consumption. becoming a real option to consumers to start looking and the positive impact the can cause in their local and global economies.
In this 17 years operating the company and Concalma handbag production from the minimum viable product the so famous MVP has been one of our key secrets to scaling.
WE see every opportuntity as a a pilot study its results and then decide if we continue with the effort or not.
Making small consistant investments and proving in the real market instead of strategizing with out having market trials has become a very organic way for Concalma to grow. All our efforts are aligned with our vision of sustainabilities and goals we want to reach to become better all the time as well as to think were are we failing and bring it back to our table and see how we can re sow the seeds of those flowers we want to see bloom, like community engagment being one that when we made shopconcalma.com our main sales channel got affected since we did not have direct contact with costumers any more. So that is a question we have on the table right now how can we make or platform be more interactive and mimic the feel of being in a brick and mortar store.
Big leaps for Concalma have been doing independent Pop Ups that covey the whole Conncalma vibe and philosophy as well as serving being suppliers the the corporate industry like orders for Salesforce a local national beer Medalla where we can reach a new customers that we hope will come back to purchase our bags since our handbag line best statistic is return customers since the quality of product proofs its comfort and durability in use.

Matilsha, 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?

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The Artist: Matilsha Marxuach
Puerto Rican artist Matilsha Marxuach is the Founder & CEO of concalma LLC, and the Senior Designer of concalma handbags, totes, backpacks, and home goods.

Marxuach grew up in the great Caribbean outdoors, always surrounded by animals, a sportswoman who often went fishing with her dad, a memory which she treasures to this day. Nevertheless, Matilsha also loved music and dance, training in classical ballet, which introduced her to creative discipline and wardrobe design. Tilsha, as her close friends call her, became acquainted with the fashion world very early on, working as a child model. She learned about fashion photography and, as she tells it, “fell in love with scissors”, adapting existing garments into new pieces.

During high school, Marxuach spent summers as an exchange student in Europe, venturing out on her own to fairs and markets, a solitary student of humanities and geography. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, she traveled extensively again. Her desire to carry things comfortably became an obsession during her long walks, testing the first prototypes of bags made using remnants, exploring a fashion equation that would one day lead her to the concalma line. Matilsha worked at organic farms in Australia and New Zealand, painting murals during her travels throughout the South Pacific. Eventually, she returned to Puerto Rico, where she acquired and operated an organic mountain farm, where her two daughters were born, ran a ceramic studio, and taught ceramics at the School of Fine Arts in San Juan.

Combining design, ecology, and collectivism, Matilsha Marxuach created concalma in 2006, upholding local manufacturing and fair trade as key to sustainable communal resiliency: the ability to create and recreate, adapt and readapt, thus evolving successfully. Her original inspiration came from the maximalism of Caribbean culture and global street cultures as they informed her formal design training. Her passion for sustainability and aesthetic functionality led her to launch the concalma brand, offering high quality, fair trade fashion products. [Read the concalma story at: ]

In 2017, Matilsha Marxuach became the Director of the Utuado Distribution Center, on behalf of the Center for the New Economy, coordinating the logistics for implementation and distribution of basic goods after Maria, a category five hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico. She also launches a social practice project designing, manufacturing, and distributing free mosquito nets for communities in need. [For more information, please read: Hyperlink] That same year, she founded Proyecto Opciones as an artistic project, seeking to create spaces where adults with special needs can participate in art and theater workshops, ecological initiatives, and engage in safe socialization, as well as advocating for institutions to be more inclusive, Opciones has also provided jobs to artists as workshop leaders, partnered with schools, galleries, and community centers, and been awarded grants by the Segarra Boerman and Miranda foundations.

Matilsha Marxuach acknowledges a number of important mentors, among them: curator Michelle Marxuach, businessman Raomal Perera, and artist Ernesto Pujol. Marxuach has received numerous awards, such as: 2014 winner: “Microentrepreneur of the Year” by Citi Foundation and the Puerto Rico Community Foundation; 2009 Finalist, Guayacán, Inc., EnterPRize Business Plan Competition. Marxuach has also participated in international conferences and events such as: 2015 H-3 Conference, Tech and Innovation, Social Entrepreneurial track, http://h3conference.com; 2014 Ted x Talk, Santurce PR, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuPEZJwOO7s; 2014 Wanted Design Fair, New York; the Iberoamerican Biennial, Matadero (Spain); the Bronx Museum of The Arts, Concalma Pop Up, New York; the AMO Studio Pop Up, Soho, New York.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

One of the most important instances in my life was after hurricane Maria where I was contacted by Centro Para La Nueva Economía to see if I could direct a center for distribution and reliefs efforts to the Municipality of Utuado and adjacent areas where the Concalma Handbag line is manufactured(https://www.good.is/articles/puerto-rico-matilsha-marxuach-concalma). This is so important for me because it proved a resilient model of community building where a small fashion brand like Concalma could actually be of use to do something that was not actually the mission of the company in a moment of a natural disaster to help the community and the country because even while being a for profit company the community mission its at the top of our buisness philosophy.

“When separated into two Spanish words, Concalma translates to the phrase “with a sense of calm.” But after Hurricane Maria, Marxuach changed the logo on the brand’s website to switch between the words “concalma” and “ConPrisa.” The latter is a new coinage: a combination of Spanish words that means “with urgency.” A blue banner on the site currently reads: “We’ve been hit very hard by Hurricane Maria. We need the support of our fans urgently!”
https://www.good.is/articles/puerto-rico-matilsha-marxuach-concalma

Have you ever had to pivot?

After the pandemic we had to pivot from our brick and mortar model where we used to sell our products for the last 15 years to e commerce. The lesson is that we had to change our production model and buisness plan. Buisness plans for me are documents that hold the blueprint to your company not just qualitative and quantitative but also your philosophy and your passion but the do respond directly to the mission and the buisness model and if either changes my suggestion is to revise the plan. We had rethink models, quantities of production of of our handbag line and focus in photoshoots and the lifestyle image part of the company that in a brick and mortar is just there so this was a big change and a big opportunity as a pivot and in the artistic sense as well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://shopconcalma.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shopconcalma/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shopconcalma/
• Linkedin: https://pr.linkedin.com/in/matilsha-marxuach-771ab743

Image Credits
Stephanie Segarra / Campo Stephanie Segarra / Beach backpack Christopher Gregory Rivera / SS23 _10