Two years ago, she opened a company and an online store where her products can be found, and plans to create a center with workshops and courses where people can learn about handmade art, writes zf.ro.
The girl graduated from the Chisinau School of Painting and came to Romania from Moldova in 2011 to study architecture. She then started working in restoration and at the same time created the Ars Ana workshop.
During the pandemic, she worked from home and eventually bought her first kiln and switched from ceramics to painting. The product from the Ars Ana range that she says best characterizes the brand is the ceramic angel wing. The pieces can be purchased directly from the workshop as well as from her own online store, and the most expensive are the paintings, which are priced up to 1,000 or even 2,000 euros.
“The Ars Ana workshop is a space that wants to preserve craft in a non-museum, living form, so that in tens or hundreds of years, when archaeologists excavate the layer of 2026, they will find not only the shards of Ikea, but also ourselves – who we were as people, what we loved, what beauty meant. The boldest step was changing my life to do what I love,” she says.
Today, the Ars Ana team consists of four people.
“I don’t want us to have a hectic workshop where we are overloaded with training and pressure. I want to keep doing things slowly, with love and passion, and thus bring the craft closer to people,” the entrepreneur added.
Most of Ars Ana’s customers are women, mostly from Romania. Those who buy from abroad, she said, are Romanian women who have settled there. One of the goals for this year, she said, is to start selling in Europe.
In addition to the ceramics and paintings that customers can find in the Ars Ana workshop and online store, the founder is also developing other projects in the creative sector. One example is the spaces in which she has left her mark through her work, such as cafés.
“I really like these projects because they give me the opportunity to show what I do to more people who are walking around the city or are in different places. Maison des Crepes and Pizza Geniale are two spaces where I have left my mark thanks to my paintings,” says the founder.
In 2024, the latest year for which publicly available data from the Romanian Ministry of Finance is available, Ars Ana SRL, under which the eponymous brand operates, had a turnover of almost 220,000 Romanian lei (more than 850,000 MDL), up 186% from the previous year, and reported a profit of more than 116,000 RON (450,000 MDL), up 54%.
