Jorge Morales
Santa Úrsula (Tenerife) (EFE) In Santa Úrsula, a town in the north of Tenerife where she is Moroccan, divorced and with two children, she has found her home and has carved out a niche for herself in the world of bridal fashion.
Until opening a new boutique, where he employs two girls and receives clients “from all over the island” and also “from abroad”, and having earned the trust and affection of his neighbors, he has had to overcome all kinds of barriers. and resistance, social, cultural, religious and family.
Meri tells EFE that at the age of 22 she left her parents’ house in Fez because she wanted to “work on my own, my independence”, and went to Casablanca to find a life.
A year later, in 2006, she traveled to Tenerife “in love” with a canary, who would end up being her husband and father of her two children, a boy and a girl, “without knowing a word of Spanish”.
Like many other families, the 2008 crisis took its toll on them and they decided to try their luck with a tire sales business in Morocco: a tough experience but one that helped them find their commercial vocation and their “personality”. She would never be “the obedient Moroccan girl” again.
She says that her husband’s maladjustment to Morocco and “the culture shock” made them return to Tenerife “with what they were wearing” and that, after a few months, they ended up divorcing and kept custody of their two children.
The only “good news” is that this process practically coincided with the granting of Spanish nationality, which made things “easier” for him.
He worked in various stores in the tourist town of Puerto de la Cruz, one for clothing and another for perfumes, whose boss was the one who taught him “how to sell”, and later in a franchise of a well-known fashion brand, until he reached the point of mobile an SMS from your bank offering you a loan.
After requesting it three times, they ended up granting it and he set up a modest clothing store on the main road to Santa Úrsula, near the Town Hall.
Meri recalls that at first it was quite difficult for people to enter her business.
To attract attention, he put music on the street, organized theme parties or acted as a commercial at the door of the business, all in order to attract attention.
With the passage of time, few are the neighbors who do not know about “the morita de Santa Úrsula”, as she defines herself.
Now she is the owner of a bridal clothing boutique, which she opened in a “jinxed” place, since it previously housed several catering businesses without success; another “no” to which she, she assures her, she has managed to bend her pulse.
She boasts of giving comprehensive attention to her clients, whom she tries to make feel “fabulous”, like the name of her boutique; so much so that she has installed a small walkway next to the fitting rooms.
But he aspires to more: in November he will present his own line of large sizes and another at affordable prices at the Feboda bridal fashion fair.
His objective, he emphasizes, is to “conquer weddings in the Canary Islands” with his models, since it is in these islands where “my soul belongs”.
“I want to die here, this is my country”, proclaims Meri, “a canary at heart”.