Charlene Panutat-Carlos and Leona Laviña-Panutat’s journey from being stay-at-home moms to first-time lifestyle store entrepreneurs has been filled with unexpected adventures, and their tales now serve to enrich every little treasure they’ve brought home from their buying trips.

“Sourcing took so many hours of research, and yet one time, we drove three hours from Hanoi to find one village that makes paper craft, only to be told that that village doesn’t exist anymore,” says Leona. “Sometimes we would be told that from 200 families who used to make certain crafts, only two families are left doing it.”

“But we met strangers who helped us along the way,” adds Linda Panutat, the young women’s “boss” and Charlene’s mother.

The Panutat matriarch is the president of Prime Spots Inc., a subsidiary of the SM Group of Companies, and the person tapped by SM’s Tessie Sy Coson to develop a new concept store for the retail giant’s new luxe retail property, SM Aura Premier in Taguig, which opens to the public on May 17.

L’Indochine, the new 94-square-meter home and fashion lifestyle store on the third floor of SM Aura, has brought the younger Panutat women out of rat-race retirement, as their mom says she’s only there to hold their hand in the beginning. “They will be in charge,” says Linda, whose L’Indochine title is president.

Charlene worked with Globe Telecom’s marketing and, before that, as buyer for Marks and Spencer, before she quit to raise a family nine years ago. She has three kids aged four to eight.

Leona, her sister-in-law, used to be a stylist and a buyer for Esprit; she’s mom to a 22-month-old boy.

Exhausting and exciting

The women admit their venture into retail is all new, even as they used to be merchandisers in their past careers; they say it has been exhausting and exciting at the same time, and has brought them closer together. They traveled across Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia, in search of hill tribes and faraway villages, for one-of-a-kind crafts for L’Indochine, their “curated” store that Charlene likens to an art gallery.

L’Indochine (pronounced lahn-doe-sheen) is a mix of rare Asian Moderne home accent pieces as well as fashion accessories travelers typically handpick on their own trips.

“But you need not trek mountains and cross rivers,” says Charlene. “We’ve done it for you. We’ve brought home treasures, and you can partake of them.”

L’Indochine is for urban dwellers who are “style conscious, but price is a factor” when they shop, says Charlene. Prices start at P99 for paper crafts, to upward of P5,000 for the more elaborate items. They are categorized into décor and home; dining and entertaining; bedroom; and fashion.

The merchandise is a toast to traditional Asian techniques but with modern twists. The Vietnamese lacquer ware, for instance, aren’t your run-of-the-mill black or red; L’Indochine’s are in unexpected colors like bright green or pink, some with little    carved animal accents on the covers. The benjarong bowls, traditional royal Thai dishes, sport neon shades.

They have Tibetan jewelry, bags and pillows of Afghan and Pakistan fabrics assembled in Thailand, and Thai hand-embroidered tunics and kaftans and indigo-dyed table runners, as well as colorful beaded pouches and brass bag charms from the Hmong tribe of Thailand.

Traditional crafts are labor-intensive, and the women put emphasis on that as they tell stories about each piece. The lacquer ware take 75-100 days to make, they say, as each requires 20 coats of lacquer. The colors are painted on the benjarong bowls one by one, and the bowls fired up in a kiln after every color. A piece of indigo-dyed fabric takes seven days to make.

And since most of the pieces are handmade, nothing is identical. “We advise that if you like something, buy it right away, since we don’t know if we will be able to restock that item again,” says Leona.

The selection is a mix of of their varied tastes and personalities. Charlene is the classic, preppy type of girl, while Leona prefers eclectic bohemian. “We have completely different tastes, but for some reason we agree on the stuff that we picked. We both relate to the merchandise,” says Leona. “We hope that our customers will feel the same way about them, too.”