The Founder Interview: Carolina Guthmann of Di Pasquale

The Rome-based co-founder of Di Pasquale Guthmann is reviving the art of hand embroidery by employing Sicilian women to create stunning modern creations.

Advice you give to anyone who will listen?
Don’t worry about how important your work looks to the others, just but do it with love and passion and persist.

Advice you wish you’d been given before you started your business?
What seems highly unlikely still happens and what seems likely often doesn’t happen. Try to plan for the unforeseen.

What keeps you up at night?
Thinking about how to make beautiful things which express a lasting style, rather than an ephemeral trend.

What calms you down?
Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations played by Glenn Gould.

2019 is the year I will?
Continue striving for success and creating many new jobs for women.

1 product I can’t live without?
My toothbrush.

Healthiest habit?
Walking to Campo de’ Fiori in Rome to do my fruit and vegetable shopping at the market every morning.

Un-healthiest habit?
Nutella.

The little thing I beat myself up about?
Not remembering the names of people I’ve met.

The big thing I beat myself up about?
Honestly, there aren’t any. The choices I make are made with good intentions, even when they are later revealed to have been wrong. Rather than beating myself up, I try not to repeat a mistake.

(S)hero?
Lou Andreas-Salome. A brilliant essayist, she inspired some of the most distinguished thinkers and artists at the end of the 19th century in Europe, including Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke and the painter Paul Rée. She was one of the first female psychoanalysts and one of the first women to write psychoanalytically on female sexuality.

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