Nena & Co.

Ali Hynek wanted a job at Lululemon, interviewed several times and was never hired. She told the Daily Herald in 2019 that she now thanks the company for it, because otherwise Nena & Co. would never have been born. The handbag company, which builds its bags around Guatemalan weaving, lists its headquarters in American Fork, Utah.

Hynek had visited around 50 countries in her 20s, and she kept buying textiles she did not know what to do with. On a trip to her mother's native Guatemala she fell for the woven fabrics and wondered what she could make from them. To test whether Americans wanted bags featuring Guatemalan weaving, she bought some pieces, built her own website, designed her own logo, then photographed and modeled the stock herself. The first two years went to finding traditional Maya weavers and tanneries.

The Guatemala side is now a company of its own. Nena & Co. says it began manufacturing itself after some earlier partners were not paying fairly or on time, and it helped found a facility in Antigua, Guatemala.

The weaving is slow. A backstrap loom is attached to a post or tree and secured around the weaver's back, and the pull between the two creates the tension. The company says many panels take up to three days to finish. Entrepreneur reported that the company works with more than 150 leather craftspeople and more than 200 weavers in Guatemala alone, most of the weavers women.

Many Nena bags are made from huipils, the traditional Guatemalan women's shirts, which the company upcycles. Its Made-to-Order program asks the customer to buy the textile separately, estimates production at 12 to 16 weeks and returns all huipil textile waste to the customer, which makes it a rare custom order that mails back the leftovers.

Nena & Co. does not make its bags in Utah. Its manufacturing page says textiles woven in Guatemala are assembled into the final product in Guatemala, and that the company follows the same model in Morocco and Mexico. The American Fork headquarters is not open to the public, and visits are by appointment. In 2019 the company dropped new products a few times a month and had stopped selling wholesale because it could not meet consumer demand.

Hynek told the Daily Herald that the best way to help people is to create jobs for them. The one thing the weavers asked for, she recalled, was to keep getting orders.