When talking about Boutique D’Mora, we are talking about Lupe Mora and her daughter Nicole Leimgruber. But it also talks about goodbyes and returns; falls and rises; golden times and hard times; but above all it is to talk about love for family and sacrifices for the company.

And no one knows more about the sacrifices than Lupa, 70, who ran D’Mori from 1979 to 2017, although her retirement was short-lived and she returned in 2018 and is about to celebrate 43 years in the business, but now with much less responsibility and as a sort of advisor to Nicole, who took over management seven years ago, after spending thirteen years in the company she started in 2004 when she was 21 years old.

Hugging her mother and laughing, Nicole, who turns 40 this Saturday, recalls that in the early days she had to take inventory, start from scratch and learn in all parts of the store.

“We still have some order because we have a Swiss father… I was an assistant assistant, I didn’t make any decisions, but I did accompany my mother on trips and little by little I started to express my opinion and it started to change very organically, but very gently,” recalls the one who is now the image of D’Moria and who affirms that it is fortunate that he loved the same career as his mother.

Lupe is proud that her company is in the hands of her daughter, who modernized it, although, she assures, she warned her about the sacrifice of work. “I advised her many times: ‘daughter, think carefully if you want to stay in this kind of business all your life, it’s a lot of sacrifice, it’s from Sunday to Sunday, managing a lot of employees, a number of things. , that there comes a moment when you don’t know if it’s worth continuing, even worse because of unfair competition’, but she’s happy,” says the D’Mori founder with relief, while Nicole good-humoredly admits that she shed “the occasional tear of frustration, I don’t think that no job is rosy”.

The story of this legacy began when Lupe took little Nicole to her shows, catwalks and his trips to Europe or the United States in search of clothing collections to supply the store, since there was not enough national clothing at the time. That was also part of the sacrifice, says Mori, since there were as many as seven trips a year: four to Europe (Italy) and three to the United States.

“I almost always took her with me to look at clothes, textures, fashion, when the time came when she wanted to continue her career, she chose Fashion Marketing in Italy, and when she returned, the possibility opened up, first to continue her work, and then when she saw that things with the country’s economy were changing from better to worse, he started the transition of creating his line in 2016,” recalls Lupe.

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That clothing line is Etoile, a creation by Nicole that launched in November 2019.

“The launch of my brand was a bomb, such a bomb that I was so moved that I said that we are finally moving, because we have come out of difficult years, complicated years with political issues. The customs closed a little, they started to put up many obstacles for imported things, for which there is no substitute stock, because importing was so difficult, it forced us to create a local line to get injections of new things in these long waiting times while things arrived from abroad,” says the businesswoman, who points out that before the launch of the Etoile D’Mori catalog there was 90% imported and 10% domestic, currently they are 50/50.

Lupe remembers the golden days, the first days of the boutique, when her sister Fanny sent her clothes from Italy, and D’Mori was one of the few shops in town that offered European clothes. They later experienced a rise when they opened more stores in Riocentro de Los Ceibos and Riocentro de Samborondón, including one in Miami; and they also expanded their business and opened the men’s clothing store Ecco, which they still have today together with the company D’Mori del Policentro.

“Since 2000, things have started to change, there is a lot of unfair competition, it must be said, which causes great damage to us who pay taxes, and it cannot be like that,” laments Mori, who insists that there have been many difficult times. and remember the pandemic as the last one they had to overcome and they passed thanks to Etoile.

They managed to overcome that problem thanks to Nicole, who started selling clothes on the street from home during the quarantine on the line and when the captivity ended they started delivering to the whole country. “There were people from Puy, Loja, Portoviejo, Quito, El Triunfo… It wasn’t a brutal sale, but we were happy that we paid for the basics and didn’t have to remove anyone,” emphasizes Mori, who assures that the present and the future his company his daughter.

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Now Lupe enjoys her time as a grandmother and enjoys doing things she didn’t do when she was young because she didn’t have time, hobbies. She loves dancing and attends dance lessons at the academy four times a week. “I can’t end my days here, I want to live because times were very difficult when we started.”

She advises business mothers to open the door to work for their children, not to underestimate them and give them wings to fly, to grow and do new projects, “it’s their time, we can only help them as much as we can, always support them with advice, stories and knowledge”.

And that is that Nicole received an open letter: “I felt free to do and undo and thanks to that I hit her, I was wrong, but sometimes I hit her,” she says with a laugh.