Growing Together

Helping run the affairs of craft maker Papemelroti proves to be an opportunity for the Alejandro household to bond and grow as a family.

By: Katrina Tan

The founders of Papemelroti, husband-and-wife Benny and Corit Alejandro, may not have the best-laid plans when they started out, but after four decades and two generations into the business, their establishment remains one of the most popular and successful of its kind in the country.

“It has always been my hobby to make new things out of what people usually throw away”, recalls Corit Alejandro, mother of the five children--Patsy, Peggy, Meldy, Robert, and Tina--whose names from which the first syllables form the quaint acronym that the couple used to name their business. “I sewed dresses for my daughters, made toys from toilet paper rolls, and piggy banks from empty Clorox bottles. My husband, Benny, also enjoy woodworking and making furniture. Although I had neither a business background nor the capital, I wanted to have a business of my own while my children were still growing up. I prayed to the Lord to grant me even a small business.”

            As it happened, Benny was looking for a new home for the family at the time, so Corit asked him to find one where she could also put up a small store. They found such a place in an apartment along Tomas Morato in Quezon City, and they move to it in 1967.

            Patsy, the eldest child of Alejandro, recalls: “My mom would make different crafts and ran her shop on the first floor, while the family lived in the second. We were just kids then, so naturally we would help her out every now and then in doing the pieces to be sold in the store.”

            The couple named the store Korben Gifts, after the first syllables of their first name, Corit and Benny, and they opened it for business during their first summer there. Patsy remembers: “At first, the products we had were just enough to fill the window display; the rest of the 30 sq m store space was empty. But my parent refused to borrow money. All of their capital thus came solely from their savings and from my dad’s earning as a broker.”

            With their friends and neighbors soon frequenting the store, the couple was able to expand their product line steadily. After going on business trips to Europe and United States, during which they purchased samples and kits for their shop, they began sourcing some of their product lines from abroad. But then, the Philippines economy took a plunge and importing them became too difficult, so the Alejandro’s were forced to concentrate on making their own merchandise: figurines, furniture, metal pieces, stationary, woodcarvings, and other crafts.

            Because she had not yet perfected her molding method, Corit Alejandro would inadvertently produce many pieces of deformed figurines. Surprisingly, though, those deformed pieces ended up becoming a favorite of their customers. This encouraged the Alejandro children, who were all still in grade school at that time, to paint figures and hammer down wooden plaques to give them that distressed, but lovable, “antique” look--a look that made the store extremely popular.

            Recalls Pastry: “We got paid five to ten centavos for making each piece. I’d make about P1.50 a day, which was actually a lot because back then, we were the only kids in our school with that kind of money. But then we’d just end up spending it to buy candy or things from our own store.”

            Later, in 1976, a customer suggested that Corit put up a similar shop in a commercial area so she could sell more of her products. So, in May of that year, using all of the profit that their existing shop had made that far, they opened a shop on the second floor of Ali Mall in Cubao, Quezon City. Ali Mall was the country’s premier mall at the time, so the couple anticipated that their new shop would enjoy brisk business. This time, in much the same way that they named their first shop, they named the shop “Papemelroti,” the acronym formed by the first syllables of the names of their five children.

            Ever since the couple opened Papemelroti, all of five Alejandro siblings have been in the thick of things running the business. Patsy and Peggy would take turns at the cash register, Meldy would sell the items, Robert would draw decorations on the little wooden figures, and Tina, who was seven at the time, would help out in the gift wrapping. Tina remembers: "I couldn't even reach teh counter. And since I didn't want customers to know that theri gifts were being wrapped by a kid, I would do the job on the floor where they couldn’t see me.”

            Papemelroti’s biggest attraction was definitely its charming, distinctly handcrafted items, many of which were made from recycled materials that otherwise would have gone to waste. “My mother was naturally thrifty, so a lot of our items were made out of scraps, natural paper, shells, twigs, and so many others,” says Patsy. “We used recycled brown paper even back then. Then, would put sentimental sayings on some of those items--an uncommon touch that somehow gave our store a unique character. Also, we would make personalized pieces for doctors, lawyers, mothers, and the like. These made for nice, reasonably-priced gifts that would sell particularly well during the holiday seasons”.

            As the years passed, and even as the most of the original shops on the second floor of the Ali Mall lost money and closed down, the Papemelroti shop remained in business and prospered. “Because the shop was doing so well, the mall management even gave us a better and bigger area on the ground floor,” says Patsy. “Also at about this time, though, we were asked to vacate the space of our original shop at Tomas Morato. This worried my mom, but then we realized that the setback was actually God’s way of prodding us to grow. After all, we had already saved up enough money to expand and purchase our own place. The new building had even more space for production, storage, and selling, and allowed us to grow.”

            Indeed, Papemelroti has grown such that it now has a chain of 14 gift shops all over Metro Manila, generating enough sales revenues to acquire a five- story factory in Bulacan and to undertake continuing expansion. Patsy considers it God’s blessing for the company to have done so well even though they had hardly spent for advertising.

            “God even guided us where and when to open a branch,” Patsy says. “For example, take that time when we were invited to open in SM City [on EDSA corner North Avenue in Quezon City] in 1985, right before the EDSA Revolution. With the economy doing so badly, we really didn’t know what to do. But after we prayed to God, we felt that we should go ahead and open the store anyway. And so we did, and our SM City store was to become one of our best branches,” she says.

            Year after year, the Alejandro children would be asked to help out in running the Papemelroti stores, not only during summer but also even during the regular school semesters. “It got to a point that we began to playfully call working in the store as ‘Siberia’,” says Patsy. “We always had fun, though, and we got paid for our work. This made us learn the value of work and also helped us grow as a close-knit family”.

            All of the five Alejandro children studied and got their college degrees from the University of the Philippines. Patsy got a degree in interior design, Peggy in architecture, Meldy in business administration, Robert in fine arts, and Tina in mass communications. On top of this, all of them inherited their parents’ artistic inclination and have become adept in designing products for their shops. It was only Patsy, though, who joined the family business on her own volition right after graduating. In the case of her siblings, they all decided to first work with other companies before finding their way back to the family business.

            None of the Alejandro siblings holds a formal position in Papemelroti. Following each other’s inclinations, Patsy mainly handles the paperwork and acts as corporate secretary, Peggy takes care of personnel matters. Meldy manages their stores and their inventory, Robert designs products and store layouts (on top of running his own design outfit), and Tina evaluates operations and runs the company website. “We didn’t really assign positions,” says Peggy. “When one of us notices something that needs improvement, we just do it. For example, when I noticed that we needed a better method of training and evaluating our staff, I created a manual for it and that was that.”

            Patsy describes how Papemelroti comes up with new products and business ideas: “We hold breakfast meetings with our sales staff, we gather and evaluate the large amount of feedback that we get in our customer comment books, we develop things to support recycling and environment conservation, and we regularly run contests and promos. And we introduce new products frequently – paper making and paper work kits, souvenir items with new quotations, even made-to-order furniture.”

            All Alejandro family members – including Corit and Benny – remain very hands-on in running the business. Each of them makes the rounds of the stores every Monday, and each one has a hand in the design of the company’s products. Together, they come up with several new products to sell each month, making an initial production order of 50 to 200 pieces for each of them.

            “We acknowledge that our unique talents come from the Lord, and we know that all of these ideas come from Him,” says Patsy. “We enjoy doing the business because we find it exciting to create things that others appreciate highly enough to actually buy them.

            Corit says that Papemelroti is a business venture that is anchored on the following ideals: love of God, love of family, and love of country. This being the case, she says, the family makes it a point to treat their customers, employees, and subcontractors fairly and conscientiously, giving good value for the money and making payments promptly, always paying the correct taxes, and providing their employees with a decent means of livelihood.

            Patsy adds: “The way of doing business that was passed on to us by our parents was not really about making money, but more about making a living with the right values and work ethics--creativity, hard work, honesty, integrity, perseverance, thriftiness, and especially prayer. We didn’t get any formal training. We ‘caught it’ rather than ‘were taught it’. We observed what our parents did and just followed it.”

            Papemelroti now also sells its products wholesale to several stores in the province through resellers and business partners, and has also started exporting them to Hong Kong, Singapore, and other foreign markets. Patsy says that the company having grown to such a scale, “we get suggestions from people to just hire someone to do this or that or perhaps to open up our company for franchising, but then we asked ourselves: ‘What’s the fun in that?’ We’re not in this business only for the money. We know we can still improve a lot in our business, but we’ll only do it when the time comes.