Paco Melero

In 2015, with more than 55 years, I set up my small crafts workshop specialized in the design and elaboration of Andalusian-inspired decorative pieces, that I draw with a pyrography on wood or on leather. I also use regularly polychrome, following a tradition of more than 10 centuries in the famous city of Córdoba: the guadamecí, as well as my own creative intuition.

A guadamecí is a tanned ram skin adorned with relief, painted, or gilded patterns. It was a skin used in the past, mainly for hangings.

Without realizing it, I had been doing this all my life, but my job was another. And I turned my life around. Now is the time to turn my business around. Online communication is going to be the focus.

I make decorative pieces with great aesthetic content, with formats that evoke the old architectures of our heritage (lintels, rose windows, wavelets). With a pyrograph I do arabesques, and geometries, in wood, or in leather, which I paint with gold and silver as in the old craft of the guadamecí, but with a marked contemporary character.

My business objectives are:

It was time to rethink the activity, developing the lessons learned, and designing an attractive and shareable business model; managed by a single person and adapted to ‘clean’ life strategies, ethical economy, and responsible consumption.

I am focusing on remodelling my business idea, especially on the concept of contextualization, in a double sense: the object, the process and the experience in its own environment, the workshop, and in its relationship with the social, physical space, historical and cultural of the city; and in terms of connectivity and communication. All this with the goal of offering a value proposition, well defined and valid(ated). While adapting the sales capacity to the productivity thanks to the digital environment, and not vice versa since the end is not the growth of the company but the survival of the activity.

Work and live successfully, not die while trying or letting die.

My learnings from the Crafting Business Programme:

• I have been able to deepen ideas and knowledge, incorporate resources, and above all, rethink collaboratively, considering all aspects of the workshop as a business. This is essential when it comes to defining value and optimizing your own capabilities.
• Study the possibilities of a necessary digital structure, focused on promoting artisan work and establishing the most favourable commercial relationships.
• Detecting or intuiting new consumer and commercial trends.
• Access to business models in crafts.
• And, above all, to people, professionals, who from different places, and in distant moments like these, have shared links of knowledge and experience, and the more human side of crafts.

My 5 top tips that I have learnt on this journey:

1. It is important to make the right stops to know where you are, where you were going, when to change direction, where you want to be …
2. Balancing the trade with the business.
3. Share professional issues with professionals.
4. To train and communicate (oneself) to be in the world.
5. And above all, be consistent with oneself and responsible with society.
6. Designing and validating your own model, and focusing on this from coherence, is going to be, possibly, the best strategy in the market, and for life. Artisan work, in general, or in certain typologies or business models, and in my case, it is closely linked to life. And this, more than negative, can be, and must be a value proposition.