Car­ol Quash

Re­nes­sa Or­tiz knows first-hand the val­ue of a well-fit­ting, beau­ti­ful gown in build­ing con­fi­dence.

A for­mer Miss To­ba­go 2024 and Miss World T&T 2024, and now a busi­ness own­er, she has start­ed mak­ing cus­tom gowns for the 2026 grad­u­a­tion sea­son.

“I al­ready have some con­sul­ta­tions and some or­ders,” Or­tiz told the Busi­ness Guardian.

These stemmed from re­fer­rals from clients for whom she had done work.

The 25-year-old start­ed Ren­Cre­ate in 2021, cre­at­ing main­ly re­sort wear—ki­monos, palaz­zo pants, crop tops and free-flow­ing dress­es. She al­so makes wed­ding dress­es.

Ren­Cre­ate, she said, caters pri­mar­i­ly to the curvy fea­tures of Caribbean women.

“We are known for our hips and curves and the sinks in our backs… Of­ten you would hear the state­ments, ‘This doesn’t sit on me right; it just doesn’t fit right,’” Or­tiz said.

She not­ed that she is more on the slim side, so usu­al­ly any­thing she buys from a store would fit.

“But when it comes to deal­ing with a curvy woman, there are things you have to con­sid­er. And I do have some curvy friends,” she added.

Some­times clients even ask her to de­sign some­thing for them.

“So I would pull things to­geth­er and show them a lit­tle sketch or an idea of what it could look like,” Or­tiz said.

While she has not yet po­si­tioned her­self as a ven­dor to whom tourists would come for ready-to-wear pieces, that is some­thing she has al­ways want­ed to do.

“So once that launch­es, I would be able to have that be a part of the tourism prod­uct for the tourism brand,” Or­tiz said.

While a stu­dent at Sig­nal Hill Sec­ondary, she stud­ied cloth­ing and tex­tiles but found pat­tern draft­ing dif­fi­cult.

“I left it alone and start­ed pur­su­ing the sci­ence sub­jects to be­come a med­ical doc­tor,” she shared.

But some skills have a way of resur­fac­ing, some­times un­der the most try­ing cir­cum­stances.

Dur­ing the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, she made masks and post­ed pho­tos on her What­sApp sta­tus.

A friend then en­cour­aged her to cap­i­talise on her skill by sell­ing the masks.

“On an­oth­er in­stance, I was telling a friend I want­ed to reach out to some in­ter­na­tion­al ven­dors to start do­ing whole­sale for my ready-to-wear line. She ad­vised me to start cus­tom, build my con­fi­dence, and then branch off. She was one of my very first cus­tomers, along with my friend with the masks,” Or­tiz said.

She said she took some sewing class­es, watched YouTube videos and prac­tised ex­ten­sive­ly.

“And I think it’s al­so a skill that I have nat­u­ral­ly be­cause I grew up watch­ing my grand­moth­er sew,” she added.

Or­tiz went from hav­ing one or two or­ders every two months to re­ceiv­ing or­ders every month.

She some­times has to turn down re­quests be­cause of the num­ber of oth­er com­mit­ments in which she is in­volved—she is a busi­ness ad­min­is­tra­tion stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean, a news an­chor and morn­ing show pre­sen­ter for To­ba­go Up­dates, and has a full-time job.

“A lot of times we think that when we start off and we leave school, there is on­ly one cat­e­go­ry or one path­way that we need to take, which is ba­si­cal­ly what my sto­ry start­ed like. I thought there was on­ly one box that I fit in­to. But over the years, as I’ve grown, I’ve re­alised it’s okay to have many dif­fer­ent skills, and once you struc­ture your time and dis­ci­pline your­self, you can be a part of all that you want to be a part of,” Or­tiz added.

Even­tu­al­ly, the Gold­en Lane Vil­lage res­i­dent said she hopes to turn Ren­Cre­ate in­to an acad­e­my so she can teach young peo­ple on the is­land how to draft and sew.

“It’s a good skill to have and al­so a great way to de­vel­op your­self as an in­di­vid­ual,” she said.

She be­lieves it is easy to go to a job and learn what is nec­es­sary to car­ry out the func­tions of that job.

But when it comes to learn­ing a skill and turn­ing that in­to en­tre­pre­neur­ship, there are cer­tain ar­eas of char­ac­ter that have to be de­vel­oped.

“You have to be okay with fail­ing. Some­times, with a job, it’s much safer to be there. It’s easy to say, ‘well, okay, if I make a lit­tle mess up, it’s all right.’ But when it comes to your busi­ness and the skill that you have, there are things that you can­not af­ford to hap­pen,” Or­tiz said.

Or­tiz said she has a large book in which she writes down all her goals and ideas for Ren­Cre­ate.

“I have so much that I want to do, and I just hope with time, dis­ci­pline and per­se­ver­ance that those things come to fruition,” she added.