How we started Thibisay and Gabriel

It started as a game. Thibisay made little elves with found materials — wire, scraps of fabric, twigs — and gave them away. Gabriel looked at them and one day he said:

There is something about these that is not you. It's like they come from outside.

That sentence was the beginning.

We began to notice that each piece arrived with its own personality. That when Thibisay tried to "design" one from scratch, it didn't turn out well. But when he sat down to work without a prior idea, letting his hands choose, pieces appeared that had something extra.

The First Channeled Guardian

The first guardian channeled seriously was a small, brown one, with green bead eyes. We gave it to a friend who was grieving. Three weeks later she called us crying: she told us things that the guard "had told her" that she had never told us. Intimate, specific things. Details about her mother that only she knew.

There we understood that what we were doing was serious. It wasn't craftsmanship. It was something else.

The change

That's where everything was born. We started taking more time. We start listening to each piece before we finish it. We begin to respect the rhythm of each channeling. And we stop giving away: the energy of the exchange matters, and a guardian that comes to you "for free" loses some of the weight of the decision.

It was not a commercial decision. It was an energy decision. When you receive something without having made a move for it, it is not yours. When you make a movement – be it economic, be it time, be it waiting – the being enters in a different way.

What we learned the first years

The first years were trial and error. We made pieces that we later realized were not. We remove them. We learned to recognize when we were channeling well and when we were inventing because we wanted to finish sooner. We learned that some days it was not possible and we had to stop.

We also learned that there are people who are not for this. And that's fine. There are those who receive a guardian and connect immediately. There are those who receive it, keep it, and rediscover it five years later. There are those who receive it and never connect. The Guardian is not for everyone.

Today

Today we are both. Thibisay channels and arms. Gabriel supports the logistics, shipping, and the community. We work without employees, without intermediaries, without resellers. What you do with us, you do directly with us.

We are registered as a company in Uruguay and as an LLC in the United States. But we don't feel like a "company." We feel like a job. Like a couple of bakers who bake bread every night so that the people of the neighborhood can eat well the next day.

Why we don't climb

Many people tell us "they should hire people, do more, earn more." We understand it but it's not for us. If we hire someone, it stops being a serious pipeline: it becomes a production line.

We prefer to make fewer pieces but do them well. We prefer to take as long as it takes. We prefer to charge what is fair and live well with that. The scale there is is what it is. And we like it that way.

What we have in common with the community

People who come to Duendes del Uruguay usually share something: they are tired of the mass. We saw it very clearly. They come from buying things that break, from having consumer relationships that leave them empty, from looking for something more solid and slower.

That's why we connect. What we offer is the opposite of fast consumption: something unique, handmade, that takes as long as it has to take.

What's coming

We are opening the way to the United States market in English. We are thinking about new collections. We are planning for this same community — the one you are reading now — to grow with us. We don't want to be bigger. We want to be deeper.

If you want to be part of this elemental community, you already are. Your adoption put you in. We build what follows together — that is the alchemy that lies ahead for you.