The Pino Collection is bringing bits of the Philippines to SA
The Pino Collection is making the rounds on the market circuit with a mission to celebrate Filipino artisans in Australia.
Paolo Avis has lived in Adelaide for the last six years with a career in digital marketing and working with travel magazines – so he’s always had content creation and sales in his background.
In December of 2024, a month-long vacation in Manilla got the gears turning on a new venture for him.
“I was seeing all these new, emerging products from the Philippines that are becoming more luxury, in a sense,” Paolo tells CityMag.
“And I thought, living in Adelaide, we don’t have a lot of representation coming from my culture in South Australia.”
He wanted representation of his culture to be more than the occasional nod.
“If you’re talking about food for example, you have a lot of Vietnamese, Thai – but not a lot of popular Filipino food, and no Filipino products at all,” he says.
You might like
“I thought; why don’t I bring a bit of my culture to South Australia?”
In a feast of fashion rather than food, Paolo and his sister Denise created The Pino Collection, a purely Filipino retailer operating both online and across local Adelaide markets.
Paolo says each product, from their Abacá bag collections to their Inabel blankets and ponchos, is sustainably sourced, entirely eco-friendly and proudly handmade.
The products all come from artisans Paolo has met with in underrepresented and underprivileged communities in the Philippines.
“We don’t want to work with anything that’s already too commercial, so we deliberately had to go personally meet them, and then learn more about their products,” he says.
“What kind of raw materials have they been using? Is it sustainable? Is it eco-friendly?”
Subscribe for updates
Paolo adds that luxury brands “have been moving towards these sustainable materials like abacá, rattan”.
“They have all these collections, similar to what we have been producing and those are fast-paced fashion, whereas ours are handmade.”
The Pino Collection offers the popular designs to South Australian shoppers while honouring the Filipino culture they’ve come from.
The Inabel blankets and ponchos are just one example of the care that goes into the traditional production of their products.
Paolo says the elderly women they collaborate with “have been working on these kinds of weaving for many generations now”.
“And the problem that we’re seeing is that the younger generation don’t want to continue this type of weaving because they feel like it’s too outdated, or there’s no market anymore, so their challenge is how to pass it to a new generation,” he says.
“With us, and other brands who have been pushing for their kind of weaving, it brings light to them, like why not teach younger kids? Because there is a market out there, and there’s potential.”
Currently, The Pino Collection trades online, on the market circuit and has appeared at Meet the Maker’s Westfield Marion location.
“We’ll see if there is an uptake in demand for more of these products and then hopefully, we can look at our own store in the future,” Paolo says.
Connect with them on Instagram for more information about their manufacturing process and the brand’s upcoming product launches.