I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my business and how many pivots and makeshift strategies have gotten me through the last eleven years. From zero capital and bootstrapping to pandemic upsets, mind-numbing tariffs to export nightmares, slim profit margins to human-centered staffing, I have ridden so many different waves and worn so many different hats since Luna Zorro first began (bright-eyed and bushy-tailed).
I am definitely not the first founder or small-business owner to say that entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. It most certainly is not. It is, however, for the bold of heart and requires as much vision, enthusiasm and gusto as one can muster, day-in and day-out...often lined with an initial element of naivete. As a business owner, one has to believe in their “product” more than anyone else, otherwise, there would be no point.
And when it comes to collaborating with artisans, there is no exception.
Looking at where Luna Zorro stands today, I feel a complex combination of pride, exhaustion and inspiration. The newest arms of our business (like the curated trips we offer and the boutique hotels I’ve designed interiors for) actually exist to protect the oldest and most foundational part of what Luna Zorro stands for: supporting and celebrating handwoven textile traditions so that they can continue thriving in the communities that they come from.
Delia Chiroy has been part of Luna Zorro for all 11+ years of it’s existence. She is a pillar of the business and represents an intuitive thread running through so much of what we have created—the person I think of whenever someone asks what my business is about.
In 2015 I was just starting to find my way in the world of textiles, when I received a call from 22 year old Delia. We had met briefly during a project in the Western Highlands and later she got my phone number from a cooperative leader. She called me out of the blue to say that she would like to make the three-hour bus journey to Antigua to show me some examples of her family’s work. She had so much pride and courage. Without any capital to start a business, I wasn’t sure what I could offer her, but I knew we had to meet. In so many ways, Delia and I have grown up together. She constantly inspires me with her talent and tenacity. Because of that brave leap she took, Luna Zorro has had countless, successful collaborations with the Chiroy family - a partnership that has grown (and been nurtured) from a true foundation of friendship and respect.
I think about Delia and her family anytime someone asks why we’ve expanded into small-group travel, because the honest answer has almost nothing to do with growth for growth’s sake and almost everything to do with keeping the textile - and people - side of this business alive in the first place.
Running things ethically, paying fair wages, sourcing responsibly, never asking artisans to speed up or cut corners to hit a margin, is genuinely expensive to sustain. It’s slow by design and for the sake of design. But the honest truth is that kind of pace doesn’t generate the revenue a business needs to keep teams employed and the studio lights on year after year. This is really why the travel side of our business first grew and, luckily for us, has blossomed.
To keep the textile side of Luna Zorro operating on realistic terms and on the terms of the artisans we work with, it became clear a little over three years ago that we needed to build other revenue streams stemming from services in addition to products. I love to travel consciously and thoughtfully and I love sharing the beauty of Guatemala, so once I decided we’d take the leap and run our first trip, the results felt so natural and so authentic.
The beauty of handwoven textiles is that they highlight the incredible skill and craftsmanship of the master weavers I am lucky to know, and as a human-centered product, they are bespoke and small batch. Rather than forcing production to increase unsustainably, we needed to find other scalable offers that could highlight the world of Guatemalan textiles while also giving them the honor and respect they deserve.
An artisan and their craft is not one without the other just as much as working with artisans is not a charitable cause or a voyeuristic opportunity to gawk and bargain. Weaving in Guatemala is a living, working, economically essential part of daily life for a huge number of men and women, particularly in indigenous communities where this craft has survived colonization, civil war, and decades of pressure to disappear into something cheaper and faster.
Every order we place and every trip we run is a small vote for that survival, not because anyone needs saving, but because an economy like this only keeps existing when enough people choose to actually participate in it honestly, with their money, their time, and their attention. And that is how the travel side of our business was born. The curated trips we lead aren’t really about just seeing a place, they’re about being let into that place with curiosity, integrity and respect.
We didn’t start running trips because we wanted a second business. We started because we wanted the first one to survive, and along the way it turned into something I believe in just as much as the weaving itself.
Eleven years into knowing Delia, I feel a kinship and a profound sense of gratitude that somehow our very unique backgrounds and paths, crossed in this lifetime. That’s the piece I want people to leave with, whether they’ve been on one of our trips or just read about them here. Conscious travel, at least to me, isn’t a marketing term; it’s travel that remembers there are real people, real histories, and real economies on the other side of the tourist’s experience.
I’d genuinely love to hear from you on this one. Have you had a travel experience that changed how you thought about where your things come from? What pulls you toward slower or more conscious travel, if anything at all?
I read every response and truly appreciate your thoughts and perspectives.
-Molly x
To learn more about my business and the trips we offer, click here.
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