Leaping W.O.R.M.S.
By Frolic Tan Lopez

ARTS AND BUSINESS Clint Catalan (ABOVE) established a business (BELOW) celebrating the arts.

While finishing his advertising degree in the College of Architecture and Fine Arts of the University of Santo Tomas sometime in the latter part of the 1990s, Clint Gonzales Catalan started W.O.R.M.S. (Wearing One Really Makes Sense), a line of hand sewn/hand painted bags with its trademark “spikes” for guys and girls of the punk rock generation.  “It started out as a hobby for me, then friends got interested, and soon enough, I was participating in school fashion shows and trade bazaars,” Catalan recalls.  “It came naturally for me as a visual artist, to create artworks, but since I’m inclined more into fashion, I combined both to create functional / wearable art.  I would stylize (by painting and embellishing) my own stuff, and people would notice them and would like to have one for themselves.  I found a demand for it, so I pursued this kind of business, and which I enjoyed doing at the same time.”

Initially based at home in the province of Laguna, Catalan eventually moved W.O.R.M.S. to Pasig City, with consignments all over Metro Manila, e.g. The Cubicle ( Pasig City ), FaRT (Kamuning, Quezon City),  and I Love You Store and Pablo Gallery (both in Cubao Expo, also in Quezon City); and then in Haftig (Tacloban City).  He also joined expos/bazaars/et cetera

Looking back, Catalan says it’s now hard to ascertain how much he just spent when he started, considering that “I made my stuff from discarded items and scraps of cloth – call it recycling, if you will, but I rarely bought raw materials except when clients wanted a specific fabric to go with a specific design,” he says.  With the growth of the business, though, Catalan can recall putting in “around P10,000” to further push the business forward, especially since “I’m now pursuing the ready to wear (RTW) and couture line in a smaller scale.”

SECOND NATURE

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