Before Adriana Hoyos could become one of Latin America’s most influential designers, she had to invent the job she wanted — because in 1990s Ecuador, “interior designer” wasn’t a career anyone recognized yet.
In this episode, Laura Umansky and Melissa Grove sit down with the founder of the Adriana Hoyos furniture house — now a 30-year-old, vertically integrated brand with 15+ collections, showrooms from Dubai to Georgetown, and a factory in Ecuador exporting containers daily. Adriana traces her path from decorating in a department store with no mentorship, to sketching her first furniture collection on napkins during a flight home from High Point, to building a family business now run alongside her husband, daughter, and son.
They get into:
- Why she had to create both her style and her market at the same time, with no industry playbook to follow
- The real story behind the Galapagos collection — born from a sea lion encounter on a girls’ trip
- What it took to bring her daughter into the business after she initially chose fashion design instead
- The expensive lesson that changed their global expansion strategy (and why “conquering the world alone” doesn’t work)
- Her definition of luxury: the stitching no client will ever notice, but she’ll never let slide
- Balancing handcrafted, generational Ecuadorian craftsmanship with high-tech production and data-driven decision-making
- Why some of her best-loved “iconic” pieces were the ones everyone told her wouldn’t sell
Whether you’re building a design career, a product brand, or a family business meant to outlast you, Adriana’s story is a masterclass in intuition, resilience, and building for legacy rather than trend.
