A NOTE FROM OUR FOUNDER
I didn't start Isla Foundry because I had a brilliant ecommerce idea.
I started it because I was trying to find a way to stay.
For most of my life, the thing I wanted most wasn't money.
It was a family.
When I was a kid, my life wasn't always easy. I remember being around twelve years old, coming home after being bullied and wondering why people seemed to hurt each other so much.
What bothered me wasn't only what happened to me. I worried about what happened to my mom. My brother. Other people.
Why is the world like this?
I wish I could change something about it.
I didn't know what that meant yet. But I learned something about myself early: pain usually didn't stay sadness for very long. I would turn it into energy. Then work. Then another idea. Then another attempt to build something.
Sometimes that made things better. Sometimes I made mistakes. But underneath all of it was still the same boy looking for the same thing: somewhere to belong and people to love.
THE PHILIPPINES KEPT APPEARING
Looking backward, it almost feels like a trail of breadcrumbs.
One of my first childhood friends came from a Filipino family. Our fathers played music together.
Years later, when I was around twenty and going through another major change in my life, I seriously considered missionary work. I've never been particularly motivated by money for its own sake. Even then, part of me thought: If I can make enough to live and spend my life doing something meaningful, maybe that's enough.
While looking into churches and missionary work, the Philippines entered my life again. That path never became what I imagined, but the connection to this country somehow remained.
Years passed. Businesses came and went. Life changed. And somehow, almost invisibly, the Philippines never entirely disappeared from the background.
THEN I MET MJ
For the first time, I didn't have to wonder what a genuine connection felt like.
I wasn't seriously looking for anyone. Dating apps had never meant much to me. Most conversations started the same way and ended almost as quickly.
Then I saw Mary Jane. My first thought was basically: She's way too beautiful. She's not going to talk to me.
Then she did.
There was no meaningless small talk. We started telling each other real things almost immediately — long messages, stories, our lives, our failures, what we wanted, what had hurt, and what we still hoped for.
We had very different cultures and remarkably similar emotional histories. Neither of us quite understood why the other person was interested. We still joke about that.
I GOT ON THE PLANE
For probably the first time in my adult life, somebody became more important than the business.
At the time, I was growing another business. For the first time in a while, I could see where sales were going to come from. I also knew there were operational weaknesses that required my attention.
There were things I should have handled better. There were decisions I would make differently today.
But I bought the plane ticket. I crossed the world. I chose to find out whether this thing I felt was real.
And I would make that choice again.
WHAT I FOUND
I expected to meet the woman I loved. I didn't understand that I was about to meet an entire life.
From the moment I arrived, I was treated like family.
There were hugs. Food. Kisses. People worrying about whether I was comfortable. People taking care of me in ways I wasn't accustomed to.
Mary Jane would take care of me when I was sick, make sure I ate, help me, and love me without making it complicated. I would try to help because my American brain kept telling me that if I sat there while she did something for me, I was being lazy.
We were both learning — two completely different cultures trying to understand how the other one expresses love. And somehow it worked.
Then my old life started falling apart.
After I arrived, the business I had depended on collapsed.
Part of that was circumstance. Part of it was my responsibility. There are decisions I wish I had handled with more discipline.
I can acknowledge that without changing the most important fact:
I do not regret coming here.
If the price of meeting Mary Jane, finding this family, and experiencing this life was getting on that airplane when conventional wisdom said I should stay focused on business — I would still get on the plane.
BECAUSE SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENED
For years, I thought I was trying to build businesses. Maybe I was really trying to build a home.
One day I looked around and realized the thing I had wanted since childhood was already beside me.
I had people to love. People who loved me. A woman I wanted to build a life with. A child I was allowed to love and help raise. A family who treated me as one of them.
And suddenly the problem wasn't: “How do I go back to my old life?”
It was: How do I build a life that lets me stay?
ISLA FOUNDRY
While trying to answer that question, I started paying closer attention to what was around me.
The Philippines is full of extraordinary things that American customers rarely encounter: textiles, natural fibers, bags, objects made by families and small businesses, and traditions that have existed longer than many of the brands selling “artisan-inspired” versions of them in the United States.
And I began noticing something else. Many of the people making these products operate in an economy where charging what their work might actually command internationally can feel impossible.
I didn't want to come here and ask, “How cheap can I get this?”
I wanted to know: “What happens if we find people who understand what this is actually worth?”
That question became Isla Foundry.
The business I had built didn't survive the journey.
The reason I made the journey did.
I don't know where this story ends. Isla Foundry is still new. We're still figuring things out. We're starting with a small collection and an enormous amount to learn.
But I know why I want it to work.
I want to stay with the people I love. I want to build something my family can be proud of. I want the makers we work with to benefit when the company grows.
And if we're fortunate enough to build something much bigger, I would love to see Isla become a platform through which people across the Philippines can reach customers they never could have reached alone.
Maybe that's how the twelve-year-old boy who wanted to change the world finally does some of it.
Not all at once. Not through some grand gesture. One family. One maker. One opportunity. One product. One connection at a time.
With love from the Philippines,
Travis Carter
Founder, Isla Foundry
And MJ — the reason I got on the plane.