The plastic rings that seduce Rosalía
TRENDS
The accessories firm La Manso, founded by Adriana Manso, breaks the mold and triumphs among the 'millennial' generation and Z with its extravagant colored methacrylate rings, which even stars like Rosalía and Dua Lipa wear
Andrea VerdejoA loan of 400 euros and an old stock of plastic rings was enough for Adriana Manso (Barcelona, 1994) to found her “little empire”, as La Manso refers to her firm. She now creates and markets T-shirts with printed photos of dogs, bags that resemble bikini tops, belts, dolphin-shaped hair clips and even psychedelic tables that transform like a puzzle; but the highlight of her business continues to be her original plastic rings, a reviled material with a very bad reputation that the Catalan is determined to redefine.
"I have always loved costume jewelry, when I was little I used to play necklaces with my grandmother," she says through a video call from a bar in Formentera, where she spends her first vacation since she founded the company in 2019. "I lived in the neighborhood of Call, surrounded by shops where you can buy material to make the pieces. The owners knew me and when they emptied the warehouse they gave me bags full of plastic objects that I recycled”. After studying lighting design at the Barcelona Theater Institute and working as a lighting technician at the Gran Teatro del Liceo in Barcelona, he began to combine music programming at the Ocaña hall in the Catalan capital with what were the beginnings of his brand, in 2019. "That amused me a lot, but the confinement came, they had to close the place and I focused all my energies on the ring business," he explains.
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Success came soon. Her sculptural colored rings went viral on Instagram – where she now has more than 142,000 followers, including celebrities such as Bella Hadid, Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa and Rosalía, who wear her products and promote her for free – and orders began to arrive on the website from all over the world. "I was at home alone, sticking rings and writing to people from many countries... Everything was very easy," she admits. “I'm very nice,” she admits shamelessly, “so they're very nice to me. I'm pretty lucky."
As the description of her website says, "La Manso is not a brand, but a girl", and her character is reflected in each product and image she shares: she is fun, cheeky and with an air of millennial nostalgia, since her aesthetic is the one that was more fashionable at the beginning of the century when she was "the queen of the school". “My maternal grandmother ran a kiosk, she always had plastic rings and toys that were sold there. That meant she was rich to the other kids,” she recalls with a laugh. In addition to her popularity during her elementary school years, she owes her closeness to her grandmother to whom she has become her source of income. She, recalls her granddaughter, elegantly wore plastic jewelry, as if it were the richest material on the market, and Adriana was fascinated "to see that plastic offered those volumes and colors without burdening you with a lot of weight, in addition to not giving any allergy”. She has wanted to transfer the same concept to her creations, with prices ranging between 50 and 80 euros in the case of rings. “We often use 1980s stock: we salvage it, polish it, clean it, shine it and give it another life,” she says.
The most logical thing would have been to expand the business with necklaces or earrings, but that, she says, "was what everyone was expecting from me." He decided that the next step was to create a table with the help of furniture designer Max Enrich whose structure with colored plates can be changed to suit the client. "It's not like they sell very well, but I had so much fun making them that it was worth it," she says.
She wants to strengthen the digital and global community that she has created, where she shares the creation processes, her day to day life and a good handful of memes with her followers. Her philosophy, carefree, optimistic and “a little chaotic”, she says, is not at odds with professionalism. Her team —of about 20 people, formed in 2020 by a majority of young women— and she have learned to use 3D printers and silicone molds with which to materialize the designs, to manage their digital business and to reach points of sale in London (Selfridges) and Madrid (Ekseption).
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