Guatemala´s largest handicraft exporter
Founded as a retail store in Guatemala City in 1994, La Casa Guatemala offered fine wearable and home decor textiles as well as custom furniture; we also sold vintage textiles, vernacular furniture, and folk art related to the religious and everyday life of the indigenous Mayan population.
Our products are a versatile array of handmade products.
La Casa Guatemala teams with artisans to develop personal accessories, fashion, and home decor products in the widest range of possible techniques and materials: handwoven textiles, wood, ceramics and terracotta, metals, Czech and Japanese glass beads, horn, leather, stone, natural fibers, and recycled glass.
We work on a fair trade model, training groups to make new designs, helping them to calculate costs and profits, and paying artisans optimum wages for their labor (we pay advances against purchase orders and balances on delivery).
Our artisan partners belong to a dozen Mayan indigenous and linguistic groups and have mastery of a vast range of traditional techniques developed across their history.
We work with individual artisans, family workshops, and artisan cooperatives in nearly every region, helping to support six hundred to a thousand artisan families.
Our Commitments in Guatemala
Within Guatemala, we are focused on generating sustainable, income-producing crafts, including new opportunities for existing artisan groups, and training for incipient groups.
We enjoy bringing buyers and producers together, a model which we believe promotes trust, mutual respect, empathy, and a shared sense of the stakes involved in launching new products.