To Janeesa María Joseph, the unexpected death of her brother from 26 years, on Christmas Eve almost 8 years ago, he led her without trying to create ‘Salvage María’, a company that creates blankets and many other products made from recycled clothing.
“When my brother died, I felt lonely and depressed. My mom and my sisters live in Texas. My husband told me that he understood what he was going through, but that we had a 2-year-old boy and he needed to be present for him. ”
At that time, Janeesa María says that she had brought home some of her late brother Joshua’s clothes.
“Since I was a child I have always liked creating creative things and painting,” she remembers.
In front of the pile of shirts that her brother had left , he thought he should find a way to fix them for his son.
“ I knew that he was not going to remember my brother, so I started cutting them and turning them into little t-shirts of different colors and sizes so that my son could wear them as he grew up, at 2 and 4 years old ”.
From this effort to recycle and adapt his brother’s t-shirts for his son, some friends started asking him if he could do the same job for their children with concert, high school or college t-shirts.
“This is how my business started and grew. At first, we reused clothes. At the same time he published what he was doing on Instagram and we were discovered by a person from the Nordstrom store who was doing an ecological catwalk on the occasion of Earth Day. ”
Janeesa María says that Nordstrom told her that they would love to present the shirts and some other of their work. “By that time, I had started going to thrift stores and I was buying little jackets and putting fur trim on them and trying to find old materials to make them look new.”
After the recognition that participating in the catwalk brought him Nordstrom’s eco-friendly outfit with kids’ clothing, his brand began to grow and his work was placed in small Los Angeles boutiques.
But one day Three years ago, when she was traveling to Mexico with her mother María Rosario Miller who is from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, she came across a blanket decorated with swallow figures. “It was beautiful and I became obsessed with it. I said, what can I do with it and I turned it into a big cushion, and I put it on Instagram to show it to a friend who owns a pet store and he loved it. ”
In this way, he began to create cushions for pets using Mexican blankets. First for her friend who owns the pet store, but later they started looking for her from other stores.
“I had no plans to venture into in that kind of pet business. I was making cushions for my two children. ”
As she looked for ways to produce more cushions, her mother helped her contact a family of weavers of blankets in Puebla, Mexico and since then he has worked with them.
“I have visited them to see how they make the blankets. They buy large laundry baskets in specific colors. They put it in their machines and they break into fibers. With the fibers, the weavers make threads that they put on the loom to make the blankets. So they are completely recyclable because they are made from old clothes. It’s amazing!“.
Janeesa María says that her company Salvage María has evolved from creating children’s clothing to pet supplies and home decor. “We make beds and all kinds of accessories for pets as well as blankets and cushions for home decoration.”
Talk that her mother supports her in the search for textiles and in building relationships with Mexican artisans. “We have been able to help revive some of the traditional hand-weaving arts that in certain areas are slowly disappearing.”
And he says his Mom has also helped her to figure out how to import as 200 blankets, one month in and another no.
Comment that they rent a warehouse in Huntington Park where around 4 people work for their company.
Regarding the blankets that are manufactured in Puebla, Mexico, she says that she chooses the colors and designs so that they are original and have variety.
“In my store, what they buy me the most are pet beds and blankets.”
During the pandemic, one of the products that most He was sold the masks to protect himself from COVID.
“At a certain point we had to close. We did not know what to do. The stores were canceling our orders. It was very alarming. We had a lot of material standing in the warehouse. I was thinking what can we do and when I saw the masks on the news, I said we should try. When we took them out, it was crazy because we were one of the first companies to make them and that helped us stay in business and even hire one more person. ”
They came to manufacture between 30, 000 Y 40, 000 masks that even donated to hospitals, nonprofits and police stations in Los Angeles and other states.
“Despite the circumstances, it was quite incredible to see how a small group was able to do what we did during the pandemic.”
By recounting everything that has happened After the unexpected death of her brother, she says that she never anticipated that her devastating departure would lead her to create a business that was born with the idea of reusing the shirts she left behind.
“ Reusing things is a theme that is deeply rooted in us culturally. My mother always made us keep the clothes that we no longer used to take to the children of the town where she is from in Mexico. In our house, nothing was wasted ”.
It says that the box The empty cookies were used to put things to sew and even the plastic cutlery was washed and put away.
“In our culture there is a reuse mentality and many can identify with what was happening in my house. Since I was a child, I always thought about how I could reuse things. It is something deeply rooted in me. ”
If you want to know more about Janeesa María’s work, visit her website: https://salvagemaria.com