Mabuhay Maynila is not afraid of being niche. Their merchandise, ranging from tableware reminiscent of a kitschy prized porcelain collection display to angsty T-shirts emblazoned with jailhouse tattoo motifs, is always sold out, and by design.
“It’s a niche brand,” admits Alex Lizares-Fontanilla, who “takes care of the numbers” for Mabuhay Maynila. But not in a gatekeep-y way, she clarifies. She and her husband, visual artist and the other creative brain behind the brand Auggie Fontanilla, are well aware they are still running a business. They’d rather call it small. A small business run by a couple who happen to like making things for themselves, and those things happen to strike a chord with a lot of people their age: once listless creatives who are now trying to settle down without losing “the juice.”
Auggie, whose work oozes with the uncontainable chaos of the city and Filipino maximalism at large, and is omnipresent in all of Mabuhay Maynila’s products, will be the first to admit, it’s not all his. “If it’s just me, magmumukhang masyadong [the actual art I already do],” he says. “Masyadong straight male. Alex balances it out.”
With his art practice, Auggie was somehow able to scratch the itch of producing merch, but with Mabuhay Maynila and Alex around, it’s more about creating what they want as a unit. It’s their “playground,” an amalgamation of their interest in vintage, workwear, homeware, and “little whatevers” cloaked in cheeky references to Pinoy aesthetics: hand-drawn typography, mythic creatures, and local flora, to name a few.
“So if you ask us, who’s the market? We are the market. We create products for us and for people like us.”
That doesn’t mean the couple keeps to themselves. Again, they don’t gatekeep. A few times, Mabuhay Maynila has also done collaborations with other like-minded brands, including an Escolta-based coffee roaster, a line of handmade biker rings, and most recently, a brand called Happiness Research Facility, whom they worked together to create a tea set as part of their Mabuhay Maynila Eatery pop-up last May at photographer duo Everywhere We Shoot’s little shop/gallery at Karrivin.
In hindsight, Mabuhay Maynila’s trajectory is typical of the life cycle of a local lifestyle brand: build from the
ground up, then cultivate a niche following that then grows by word of mouth. What comes next is often upscaling, something the Fontanillas are not racing to get at. “Ultimately, the dream is to upscale in terms of quality. Production? Not so much.”
So for now, they’re sticking to a tried and tested formula of doing only small drops. And even after these sold-out partnerships, they always return to themselves as their own “market.” “Because it’s our interest, it’s what we want, we don’t put out products we won’t use,” Alex says as we lounge at their home, peppered with objects from previous releases. A tapestry depicting a King Kong-like beast about to fall prey to a woman warrior covers the edge of the couch, and on the dining table, pristine cotton placemats embroidered with a growling wild cat and two palm trees with mystic symbols for roots.
“We want very specific things that we can’t find anywhere, so we try to create that for ourselves,” Alex says. “So if you ask us, who’s the market? We are the market. We create products for us and for people like us.”
This story first appeared in The State of Affairs issue of Rolling Stone Philippines. Pre-order a copy on Sari-Sari Shopping, or read the e-magazine now here.
