Pura Utz is a Copenhagen-based label founded in 2018 by Anna Waller Andrés, creative director, and Bernabela Sapalú, who runs operations in Guatemala. They met through an NGO. After three years of working together, they started the brand in Bernabela’s house in Santiago Atitlán.
The workshop is still in that house. It began in the kitchen, moved to the second floor, then to a half covered terrace, and now has a floor of its own with large windows and a view of Volcán Atitlán. The team is twenty, sixteen of them full time in the workshop and the rest working from home. It has passed fifty at busy times.
The brand says it pays its artisans three to four times the local market rate, set by a time motion study. It describes itself as a stepping stone, not a lifelong job, unless someone wants it to be.
The name means pure quality, pure good.
