The Needle Was Always There
Teresita Villanueva was twelve years old when her mother, Lourdes, sat her down at the wooden sewing table in their two-room house in Mabalacat, Pampanga, and said, "Suki na natin ang karayom." We are already married to the needle.
It was 1983. Lourdes had been taking in alteraciones since before Tering could remember — hemming uniforms for schoolteachers, shortening pants for farmers who found their market trousers too long. The family ate well in months when the school season made everyone rush to get their barongs and uniforms fixed. The family ate rice with patis in the slow months.
Tering learned zigzag stitch before she learned long division. By sixteen, she was handling full garment construction from her mother's old Singer — a black, cast-iron machine that had been in the family since the Marcos years. Her first paid job was repairing a torn lining on a neighbor's dress for fifteen pesos. She cried that evening — not from the work, but from the feeling of being useful in a way that filled her with something she couldn't name.
She never finished college. A semester at a local state university for Home Economics lasted four months before the tuition became another bill her mother couldn't cover. But Tering kept sewing. She sewed pancho for the market vendors. She sewed pambahay for her aunties. She sewed simple A-line dresses for the daughters of her mother's clients — the kind of thing you could make in two evenings with a pattern borrowed from a magazine.
The dresses were for ₱150 to ₱250 apiece. A good week was four dresses. That was barely enough for rice, fish, and the electric bill.
The Aunt in New Jersey
In 2003, Tering's Tita Remedios flew in from New Jersey for Christmas — as she did every two years, carrying boxes of clothes and canned goods for the barangay. She was a nursing aide at a hospital in Newark, single, practical, and always looking for ways to make her overtime pay stretch further.
On the third night, Remedios held up one of Tering's dresses — a simple wrap style in cotton, hand-finished at the seams — and turned it over with the kind of attention usually reserved for imported garments.
"Ang ganda ng finishing mo," Remedios said. "I can sell these here. In the Filipino stores in Jersey City. In the boutiques in Kearny."
Tering laughed. "Tita, I can make maybe ten a month."
"Start with ten," Remedios said. "I'll pay you thirty dollars each."
Thirty dollars. In 2003, that was ₱1,500. Tering made ₱200 for a dress locally.
She did the math three times that night. Ten dresses meant ₱15,000. Her mother's monthly earnings from alterations had never exceeded ₱8,000.
The Garage, the Debt, and the Dream
Tering started a small business in her front garage in January 2004. She bought two secondhand industrial Juki machines from a closing factory in San Fernando for ₱18,000. Fabric cost ₱4,000 — cotton and hablon from a supplier in Angeles City. Thread, needles, patterns: another ₱2,500. She registered her business at the barangay hall — ₱500 for barangay clearance — then went to DTI to register the name "Tering's Atelier" for ₱400. BIR registration was another ₱500 for the first year's documentary stamp.
Total startup cost: approximately ₱25,000. She borrowed ₱15,000 from a cousin in Lubao and ₱10,000 from her employer at the time, a small uniform shop in the municipal hall.
The first month was brutal. She was making dresses between 5 AM and 2 AM, her fingers pricked and bleeding. Her mother cooked the rice and scolded her to sleep. Her husband, a tricycle driver, said nothing but started bringing her coffee at midnight without being asked.
By the third month, she was producing fifteen pieces per month. Tita Remedios sold them out within weeks. Filipino women in New Jersey, in Daly City, in Los Angeles — they wanted the quality of Filipino craftsmanship at prices that didn't look outrageous. A ₱1,500 dress in the Philippines became a $35-$40 dress in the US. Still cheap by American standards. Still life-changing for Tering.
The First Container
By 2007, Tering had eleven women working in her garage. She'd moved her operations to a rented warehouse space along the old MacArthur Highway for ₱8,000 a month. Revenue hit ₱1.2 million that year — almost entirely from the US market, shipped through Tita Remedios's network.
But Remedios was getting older. The nursing shifts were harder on her knees. And the volume was growing beyond what one person could carry in a suitcase.
Tering learned about LCL shipping — less than container load. She found a freight forwarder in Cubao who charged ₱45,000 for a partial container to Newark, door-to-door. She had to register with BIR as an exporter, get a Mayor's Permit, renew her DTI registration for a business-to-business classification, and register her workers with SSS and PhilHealth — adding ₱3,200 monthly in employer contributions for eleven employees.
The first full shipment in March 2009 — two hundred pieces, valued at ₱680,000 — nearly broke her. She spent three weeks on paperwork. She sat in BIR lines in San Fernando for six hours to get a Certificate of Registration updated. She paid ₱12,000 to a customs broker she found through a kuya in the barangay. She lost ₱40,000 when a batch of fabric arrived with defects and she had to rush-order replacements from Cebu.
The container arrived in Newark forty-three days later. Tita Remedios called from a payphone — cell service was patchy in the warehouse district — and said, "Naku, Tering, they're beautiful. The boutique owner wants to reorder."
Tering sat on the floor of her warehouse and wept.
Scaling Without a Safety Net
The years between 2010 and 2015 were when Tering's Atelier became something she didn't fully recognize. She hired more workers — up to twenty-three at peak. She invested in a fabric-cutting machine (₱85,000, financed through a cooperative loan at 2.5% monthly interest). She started sourcing directly from mills in Cebu and, eventually, from a supplier in Guangzhou who could deliver hablon and cotton blends at lower cost.
Revenue grew to ₱8.5 million in 2012, then ₱14 million in 2015. Margins hovered between 35% and 42% after labor, materials, shipping, and compliance costs. She was paying her seamstresses ₱450 a day — above the provincial minimum wage of ₱368 — because she remembered what it felt like to be underpaid and proud but exhausted.
But growth brought new fears. Flooding in Pampanga in 2012 destroyed ₱200,000 worth of inventory stored on the warehouse floor. A typhoon in 2013 delayed a shipment by nineteen days; the client in California cancelled the order. Brownouts in 2014 meant generators running for eight hours a day, eating ₱3,000 daily in diesel.
She considered quitting twice. Once in 2011, when a client in Texas refused to pay ₱1.8 million in goods, claiming quality issues. Once in 2014, when a labor dispute — a worker she'd hired from a neighboring barangay accused her of favoritism — nearly split her team in half.
Both times, her mother said the same thing: "Ang karayom, hindi natin itinatapon kahit mabali. We don't throw away the needle even when it breaks."
The Business Today
Today, Tering's Atelier operates from a proper facility in Mabalacat with a registered business name, a full-time accountant, and a quality control staff of two. The team has grown to thirty-one seamstresses, most of them women from the surrounding barangays who previously worked as domestic helpers in Manila or as farm laborers during harvest season.
Annual revenue in 2023 was ₱24.3 million. Export markets include the US (65%), Canada (20%), and a growing client base in Australia (15%). Products range from modest fashion to resort wear to custom bridal pieces that sell for $180-$350 in international boutiques.
Tering is fifty-four years old. She still sews every morning before the workers arrive. She still checks every seam with her fingers. She still remembers the fifteen pesos.
Lessons for the Rest of Us
Tering's story isn't about disruption or innovation. It's about a woman who owned a skill so thoroughly that when the right connection appeared — an aunt, a suitcase, a thirty-dollar price point — she was already ready.
A few things worth carrying forward:
Start with what you already know. Tering didn't learn export logistics before she learned to sew. She mastered the craft first, then figured out the rest. For anyone asking how to start a business in the Philippines, the answer often begins closer to home than you think.
The network is the business. Tita Remedios wasn't a business consultant. She was family. In the Filipino context, utang na loob isn't just a cultural phrase — it's sometimes the entire distribution strategy. Build relationships before you build systems.
Compliance is non-negotiable but survivable. Barangay clearance, DTI registration, BIR, SSS, PhilHealth — yes, it's exhausting. Yes, you'll spend hours in lines. But doing it right from the start saved Tering from penalties that would have erased years of profit. Register. Even if you're scared.
Protect your people like they're family — because in small business Philippines, they are. Tering's thirty-one workers are not "human capital." They're her neighbors, her churchmates, the women whose children play with hers. That loyalty became a quality advantage that no factory in China could replicate.
Margins matter more than volume. Tering could have scaled to fifty workers by 2013. She chose not to, because she refused to let quality slip or let her pay fall below what a family could eat on. Sustainable growth isn't fast growth. It's growth that lets you sleep.
The needle, it turns out, never breaks. You just keep stitching.