The Roots of PALACRA PVRIS
It started with 3 students.👨🏻🎓👨🏽🎓👩🏽🎓
Louise, William and Merwane.
In June 2021 as part of our studies, we went on a tour of Latin America to discover the local culture and make a documentary which will constitute a very important grade to validate our semester. 📚
June 17, we take the plane ✈️ without having the slightest idea of our subject.
2 weeks go by, we are starting to get to know the neighborhood where we are staying but have absolutely no progress on our work (we have no sense of priorities…). 🤦🏽♀️
5 minutes from our apartment, there is a kind of place where lots of people come to sell their products, most of them are hand-made, you can find hats, smoking pipes, vases and many other things there.
But especially jewelry... 💍
Lots of jewelry. 💍💍💍
Necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings, piercings, anything that can be put on a body, you can find it ! You should know that in this place, 90% of the sellers are in fact entire families who manufacture their own products at home and come to sell them here. 👨👩👧👦
After a long questioning around a fruit juice, we brainstormed for hours to decide if we were going to do a report on this pla-.....
Just kidding. 😏
For us it was so obvious to do a documentary on this place ! 😍
This place was our daily routine because every day, new sellers came and others left ; while some made their products at home, others came to sell what they had just made.
At first, we wanted to make a general documentary on this place. 🎥
But. The next day. We left to do our morning routine which is to eat a good breakfast in the city center before walking to the "famous" place in order to spend our money irresponsibly on jewelry, hats and lots of other things ! 🌬️💲
That day, William wanted to buy jewelry for his mother, we stopped at a stall and we were able to chat with the family selling the jewelry as they spoke English.
To be as brief as possible, from biodegradable materials (noble woods, polished stones etc...) they make super unique jewels ; the particularity of the jewels they sell is that they are UNIQUE. 😍
It's never the same, each necklace has a different mesh, a different pattern !
While William & I (Louise) chatted and asked questions, Merwane filmed each interaction in silence.
Then spent THE HOLE night editing the video to keep it interesting. 👨🏽💻💤
Yes you heard very well, more than 15 days of procastination settled by a night of work. 🤦🏽♀️
The next day our documentary was ready.😎
It was in March 2022 that Merwane had the idea of taking advantage of this experience to take an interest in the world of upcycling. 💡
It is after multiple researches where we discover that the jewelry pollutes... 🏭
The extraction of raw materials pollutes (1500L of water for 3gr of gold !)… Not to mention the transport of raw materials, the fumes from the chemicals used during the processing of jewelry, plastic packaging, the transport of jewelery in store or directly with customers etc...
We who are passionate about fashion and jewelry, it is with great guilt that we realize the impact on the climate generated by its industries. 😶
We who had the goal of working in fashion or jewelry, realize that working for these industries is a violation of our values and our respect for the planet, which is inconceivable for us. 😑
Having seen that the upcycling market is not very developed and that the only actors on the market offer excessive prices for very average quality... (we tried their products, that's why we allow ourselves to criticize), we followed Merwane's idea and began to create little by little what was to become :
PALACRA PVRIS. 💎
We started by partnering with thrift stores. 👕
William having a lot of knowledge and a big network on this market, found us partnerships with :
7 Parisian thrift stores & 5 London thrift stores...
...which supply us as regularly as possible with branded items which are unsold because the item is damaged or simply does not please the customers.
Then we had to find an artisan jeweller.. 🧙🏽♂️
At first we wanted to do it alone but we couldn't improvise ourselves as an expert knowing that it requires specific tools and machines to sterilize & polish the jewel. 😅
We found "Monsieur P" a unique character, very discreet, quite introverted, it is this person who is the essence of PALACRA PVRIS, he's the person who make your jewels. 🧙🏽♂️
Passionate about artisanal jewelry, he owned a boutique in Paris for 8 years before becoming an architect… Yes, a rather special retraining (we said the same thing).
October 2022, the PALACRA PVRIS Project is incubated by EM Normandie !
November 2022, after many hardships and hard work in parallel with our studies, PALACRA PVRIS is officially created.
We won't tell you the rest of the story right away! Let's do an update in mhh... a year, okay? yes ? Perfeeect ! See you in 1 year then ;) 💗
Louise <3
[ Dec 3, 2022 ]