It started with a sewing machine

My grandmother, Concepcion, was alone with three daughters and almost no money. She bought a sewing machine with what she had, and began making clothes and slippers.

That was the beginning. Not a business plan — a decision made out of necessity, by a woman who had to feed her children.

My grandfather was a shoemaker. When he came back, the two of them built it into something real, and over the years Concepcion narrowed it down to the thing she did best: slippers. My mother and her sisters grew up in that workshop. They studied and they worked, from the time they were very young.

Pantupies

When my mother married my father, they founded Pantupies together in Colombia. She was the one behind the design and the craft — she still is. He built the business around her.

More than thirty years later, it's still running.

GJ Co.

GJ stands for Gilberto and Josefina — my father and my mother. The "Co" was always just "Company."

But writing this, I realised it also holds the first letters of Concepcion — the woman who started all of it, alone, with a sewing machine. I didn't plan that. I'd like to think she did.

I'm the third generation. I moved to Australia, spent years working in hospitality here, and kept noticing the same thing: beautiful properties, thoughtfully designed, and then a plastic-wrapped slipper that belonged somewhere else entirely. Not because anyone stopped caring — because the good options came with minimums of a thousand units and a supplier on the other side of the world.

So I started GJ Co. to close that gap, and I named it after the two people who taught me how — without realising I'd also named it after the one who started it all.