Hi! Nice to meet you, I'm Cristina, but you can call me ZiaCris!
The story that brought me here is not classic or linear, but it is certainly authentic and lucky . No millionaire win. My fortune is to have been born in a wonderful land and raised surrounded by as much wonder of the gifts of the Earth and love.
In 2006 I graduated in Industrial Design and after just 3 months I moved to Rome to start working in an advertising agency as an intern in advertising graphics . I absolutely did not imagine that one day it would become my second hometown!
And so I spent many years in the office, in front of the PC, but I felt more and more the need to bring back into my daily life a simple and natural lifestyle, present in my DNA and in my childhood memories when I spent the summers with my grandparents, both farmers.
The choice to become vegetarian, like that of paying more attention to labels and supply chains, went hand in hand over the years, almost intertwined in a ball of motivations and new needs, which literally made something click in me to the point of "I'm dropping everything and starting my own business "!
This is how I began to think about my ideal store, with its shelves, departments and offers, and which responded to a health need, distancing itself from large-scale distribution not only from an ethical point of view, but also in terms of production processes and times, preferring something more natural and seasonal , rather than hyper-processed or artificially induced.
The actual project was born at the end of 2022, after an incubation path organized by EIT Food and Future Food Institute for female entrepreneurs in the agrifood sector. The initial idea was to open a physical store that could also offer nutritional advice and meal plans. But the investment was too high for the available budget. Without giving up, I first opened a shop on WhatsApp and after a few months, this website.
From this path I began to see myself as a real " girlboss " like I had never done before and to believe more and more in my business idea: retail trade of sustainable products, coming from short and transparent supply chains, preferably local and Italian, which cared not only about environmental preservation, but also about the social and economic preservation of the territory in which they had decided to be born and prosper.
To date I already have loyal customers, who I take care of with attention every day, to be able to spread healthy principles of nutrition and prevention at the table , especially thanks to the support of nutrition experts who have decided to collaborate with ZiaCris.
Maybe we'll write the next chapters together.
