10072014Tue
Last updateFri, 03 Oct 2014 3pm

Clever business team transforms ‘triques’ into artistic furniture

A small Guadalajara business will soon be heading into its third year designing and selling creatively reworked industrial castoffs.

From a tiny store located near Chapultepec and Niños Heroes and a large workshop elsewhere in the city, Elery Ramirez Van Dyck and Charlie Bradley say they are lucky to be able to live off other businesses (water bottling and printing) while they “grow” their brainchild, which they named Ecotriques.

Triques, Ramirez explained, might be translated as “odds and ends” and has a positive connotation.

An essential piece of the business plan is that the two partners invite developing artists to add a creative touch to tables, chairs and other furnishings, much of it made from the wood of disassembled pallettes.

“We don’t make any profit from their art,” said Ramirez, going on to explain that if, for example, a plain bench is produced for 1,900 pesos and the artist who decorates it asks 8,000 pesos for their work, the piece will sell for 9,900.

“The artists we work with sign their pieces. They’re happy with us because they see that we’re doing what we say we will do,” Ramirez said.

One artist in the store at the moment, Alonso Bolivar, whose artistic name is DMS32, seems to agree, as he energetically sketches a decorative design for a new piece.

“We have a commitment to the artists to promote them,” Ramirez emphasized, “so that they can use us as a showcase. Sometimes you buy art, but nobody can touch it. This is art that is made to touch. It is made for traffic and wear.

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