Doing business in Italy is not easy, and in Calabria it is worth double

I am happy with the work I do. I consider myself lucky, even privileged, to do the activity I love, for which I have studied a lot and made many sacrifices. However, in order to enjoy this privilege, I also had to make a courageous and not always easy choice, that is to become an entrepreneur and bet everything on my possibilities and abilities. It has been and continues to be a great challenge, and it is not always roses and flowers.

I preface this by saying that I have always considered failure not a setback, but rather additional experience to achieve other goals. However, I can openly confess that moments of discouragement, distrust, and dismay test you along your journey, and you need a lot of strength and the right support to overcome them.

I firmly believe in positivity and the law of attraction, which is not just about saying "I want to become rich, so I will become rich," but rather in the possibilities you will have and in facing them in the best way to achieve success or at least satisfaction, and this certainly helps.

An entrepreneur, in my case a craftsman, carries out an activity that is not only manual but also mentally very demanding, which drains your energy. And as much as you can draw satisfaction and energy from the appreciation for the products you create, you must always find more to move forward and to have the strength to overcome moments of crisis and discouragement.

I was 25 years old and had been living and working in the Marche region for eight years when I started thinking about creating something of my own, a brand that reflected my values and ideals. There I had part of my family, my brother and sister, and there I had my greatest affection, the one who would later become my husband seven years later. It was not an easy choice to return to Calabria to start a business. It was not an easy choice even to imagine doing it, let alone actually realizing this sort of reverse emigration. For weeks I thought about what to do, and thanks to the support of my partner, I chose what the best solution was. With courage, I returned to my hometown, but it was not at all simple to start living again in what had always been my home until I was 18. Life starts from scratch, you have been away for so long, and everything has changed around you. Affections and friendships have each taken their own path, and often in a southern town, I say this with much regret, this path coincides with leaving elsewhere in search of work. You can't even imagine how many tears I shed in the first months while renovating my grandmother's old shop in the center of town. I literally cried over anything because the emotional burden of such an undertaking (returning to the south is in its own way a "heroic" endeavor) was immense and added to all the doubts and fears of starting a brand from scratch. The tears were then replaced by smiles and shining eyes as I saw my grandmother's old shop come back to life and take shape, gradually transforming into what is also currently our little atelier. The workplace was ready, now came the hard part, starting my business.

Sometimes it happens that the solution you initially thought of is too difficult or laborious to implement, and you spend days thinking about how to solve it (yes, as happens to many entrepreneurs, I am one of those people who tends not to unplug after work hours and I keep thinking and thinking, analyzing step by step the work done up to that moment for that specific product, in search of a solution) without reaching a result, and you think about abandoning the product or not realizing it. It happens, and when you are at home, maybe with your partner, on the couch or simply sitting at the table, you seem distracted even if someone is talking to you, because your brain is constantly searching for the solution. It’s not easy, but you shouldn’t get discouraged. In these moments, what helps me is to expose all the problems or doubts I have to the person closest to me, in my case my husband Paride (who mainly deals with something else and not my own field, but he is still the person closest to me), and together with him think of a solution. The simple strength of a loved one to lean on, to vent and talk to, to share the emotional and anxiety or pressure load on a doubt, can help find a solution, which is often so simple that you will wonder how you didn’t manage to reach it before.

Starting a brand from scratch is not an easy task; I’m not saying it’s the most difficult thing ever, but you are courageously betting on yourself, investing economic and psychological resources, in the hope of realizing what you have in mind. You have put yourself on the line, with your creativity, your idea, and your passion. During the journey towards the prosperity and self-sufficiency of your dream, there will be many obstacles, and moments when you would want to give it all up and find a safer, more stable path are around every corner. The important thing is to celebrate, symbolically speaking, because you still have to work hard for every single milestone you reach. Create a schedule or a roadmap, marking slightly higher goals each time and crossing off the progress made, one small step at a time, without necessarily overdoing it, because often overdoing it can also be counterproductive in case of failure of one of the established goals.