It was in 2017 when Andrea Orrego began creating the blueprints for the interior design app of her dreams. Orrego’s app, Atelier, helps people envision their project more clearly with ease. By simply putting a project’s dimensions into the IOS app or website, Atelier enables one to settle details, from furniture selection to the amount of paint required for the project. Orrego’s journey from 2017 to today, however, has been anything but easy.
“It’s been all sorts of rocky, because being a woman founder and a Latina in a community that’s not a tech hub where you don’t have really necessarily all the connections possible, I pretty much needed to create a name for myself,” said Orrego as she remembered what it was like bringing Atelier into Carbondale in 2019. “I was really trying to find my place, or bring my own seat to the table.”
Orrego is a third-generation architect from Lima, Peru with over 18 years of experience. She immigrated to the United States and, after a difficult immigration process, she had to remold the knowledge of her career to U.S. architectural standards.
“I pretty much had to start over,” Orrego recounted.
The idea for Atelier began while Orrego worked in Snowmass for a small architecture firm handling residential projects as she updated her career knowledge. In 2017, she noticed that many clients had a difficult time envisioning their interior design and architecture projects in real life.
“I just thought at that point, if there was a tool that was easy enough for anybody to use, like my mom or whoever, that would just allow people to simply visualize what they see in pictures — but in a real space and dimensions, and tell the client how that translates into their budget — I feel that would help the ideation process so much,” Orrego said.
In an age where people often turn to their phones or the internet for solutions, Orrego’s idea made perfect sense. Thus began her journey into the unknown of technology and app startups. Orrego emphasized the importance of community and networking when it came to creating Atelier.
Early on, Orrego worked with Coventure, a Carbondale nonprofit that helps finance entrepreneurs in their businesses. Orrego was in a pitch competition where she was able to refine the idea and business plan of Atelier. Unfortunately, Orrego didn’t win the competition or cash prize, but through Coventure she met the right people.
“Coventure being a co-working place allowed us all to come together. Then, there was the Roaring Fork Technologists that allowed us to create a social group of people that are in the technology field, whether that’s a developer, startup founder, like myself, or someone working in [the technology field] in a different way,” Orrego said.
Around the time that Atelier was taking flight, the COVID-19 pandemic began, but Orrego hurdled the obstacle by using the time during lockdown to expand her brand online. Through that, she was able to gain connections with tech hubs outside of Carbondale, such as Silicon Valley and New York City.
“I’m able to now bring that back into the [Carbondale] community,” Orrego said. “Once this becomes successful enough, I can invest in other women like me in the community who are trying to start something that feels a little too far or removed from what most businesses are in the area where we live, because everything seems to be either hospitality related or construction related.”
Orrego hopes to empower other women and Latinas who are interested in starting their own businesses, especially since she knows the challenges of what it’s like being a woman in a male-dominated industry.
“I’m like this little small Latina girl. I walk into a room and nobody even looks at me twice, but then I start speaking about everything I’ve been able to build and accomplish and people are really like in awe sometimes, because they wouldn’t imagine that coming from a Latina woman,” Orrego said. “There’s this bias against us already, but it’s up to us to change that. If we want the next generation to have it easier and our daughters to live in a more equitable world, then we have to be the fighters that are going to make that happen.”
The idea for Atelier, back then and now, is that it gives users a starting point and complete control over their design project. The plan was always to push users toward their goals and dreams of interior design. After nearly a year of Atelier being in operation, Orrego now knows that she is resilient enough to build a company from scratch and bring her newfound knowledge of the tech industry back to the Carbondale area.
Visit www.atelier-app.com for more information.