2023-04-28 19:12:56
Only four years have passed since the afternoon in which, saddened, Tomás Machuca investigated in the patio of his house to see what was available to his imagination to replace the shin guards that had broken. He played soccer and needed that protection, but he didn’t have the money to buy new ones.
He saw an old bucket, somewhat broken and worn, and took it in his hands. The plastic seemed good to him. She cut it, shaped it using her own leg as a mold; and then she painted it and drew a little. The next day, she used it in training and although it caused a sensation, she did not feel comfortable.
“My colleagues asked me where I bought them, where I got them from because they were also personalized… I was embarrassed to tell them that I had made them myself and with a bucket, so I told them that an uncle who lived in Buenos Aires sold and that he had sent them to me ”, the 21-year-old tells Infobae.
Between doubts and fears, he let his idea begin to grow and asked a friend for help to make the first custom designs that he timidly began to sell. He did not imagine that he would create his own brand and that this would take him from his native Rosario to the AFA property to leave a pair for soccer player Lautaro Blanco.
believe, the key
Tomás is from Barrio República, Rosario, Santa Fe. Land of minds that over the years have shown their own brilliance. He joins them.
With a tight schedule, he responds to Infobae’s call and summarizes how the beginning was: “I’ve been playing soccer since I was 6 years old and when I was in the lower ranks of the club here, at the age of 16, in training they kicked me so much that they broke my the shin guards that I had and that I had bought recently. At home there was not enough to buy another one so I decided to find a way to make one myself: I grabbed a bucket that I had thrown in the patio of the house, I cut it there with a saw, I shaped it with a hair dryer and a friend he made a design with one of some images in Paint to be able to stick it on. I made them personalized and the next game all my teammates asked me where I got them”.
At the same time, he realized that he was manufacturing a sustainable product and that the plastic that was waste until he took it would return to a useful life. “If he hadn’t used it, that bucket would have ended up in the trash and polluting.”
A year later, when he was starting the fifth year of high school, he wondered what the future would hold for him. “I thought it would be good to put something together on that side. It occurred to me to sell online and I proposed to a friend to start manufacturing to sell. He looked at me with a strange face, but he told me to go forward, ”he recalls with a laugh.
The first time, together with his friend, they asked the neighbors for old buckets, they went to the construction sites to ask them for the work buckets that they no longer used or any PVC object that they could mold. But the pivotal moment arrived: “We began to receive orders and what we collected was not enough, so we decided to take the leap and start transforming plastic bottle caps. We also stopped making customizations because that took a long time, so we started working on building a brand”, he revives.
When they managed to transform caps into shin guards, they decided that for each pair sold another pair would be delivered to a neighborhood club in order to encourage the concept of caring for the environment in those same clubs and among the people of the neighborhood who already collected the caps and took them to the collection points they created.
“Through this positive business impact we achieved an environmental and social impact,” he tells of what was already happening in just two years. In the first year and a half, from that first shin guard made from an old bucket, they made 300 pairs per month and currently produce 15,000 pairs per month between the two models they have.
Among the models, one is flexible and adapts to the morphology of the leg and the other comes in three sizes that are standardized according to the circumference of the leg.
“The return is very good. They tell us that they are more comfortable than the ones they had before, for example, because the others are bulky and these are designed for comfort and ergonomics. The idea is to empower those who are playing and not have to worry about dropping them while run,” he explains.
His innovation reached Lautaro Blanco, the 24-year-old left-back who was summoned by DT Lionel Scaloni to join the world champions during their time in Argentina last March.
“We got to the AFA property and we left them with him, he already has them. We have not reached the senior team yet, but we are working with clubs like San Lorenzo, Argentinos Juniors, Talleres de Córdoba, among others, and we offer them sustainability as income generation because we realized that for sport in Argentina, sustainability is doing a foreign topic and we present a proposal to the clubs so that they can translate it in a sustainable way in all its aspects, both financially and with a positive impact on the environment and sustainable over time ”, he explains.
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