Jeandie O. Galolo
Sun.Star Correspondent
A YOUNG Cebuano furniture designer was named by the Philippine Yearbook as one of the 61 artists who will change the world.
Vito Angelo Selma, the 29-year old designer, is the man behind the internationally-renowned Vito Selma furniture brand that is now sold in over 40 countries worldwide.
Selma, the Stonesets International, Inc. creative director, was also named Young Entrepreneur of the Year last month by the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Born into a family of furniture manufacturers, Selma has a good grasp of furniture design. He still remembers back in the 1980s and early 1990s, when furniture pieces were mostly made of stones and the preferred pieces were classical in design.
But Selma, who is described to be one of the most successful designers of his generation, did not initially plan on going into the industry.
Selma loves drawing and photography. During his childhood and teenage years, he enrolled himself into art classes every summer and later on learned to paint and draw in different medium, from charcoal to oil.
Mentor
It was when he met furniture designer Debbie Palao and attended a workshop under the Designers Guild of the Philippines in his third year in high school that Selma got interested in furniture design. From then on, Palao served as his mentor.
Determined as well to help his parents in their furniture business, Selma decided to improve his skills in furniture design and take a degree in Interior Architecture at the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco, California. After three years of studying, he quit when he realized that the lessons in the university were mainly focused on transportation design instead of furniture.
Even without finishing his degree, Selma applied for a master’s degree in Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan, Italy. There he met the Italian designer Raffaela Mangiarotti who taught him how to design for a global market. Mangiarotti designs products for international companies like Coca Cola, Whirlpool Europe, JVC and Kraft, among many others.
Selma also headed to South Africa to intern for George de Haast, who taught him aesthetics and spaces in furniture design, which he said has helped shape his present work. “Less is more,” the young designer said of his philosophy.
Selma’s pieces are identified as modern in style and mostly made of raw wood with their “simple and creative design.” Creativity comes with emphasizing the natural texture of the wood and simplicity comes with their clean spaces.
What had been a move to help design for his parents has led to Selma making his own name in the furniture industry.
Vito Selma as a brand emerged in 2007, when he participated in a furniture expo with his four collections: Baud, a wave-shaped furniture for sitting; Geo, a coffee table which plays on the concept of string art to create a three-dimensional play of lines; Plumeria, a table with a base that appears like a tree bark; and Puno Sofa, an upholstered seat with multiple rails.
Awards
From then on, people started calling his designs as a “Vito Selma” piece instead of associating the designs with his parents’ furniture business.
Selma also received several awards, particularly for his Geo table. These include first prize industrial award for the Department of Science and Technology’s National Invention Contest and Cebu Next Expo’s Best Contemporary Design in 2010 and many other recognitions and nominations in several furniture expos in the country.
Currently, Vito has more than 40 collections patented under his name.
The young designer is also active in helping women in Cebu find employment opportunities in furniture-making.
He has worked recently with six women from Liloan, Cebu to produce a table made of crocheted dry leaves, which was showcased in Germany. He also coordinated with the Capiz shell workers in Olango Island and turned the shells into shell flowers which he used as decorations for the Plumeria table.
In the future, Selma said he is looking forward to working with women from different parts of Cebu to discover more diverse kinds of Cebuano craftsmanship. Similarly, the young designer also wants to be an “informal teacher” or mentor to those who aspire to be in the furniture design industry.
When asked for his advice to young designers who want to succeed in the furniture industry, Vito said that belief in one self is the key.
“If you don’t believe in your yourself, no one will. Failures will always be there, especially in those times when you feel that people don’t like your work because no one buys it, but just wait for the right time and believe that you will make it and I tell you, you will,” he said.