Piino

It was after living in Switzerland, Italy, Japan and Germany that Rita Botelho, on her return to Portugal, found the most colorful side of life. She had been working for years as a product designer and most of the time with a strong connection to jewelry, but it wasn’t her dream job. The materials used were always the same and did not encourage her creative side. “I have a very minimalist style and I always use neutral colors in everything, but at this point in my life it only made sense to create colorful pieces. I was happy with my daughter, with my family, with my return to Portugal. It was a creative break in which I felt the need to express myself with color.”
Thus, in 2019, Piino was created, a minimalist, fun and colorful jewelry brand. It is, starting with the name itself, an ode to fun and the lightness of someone who takes his life to risk, to fall and to try again. The earrings are made with polymer putty, “but not the kind we used to play with when we were little”. The polymer clay Rita works with is exploited with sophisticated techniques, some of which she developed over the last year – shared now on Patreon, the side project of online classes in which the designer and artisan shares her hands-on discoveries .
All the pieces are handmade by Rita but, contrary to what you might think, exclusively manual work is not the best option. “I use instruments and small machines to avoid fingerprints and impurities in the material.” And yet, no two pieces are ever exactly alike. The earring colors, which Rita points out as one of the great reasons for the brand’s success, are the result of the many mixtures made by the designer until she finds the right recipe for each one of them. The three initial tones have already given way to 14, which are guaranteed to increase soon.