Nine years ago, we made our first set on two family sewing machines.
A small apartment in Medellín. A mother and a daughter. I was nineteen and had just lost my job. My mother, Marcela, had been sewing since she was a girl — and by then she knew fabric the way few people ever do: which lace holds its shape after a hundred washes, which elastic softens instead of digging in, how a single millimeter in a pattern changes the way a piece sits on a real body.
That knowledge is what built Marítimas. Not a business plan — her hands, and everything they already knew. Nine years later she still leads design and construction, and not one piece leaves us without passing through them.
We weren't trying to start a company. We were trying to build something of our own — something with purpose, something worth remembering. Made by women, for women.
Why the name
Marítimas means of the sea — feminine, and plural.
We chose it for depth. The ocean never shows you what it holds; you have to go under to find it. Women are the same. The part of us that matters was never the part on the surface.
The anchor came with the name, and it stayed. An anchor doesn't hold you in place — it holds you steady. That is the relationship we care about most: the one you have with yourself. Everything else in your life will move. That one shouldn't.
How every piece is made
Nine years later, nothing about the way we make them has changed.
Every set is still cut, sewn, and finished by hand in Colombia, under Marcela's eye. The fabrics are chosen one by one. The hardware won't tarnish or lose its shape with wear, washing, or sweat, because a piece you love should still look like itself a year from now. And every package is embroidered by hand before it leaves us.
We make very few of each design. We don't restock, and we don't repeat. When a set is gone, it's gone.
How we got here
From that apartment came a workshop, a storefront in Medellín, and women walking a runway in pieces we made by hand. And now, the United States — the same two women, the same needle, the same belief that the details are everything.
What we're really making
It was never about wearing something to impress anyone. And it was never about hiding, either.
It's about taking up space. About remembering who you are. About recognizing your body and loving it — and loving the woman you have built out of everything you have lived through.
You don't wear Marítimas for someone else.
You wear it because you chose yourself.
With love,
Michell Sánchez
Co-founder & CEO, Marítimas Lingerie