Juana Chocoyo and her daughter, Arcadia, came to As Green As It Gets™ first as translators from Spanish to their indigenous language, Kaq’chiquel. Arcadia, 16 years old at the time, showed great promise as a future business woman.
In their town, there are many women weavers who need spindles of thread. The only thread locally available is sold loose and by the pound. Arcadia recognized the market demand for thread on spindles. So she made herself a spinning wheel out of an old bicycle. She made a large spindle for the loose thread out of a tree stump and discarded construction materials. She cut small spindles out of plastic tubing, and using her contraption, spins the thread onto her plastic spindles. With not much more than a bicycle and a tree stump, she can process about 20 lbs of thread per hour.
While Arcadia’s spinning wheel was ingenious, her actual profit was only $0.03 per spindle. We analyzed Arcadia and her mother's textile business and discovered that their net earnings frequently amounted to $0.25 per day, and were never more than a few dollars a day.
We found some new markets for their products and increased their margins, but discovered that any business plan can saturate the local hand-woven tortilla warmer market rather quickly. They didn’t need new markets. They needed new products.
The right product came along when they combined their artistic talent with something utilitarian and began making hand-woven women’s purses.
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