“SYNER-G” MEANS SYNERGY

by Echo Store on November 04, 2019

Gina Lopez’ memory lingers on and in ECHOstore, too.

Written by Chit Juan

Our 11-year old baby ECHOstore is happy to announce that starting today we will be officially managing the stores of the late Gina Lopez called G STUFF in Rockwell Power Plant Mall in Makati and in Alabang Town Center. It may interest people to know that Gina used to be our customer in Serendra when we first started in 2008 and would pass by from Quezon City to grab a thing or two and on one occasion told us “throw out that microwave oven!” in Gina fashion, and we did.

Gina has always been an inspiration to the ECHOstore owners (we call ourselves the ECHOtrio) and just last year 2018 she called us for a meeting in Rockwell’s Chef Jessie restaurant to introduce who would be other mentors for her “I Love Foundation”—a foundation who worked with village economies and loving organizations aka partners. You can figure out how the acronym “I Love” was concocted—Loving Organizations in Village Economies. And we , the ECHOtrio, pledged to adopt two communities – Tublay, Benguet and Busikong Multi Purpose Cooperative in Upi, Magundanao. We went to these places with Gina (some by chopper, by plane and by land) in 2018 and in 2019 we started our work of training the community in food preparation, coffee and weaving. Upi then was adopted also by Go Negosyo and to Ginggay Hontiveros-Malvar’s  credit, Go Negosyo did a lot for Upi under Gina’s guidance, too.

To Tublay we went together and went to the tourist spots, hugging the largest tree, scaling mountains to view waterfalls where I saw Gina rappel her way, which I could not do—but she did.

Her G Stuff stores were stocked with Virgin Coconut Oil (VCO) products from the community in Palawan, and she had her lines of aromatherapy and more. Similar to ECHOstore but not exactly the same.

When Gina passed, we called for a meeting to discuss how we could help continue promoting Gina’s legacy projects. It was not a hard decision for all us to make, including her family —after all, we (Gina and the ECHOtrio) have always been aligned in our mission. So here we are today managing her stores in Rockwell and Alabang!

Last Friday, the ECHOtrio again went to Chef Jessie at Rockwell, just over a year since Gina called us to the same venue, and this time it was to seal the partnership with her brand G Stuff represented by Susan Afan and Josine Reyes of the non-profits who have since handled her business affairs.

So now we will merge our products in all our stores, G Stuff and ECHOstore, we will promote and continue to develop products from our communities, health and wellness favorites, and other popular items we have both developed. ECHOstore will now be present in Rockwell and Alabang via G Stuff and Gina’s favorites will be stocked in our ECHOstore branches, initially in the Metro Manila area and online www.echostore.ph.

It’s a wonderful and exciting union of like-minded souls which we hope to share with all our customers and friends.

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