BUSINESS BITS

Making cakes/ Kalinga textile
CANDICE LIM and LARRY LOPEZ

Filipinos just love to eat, and when they do, their meal is never complete without dessert.

This fondness of Filipinos for things sweet has led two young entrepreneurs to each put up a home-based bakery of her own, making specialty cakes and pastries for neighborhood customers and client food-service establishments.

The two young bakers, Elaine Lo of Cosmo Bread in San Juan and Cristina Miren Misa of Dessert Express in Manila now both have a thriving bakery business with healthy prospects for continued growth.

Upon graduation from college, Lo first dabbled in different business fields – the provincial hotel business, sports casting and also hosting – before discovering that baking was her true calling. She then put up Cosmo Bread in November of 2005, borrowing P500,000 from her mother for initial capital.

Most of it went into the purchase of baking equipment and utensils for her home-based operation, including a bakery oven. Mixers, and cake boards; the rest went to baking ingredients such as flour, sugar, and chocolate.

She did everything by herself in the beginning, regularly making fudge bars and double chocolate truffle cakes for a number of client coffee shops and restaurants as well as for individual customers in her neighborhood. She has since expanded her menu and recently added peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies to her product offerings, and because her orders had grown many, she has now a staff of three bakery helpers and a driver. Her sister Carla now also helps her out in managing the bakery.

To grow the business, Lo has mainly used word-of-mouth advertising, promoting Cosmo Bread largely through her friends and satisfied customers. She augments on local websites. “For greater awareness about my product offerings, I also give free samples to friends and new acquaintances as well as to potential customers during bazaars,” she says. She reports that Cosmo Bread’s business has been risk by far, and she expects to get her return in investments as early as by yearend.

How Cristina Miren Misa of Dessert Express got into the home-based bakery business is in many respects different from Elaine Lo’s experience.

To begin with, Misa always felt that baking was in her blood. Only 22, she has been baking for seven years now and continues to do so even if she now has a part-time job as an English tutor. “My family just loves cooking and baking – and eating, of course!” she explains. “In my case, baking started as a hobby that I really enjoyed, and it was only later that I realized I could make it a business out of it.”

Misa got started with her own home-based bakery in December of 200 with only P10,000 in capital. Her family already had the hardware and equipment for it, so all she needed were the ingredients to do her tried-and-tested recipes for revel bars and brownies, among several other cakes and pastries. She recovered her initial investments after only a few weeks, but she decided to plow the money back into the bakery, stocking up on ingredients for future orders. Indeed, Misa considers inventory management crucial to the bakery business, so she always makes it a point to stock up on baking material in preparation for peak seasons and holidays.

Dessert Express having seen strong from its startup onwards, Misa now plans not only to expand her home-based bakery but also to open a bakery store of her own sometime soon.
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Certainly one of the earliest, Kalinga textile which is now catching users’ preference in the province and abroad has been included in the world list of renowned woven products by an English engineer who came to do research work in the country.

Eric Anderson, an engineer and economist who worked here in the country for seven years, made a research on Kalinga material culture and produced a monograph – Kalinga Culture, which featured Kalinga woven textile.

Anderson brought home a copy of this document and made presentations about it at the People’s Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm and at the Textile Society of Hongkong.

He maintains a collection of textiles from various parts of the world and his collection of Kalinga items is said to be the largest private collections in the world with more than 100 documented antique textiles. He created and opened the ALTACO site for the Antique Luzon Tribal Art Connoisseurs.

Weaving in the province, which could be traced as early as the 18th century, derived certain origin and influence from the Indonesian design and has now evolved in its fashionable fit – the Ginamat design.

Ginamat, predominantly styled by the Lubuagan weavers, is a twilled pattern decorated with silk embroidery. Its geometric in nature showing the early mathematic prowess of Kalinga weavers, even in the absence of formal education in mathematics.

Today, Ginamat is chosen as the favorite ethnic accent in the modern world for weddings, pageants and scintillating occasions. Textile stylists in the world read in the Ginamat not only its fashionable design but its symbolic significance, depicting the value of culture of its origin. It speaks of the living waters in Kalinga, carried down by the currents of Chico River.

The Chico is a rich source of living for many Kalinga tribes. It was the proposed site of the failed Chico Dam hydro-electric project, which attracted rebellion from Cordillera tribes in the eighties.

Kalinga textile has its distinct fabulous quality using indigenous raw materials from banana, cogon, abacca and maguey. Weavers use these basic materials and braid them with polyester or cotton textile.

New innovative products finding competitive demand in international markets include dining accessories such as table runners and place mats. Common items produced are skirts, loincloths, sashes, capes, headbands, blankets, blouses and underskirts, bags and pouches.