We were lucky to catch up with Natalia Rendon and Clara De Niz recently and have shared our conversation below.

Natalia and Clara, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Picking a name was one of the biggest challenges for us we changed our business name four times until we finally came up with our perfect name Antojolandia. Before Antojolandia our business name was Cravingland which we loved because it translated to land of cravings but once the decision was made to open our first store we wanted a fresh start new branding and a name that represented more of our mexican roots. It took months of brainstorming and so many ideas for other names but finally one day we just switched our name from english to spanish and it was perfection. Antojo means craving in English so we simply just switched the name over to Spanish and we came up with Antojolandia the land of the Antojos which for us is perfect because that’s what our business represents.

Natalia and Clara, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We are most proud of our growth because Antojolandia was simply started by two friends selling Mexican parfaits outside a grocery store on the weekends. Clara was born in Jalisco Mexico and Natalia was born in Los Angeles Ca both moved to Atlanta in 2018 met and became friends. Being new to Georgia with no family and alot of spare time the idea of selling mexican parfaits came up and we both decided we would try it out.We had one table which we borrowed we bought a table cover and our main goal for those first few weeks was just to sell the few parfaits which was about 10 per day. All our products were homemade which set us apart from any other business and word spread quickly around the community of the delicious fresas con crema we were selling. After 2 weeks we decided to add esquite to our menu (Mexican streetcorn) and things just took off from there. We secured a second pop up location in Smyrna and began to attend different festivals around Atlanta. We got to a point where there was so much room for growth for our business but we both had full time jobs and we had to make a decision to take a risk and invest ourselves completely into our business or continue on the same path. After sometime we finally got the courage we both decided to quit our full time jobs and focused completely on growing our business and opening our first store front. We continued our setups adding more days Thursday to Sunday while also doing catering and participating in festivals around Atlanta. We officially opened our first store front in June 2024 in Kennesaw GA. We are proud of our humble beginings, dedication and hardwork we have put into our business to be where we are now and most importantly that many of our customers have been with us throughout these years watching our growth.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

For us our authentic delicious taste of our products is what has set us apart within our market. We specialize in homemade traditonal Mexican treats while also mixing in a few popular Mexican American snacks bringing you the best of both worlds. We make most of our products from scratch and we always use the best products to keep the authentic delicious taste. There’s products we can buy already made saving us time but for us taking short cuts has never been an option we know what keeps our customers coming back is the extra time and effort we put into our homemade antojitos. Our reputation has completely been built by our customers they spread the word telling friends family and coworkers about us which is always the best way to market your business because it’s genuine feedback.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

We started with no capital we borrowed a table from our cousins and for the products we purchased we split the cost between the both of us. Thankfully the first weekend we made enough to pay ourselves back and the extra cash we had we used for the purchases for the next weekend. The few weekends where we made more profit we used those funds to add more items to our menu or to buy things like heaters,tents, storage containers, utensils etc. For more than a year of us doing our pop up we received $0 in cash payouts all the profit we received we used it to put back into our business and to fund our 2nd pop up. The first actual payout we received from our business was almost a year and a half later and it was $13 each and we still remember how excited we were that we had $26 dollars left to split after so many weekends of hardwork we felt like we were finallly moving fordward. Most people won’t work if they don’t get paid but for us we saw it as an investment towards our business we believed in ourselves and seeing our business grow motivated us to keep putting everything we had in reaching our business goals.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Antojolandia
• Facebook: Antojolandia