Terra Alma began in 2014 in a small workshop in Cusco, in a building that smelled of cedar and warm metal. The founder, Isabela Quispe, had spent her childhood watching her grandfather pull silver into thin wire by lamplight. By her twenties she understood two things very clearly: the work was extraordinary, and the people doing it were being paid almost nothing for it.
She started by walking. From workshop to workshop, valley to valley, asking how silver moved through the markets, who set the prices, and what a fair price might look like. The answer was always the same. The makers were the last to be paid and the first to be forgotten.
Terra Alma was built to fix that. We do not buy from middlemen. We do not run warehouses full of unsold stock. When you place an order, the workshop is paid first, before the piece is even made. The artisan keeps sixty percent of the sale price — many multiples of what the export market pays.
Today we work with one hundred and twenty families across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. Some are silversmiths in their seventies who still work by candlelight. Some are young women apprenticing in workshops their mothers built. All of them are named on the product they make.
Workshops in Cusco, Puno, and the Sacred Valley. Sterling silver and woven alpaca pieces from forty families, including third-generation silversmiths in the village of Pitumarca.
Recycled bronze and silver from artisan cooperatives in La Paz and Sucre. Many of our Bolivian pieces use metals reclaimed from old mining tools — a quiet form of repair.
Hammered brass and gold from the legendary jewelry markets of Otavalo, where techniques have passed from grandmother to granddaughter for more than four hundred years.
Cartagena silversmiths working with filigree — the impossibly fine silver thread that takes ten years to learn and a lifetime to master.
Every Terra Alma artisan is paid before production begins. We commit to a sixty percent maker share, full price transparency, no exclusivity contracts, and a yearly visit to every workshop we work with. We publish our pricing breakdown for every piece — what the maker received, what the materials cost, what shipping took. Nothing hidden.
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