Handmade Art Gallery in Mostar: Window to the world for domestic products of BiH women

Home-made chilli liquor, quince and nut sweets or handmade jewellery and soaps are just a few of the many products offered by the Handmade Art Gallery, a souvenir shop located by the Old Bridge in Mostar. This shop offers products from more than 60 women and more than 20 registered farms run by women from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Wishing for her hometown to have a souvenir shop which would offer the best homemade products, Mostar-born Emica Ćorić created a place which offers tourists something different they can take back with them as a present or a memory from their trip.

„I used to live abroad for years and each time I would come to Mostar and when I was going back to where I was living at the time, I wanted to bring my friends something, and I simply wasn’t finding anything that was ours, local, Bosnian-Herzegovinian, crafts or food and drinks. I remember always saying ‘I would love to open a store like that here’,” says the owner of Handmade Art Gallery.

“I was thinking, since women are still neglected in our society, they are still in the background in comparison to men in the business world, I simply wanted, if possible, to have only women who would showcase their products and crafts”, recalls Emica, who is a successful embryologist with more than a 20-year-long career in Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Handmade Art Gallery is one of 15 small businesses led by women which are supported through the programme BizUp implemented by the Foundation 787 and UN Women and financed by the United Kingdom government. With financial and mentorship support, the Handmade Art Gallery will soon offer the tasting of products that are being sold. Emica explains she is working on designing the concept which would attract tourists and contribute to her products being more recognisable. She is working on that with mentors from BizUp while she communicates continuously with women whose products she sells.

Getting in touch

The idea of a place where one could buy domestic products as souvenirs existed for years within her, Emica says, and the gallery shop was opened symbolically on March 8, 2020. After only five days, it closed due to COVID-19-related measures. Last summer it was reopened and in the meantime partnerships with women whose products are being represented were strengthened and renovation and decoration works were continued in the shop, housed in a stone facility within the Old Bridge complex.

„From a hobby, this grew into a real business”, Emica says smiling and explains how, besides an already demanding job of running the first and only centre for reproductive medicine in Herzegovina, the Handmade Art Gallery represents an important achievement for her.

The decision to focus only on products made by women required her to research and carefully pick her contacts. She recalls how she sought some of the first advices and contacts from a similar shop from Trebinje, called „Hercegovina House“.

„I contacted the women one by one, searched them on the Internet”, she says, adding that she got some recommendations from the Trebinje shop. „I visited them and took a lot of addresses of farms run by women and the rest I contacted through Instagram”.

Women whose products and crafts are available on the shelves of the Handmade Art Gallery are mostly from Herzegovina, including towns of Grude, Ljubuški, Čitluk, Gacko, Bileća, Trebinje, and a few from Bosnia such as Sarajevo and Tešanj.

„Crafts are great, we also have ceramics and soaps, but what tourists like the most are edible and drinkable things, like jams, ajvar, sweets, liquors, rakija, something to eat”, Emica says. “When I travel myself, I also like to taste something and, if I like it, I take it back with me”.

„More than 60 women earn for their everyday lives here, and some of them sell only here because they did not get a chance somewhere else. Some of the reasons are administrative because majority of women don’t have a registered farm”, she says. “We sell their products as souvenirs and through farms of those who accepted to represent other women’s products.”

Majority of women come to Mostar and bring their own products, which is a chance to meet them and have a personal contact. She emphasizes that among them are also several women who fled Mostar during the war and only came back the first time for this occasion, which to her means a great deal.

Women entrepreneurs in BiH

This Mostar-born entrepreneur went for studies to Stuttgart in 1992 and, after starting a successful career, came back to her hometown around 2010. Apart from embryology and promoting domestic products, she is also running an association that takes care of stray animals.

Talking about the position of women in entrepreneurship in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Emica notes that this position is difficult because there are still prejudices in the BiH society „that women should perhaps not be entrepreneurs and that their place is somewhere else”.

„If a woman is very successful then ‘for sure she has someone who pushes her forward’, ‘a woman cannot be successful on her own’ – this is what I notice people are thinking“, Emica notes. “I think that women should fight more. There is still this predominant stand that it is important what other people say and what someone else thinks about us. The moment one stops fearing what someone will say about us, there are no limits anymore.”

Through BizUp she met a lot of BiH women entrepreneurs who, just like her, work on making an important step forward in their small businesses. She sees the Handmade Art Gallery as a project she wants to develop through different support programmes and she tries to find new ways of improving it. For now, she is focused on branding the products and attracting the tourists, as she wants them to be able to “recognize a difference between us and the others”.

„I think that we don’t promote our country enough, we think something else somewhere else is better. I don’t think so. I think we are the best”, Emica is determined. “Over here we are like a window to the world. Everyone comes here and it’s an opportunity for us to ‘go out to the world’.”

This article was made possible within the project “Women Economic Empowerment in Bosnia and Herzegovina – Rebuilding Better” which is implemented by UN Women in BiH with financial support of United Kingdom government.