Catarina Portas, A Vida Portuguesa

0:12Hello and welcome to the Monaco Weekly. To celebrate the 18th anniversary of Catarina Porta's homeware brand, A Vida Portuguesa, New York's Museum of Modern Art, the MoMA, invited her to set up a pop-up shop in its design store, selling a selection of its most beloved products. Here is my conversation with Catarina about her collaboration with the museum and the importance of keeping craft traditions alive in Portugal.

0:45Catarina Portas from A Vida Portuguesa. Welcome to Monaco Radio. You know, we're big fans of you here in Monaco, just so you know, Catarina. So it's always a pleasure talking to you. Hello, Fernando. It's a pleasure also. I'm a big fan of Monaco, so... It's a good combination, then. My first question to you, of course, we've been following your trajectory and there's so many exciting things happening to A Vida Portuguesa. But my first question, how is it going? How has a Vida Portuguesa been going? How many years already since you founded? Well, this year we will be 18 years. You're a grown-up, a fully grown-up.

1:28Yes, absolutely. So it was quite interesting that we had this invitation from MoMA at this 18th anniversary. It's kind of symbolic. But yes, Vida Portuguesa started with a very small and old shop in Chiado, which is this central neighborhood where the commerce located for two centuries in Lisbon, selling products that nobody was interested. And my generation and younger generations didn't know at all. So the fact is our idea was a success since the beginning. And then we start opening shops or doing special projects or pop-up shops. And today we have two big shops in Lisbon, one in Chiado. It's not the first one we had to move some months ago, but it's a very beautiful bookshop.

2:34who was a bookshop for almost two centuries. Another one in Intendente in an old factory of hand-painted tiles, one of the oldest brands in Portugal of tiles. And so it's very special. Both are very special places. And, well, we sell much more products than in the beginning. We have like 5 ,000 references today and almost 500 suppliers all over the country and the islands of Asoge and Madeira. And we opened four years ago a new shop whose name is Depósito. And it's a new idea. It's different from Vida Portuguesa. It's about crafts, new crafts and traditional crafts. Half, half. I need to visit next time the positive.

3:41I actually didn't know. And Catalina, one interesting thing you're mentioning, 18 years of a Vida Portuguesa. And during this period also, Portugal has been through a transformation. Of course, it had tourists, it always had tourists. But my God, I mean, especially Lisbon, the whole country, it was booming with tourism and people became more interested in the Portuguese culture. So in a way, you were there before, like you knew that this interest would come, right? Yes, we always have been there before, because when we started selling this old product, vintage came, the vintage style came some years after.

4:24And then, because of the economic crisis, all this thought about buying Portuguese products, our own products, we were there already also. Tourism, when we started, I did the shop for the Portuguese because I thought it was important. We are makers of excellent products and we are makers many times for foreign brands. And I wanted to show the beautiful work, the very good work these old brands are doing still. And also a little bit of economic literacy about we should buy our own products. It's important for the economy also. So the tourism in the beginning, so I started, I thought it was interesting for foreign people also.

5:23It was a way to discover something about the country, the shops. And so since the beginning, I had the products explained in Portuguese and in English. And then when the tourism began, of course, people were very interested in coming to the shop. So tourism has been very important for us, of course. During the pandemic, we discovered that we were very dependent on tourism, perhaps a little bit more than we wanted. But yes, now we have also all this tourist population and clients that come to the shops. And we here in Monaco, you know, we value Portugal. It's a big market for us. It's beautiful.

6:13We like the quality of life in the country. But there's also concerns, for example, I don't know if you've seen this, but in Porto, Casa dos Linhos, I think they've closed. So I think the work you do is very valuable in terms of protecting the manufacturing in Portugal, which you say has a long tradition, you know, and not just in the country. Sometimes Portuguese companies making products for other countries as well. So it's a very valuable thing to help the Portuguese local industry as well, no? Yes, of course. But even for old shops like Armazém dos Linhos, which is a story I know very, very well.

6:52In the new shop in Chiado now, we have a whole section selling the chitas, the kind of Portuguese shins that Armazém dos Ninhos is the last company to print in Portugal. This is one of the problems of tourism, of course. In Portugal, in Lisbon, 20 years ago, I started noticing that many of the old shops were closing, also because of foreign investment. People were buying buildings and then renovating completely the buildings, so closing these shops. And so I tried with the City Council to launch a program, which is called Lojas Con Historia, that defends these old stores. And then it went into the law, national law, and so Porto also has its program.

7:48But they can do many things. But Armazém dos Lings was a special situation because it was a very old situation before the program started. So they couldn't legally, the city council couldn't save the shop. They are now looking for a bigger shop. We'll see. Well, I'm very glad you're saying this. And by the way, I'm very glad as well that now we can find a Vida Portuguesa at MoMA. At the moment, there is kind of a pop-up shop at the museum, which is fantastic news. So did the museum approach to you? How did that work? And I think it's such a way, I think a lot of people that perhaps have never been to Portugal, they'll be able to see your products, which is fantastic.

8:34Yes, it was such a surprise for us. The day we received an email from the MoMA Design Store director. He knew he had been in Portugal. He knew about Vida Portuguesa. He visited our stores. and what he explained in the talk in the opening of the pop-up in New York was that it seemed to him that it was a concept very different from other shops he knows in several countries or like Maison Empreur in Marseille. It has a special spirit. And so he sent this invitation. So we have been working for one year and a half. the team of MoMA Design Store came to Portugal we choose together the products and so we have a pop-up store in the Soho shop and also another small one in 53rd Street just in front of the museum and we are also on the MoMA Design Store online shop it was very funny to do it And the fact is people liked it because a few days after the opening, some of the products were already selling totally.

10:02It's a great selection of products as well. Yeah, because we have different things, you see. I think difference and local are very powerful in today's world where everything is so similar. We see the same things everywhere, the same brands, the same shops, the same restaurants. Why traveling if the world is going to be all similar? Completely agree. So I think one of the solutions for this is the local and the difference, to do different. And, you know, from a beautiful yellow ceramic jug to a lovely pencil box, I had a look at the product. So I think it's great. And of course, it's a curated selection because at your shop in Portugal, how many products you sell?

10:53You mentioned 5 ,000 or something like that? 5 ,000 references, yes. Wow. That's huge. Because we have products in several colors, in several sizes, etc., etc. But 5 ,000 references today, eh? Even me, I'm impressed. Yes. You have to. You have to be impressed. But you know, along the years, we keep finding new things. And in the beginning, we were only interested in old brands, historic brands. But then 10 years ago, we started also trying to help these new brands, generally from our young designers, but that are working with traditional ways of doing it. And so, savoir faire, so traditional savoir faire.

11:51There are very, very interesting brands doing that. I think it's very important because Portugal still has very interesting work of the hands, the production, hand production, that Europe lost in the last decades. We have it. It's precious. It's one of the things that I say since the beginning, because when I started, all this handmade or the manufacture was a little bit, you know, a portrait of this poor country. We had this poor country with a dictatorship and, you know, We were behind all these modern European countries with lots of new industries and things like that. And I thought, no, this is something very precious also, because people will look for this in a few years.

12:51And the fact is that Portugal still has lots of people working in ceramics, textile, so many things. it's really important for our exports and it's something that we should cross with designers nowadays very very important Fantastic, muito obrigado Catarina, thank you so much It's a pleasure talking to you Thank you so much Catarina Portas there A Vida Portuguesa's pop-up shop is at MoMA's design store until the 10th of March The show was edited by Alan Whedon and thank you for listening Thank you.