More than 15 years ago, she and husband-lawyer, Virgilio, went on a pleasure trip to Southeast Asian countries. During those trips, she has found herself having a keen interest on handmade paper products from Japan, Thailand and India. She has noted that Japan uses the bark of a shrub, Thailand uses mulberry wastes while India uses cotton to make handmade paper.
Having that latent talent in handicrafts making herself, she started to do research on handmade paper. She went to trade fairs to know about the business, and even visited some handmade paper plants in Bicol and Manila, including the Salay Handmade Paper Products Industries, Inc. (SHAPII). At that time, she was more interested in product design only.
Using the plain handmade sheets she bought from other papermaking outlets, she started making her own products. She was so inspired by orders which kept coming in. She then decided that she should go into handmade paper production herself. Armed with her basic knowledge on handmade paper making, she started her own home-based papers, using the kitchen blenders. The initial products were encouraging that even her husband became very supportive of her infant business venture and gave her additional financial assistance.
After three broken blenders, her business flourished, and orders kept pouring in. She decided that it was time for her to hire additional hands.
Through the assistance of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) Provincial Science and Technology Center in Misamis Oriental, a basic training on handmade papermaking was conducted for her workers.
Business continued to prosper that she could not keep up with the orders anymore. She sought the assistance of DOST in region 10 based in Cagayan de Oro City. The financial aid was used to buy an oven, hot plate dryers and motorized beaters. The assistance made a big difference in her business, and in fact, increased her production output several folds. It also was able to solve her major problem on paper molds, which has been the main reason why some of her past purchase orders has been shelved.
Five years later, and inspired by the continuous orders from both local and international market, she again sought the assistance of DOST-10. The P1M loan extended by the DOST-10 through its Small Enterprises Technology Upgrading Program (SET-UP) was used for the installation of additional beaters, kiln dyer, mechanical screw press, fiber cooker, fiber squeezer, univats, dying tubs and a roller presser. The new equipment made a significant impact to the business as they made handmade papermaking highly-efficient and cost-effective.
Indeed, the “hobby,” which started in the kitchen, has gone a long way. The business is now housed in a two-storey plant located in a 1000-sq.m. area in Barra, Opol, Misamis Oriental. It employs more than 300 people during peak production (in-house and contractual) about a hundred are home-based backyard workers. Seven regular staff man the business, which include the general manager, two production managers (one each for paper production and crafts), quality control officer, administrative officer, bookkeeper, and in-house designer.
Aside from the local market, the CDO-HMPC boasted of having penetrated the world market, which includes the USA, Japan, Fiji Islands, Qatar, Kuwait, Hongkong, Japan, Singapore, Australia, countries in Europe like Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Sweden.
Their product lines include wedding albums, photo albums, stationeries, paper boxes, greeting cards, gift bags, picture frames and other novelty items.
All the family members are involved in the business. Eldest daughter Zara, a lawyer, takes charge of drawing up the Memo Agreement with the buyers and in reviewing the contracts. JV, the second child, serves as the manager. Nicole, the third child, who is an interior designer, does the in-house designing, along with Luchi. Husband, Virgilio, serves as consultant.
As the business continues to flourish, awards and recognitions also came in. Recent achievements include being the only two companies from the Philippines that made it through a rigorous and extensive European Market Entry Strategy Seminars held in Netherlands. As a result, CDO HMPC qualifies to display and have its own booth at the Paperworld in Frankfurt Germany for three consecutive years. It also qualified for European Export Coaching from the Center for Promotion of Import (CBI).
CDO HMPC also received a 13M grant from the Australian Government’s Enterprise Challenge Fund (ECF), the first grant awardee from the Philippines. Funded by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAid), the ECF provides businesses with grants ranging from Php 3.8 million (A$100,000) to 57M (A$1.5M) to support sound business ideas that can also have a positive impact on poverty alleviation. The grant is the highest so far approved by ECF among participating countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
The success of CDO-HMPC is attributed to the following: its readiness to attain the level of productivity as required by the importing markets, actual market research, introducing designs with European trends and style, competitive quality and craftsmanship of products and its being socially responsible.
Of course, CDO-HMPC business is not always a bed of roses. It has also experienced many problems, but always, it has found ways to cope. Some lessons learned are the resilience to market problems especially during global economic crisis and institutionalizing its accounting systems focusing on fair economic trade, environmental protection and democratization of workers.
“Were it not for DOST’s assistance, we could have lost our foreign buyers… could have closed shop many years ago,” says JV, the general manager. {via}
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