Atty. Sitoy miangkon siyay miilog sa ER

Another Filipina is making waves in the rarefied worlds of home furnishings and fashion accessories.

Ria Macasaet-Augousti is one-half of the R&Y Augousti brand (her business and life partner is Cyprus-born Yiouri), whose exotic skin clutch bags in deep, rich tones are the fashion world’s new must haves.

A full-page feature in the March 2007 Spring issue of Vogue formalizes what furniture, fashion and, most recently, jewelry connoisseurs have been raving about and buying up for years.

The R&Y Augousti boutique opened in Paris in 1994 and three years later moved to its present two-storey corner location on Rue du Bac. Their art deco inspired furniture and accessories crafted with exotic skins like shagreen (stingray skin), ostrich, snake, eel, crocodile, as well as parchment, bamboo and inlaid mother-of-pearl were an instant success. Five years ago they began doing bags, then stationery, pillows, and jewelry, the last Ria fondly refers to as the Augousti Body Accessory.

Their products are made in Philippines, in a factory near Ria’s family home in Cebu that happened to have been up for sale when the couple came home for Yiouri to meet the family. The 12 workers they inherited with the factory that used to do inlaid furniture grew to 50 in six months, then 200 a year later.

Ria was born in Manila but the family relocated to Cebu. At age 15 she went to New York to study art, and subsequently moved to London. She graduated from the London School of Furniture and was working at the interior design firm of John Stefanidis when Yiouri, an architect, joined the firm.

“We got on like a house on fire,” Ria said in an interview with Three Layer Cake online newsletter. “Only a few months after we met we decided we could make something on our own. We left the firm and started our own business.”

The couple married in 1990, and the business took an initial detour in the form of sugar futures, which the couple traded, quite successfully —at one point they had $48 million in letters of credit —with the help of family contacts until the market crashed. But by then they had enough capital to start their venture, a first line consisting of small item home accessories that, even by their own estimate, sold unbelievably well when they debuted at a trade show in Paris.

Neiman Marcus bought pieces, as did Barney’s New York, which now carries their entire line. The Hotel Crillon in Paris placed an order for desk accessories. They went into furniture, their designs described as “modern vintage,” that featured the exotic skins and cast metalwork.

The bag line came about when Ria created bags for herself, which all her friends wanted. Their spring line, featured in Vogue, includes emerald green and crimson clutches adorned with shagreen clasps and lined with aubergine suede.

Ria and Yiouri design all of their lines, as well as their Paris boutique and even their stands at trade fairs in Paris and New York. The couple divides their time between homes in Paris and the Philippines, and their daughter Kifu has contributed her artwork to the label (her drawings were embroidered on some bags).

“You find your soul mate, and it is a formula that works,” Yiouri tells Vogue.

“The most successful pieces are really done by both of us,” Ria says of the winning partnership.