Architect
15+ years across architecture, product design, digital fabrication and building companies.
Architecture · Product · Business
About
A positive humanist and an idea generator with a systematic mind. My greatest strength is building multidisciplinary teams that solve a project’s core challenges.
“To know myself, accept myself and outdo myself every day.”
I describe myself as a positive, self-motivated humanist: a generator of creative ideas with a systematic, disciplined and idealistic mind. From drafting a business plan to designing unique experiences for users and clients, my work has driven a constant search for innovation and sales — from architecture to technology, and back to the land.
Selected work
Architecture, product and fabrication. A summary of each project — open any of them for the full story.
My most recent project — designed, welded and built by my team. It’s delivered as a blank canvas in two sizes and five colors, with a 10-year structural warranty.
Discover Pixán
It began as CARES (Cloud Care System), where I built teams to develop cloud software, and evolved into Emiti: a watch for older adults and people with chronic conditions that detects falls in real time and alerts the family via web app, SMS and phone call. I designed the product, the brand and the packaging — and the packaging won Mexico’s National Design Award.
Working prototype · real
Industrial design, brand and packaging
As a design architect and real estate advisor at RenCo, I designed user experiences that blend the digital, the physical and the sensory. For Almeida Viajes, a Spanish travel agency operating in Mexico, I developed the concept for its master franchise.
When I moved to Vallarta to work the land and develop the modular cabins, I set up my own CNC workshop.
habitatproduct.com.mx
Rendering · 12 mm (0.47 in) lattice screen, through-cut
Track record
Competitions, funding and stages that put ideas to the test in front of juries and investors.
The CARES team · 1st place, FI-WARE Smart Society, Seville 2014
First place with CARES, a cloud-based care system: a €75,000 prize. Watch video
Winner in Product Packaging Design and finalist in Visual Communication, with Emiti.
Emiti, selected among startups from around the world to pitch international investors.
Emiti among Mexico’s top 20 startups at the world’s largest tech show. Pitched to investors in English.
We pitched Emiti on national television to the show’s investors.
Honorable mention and an interview as Emiti’s CEO in the English edition of the book.
Our first international competition.
Our second European final that same year.
CARES: emergency monitoring and response.
Pitched to Telcel executives and spoke on the main stage at Campus Party.
A second category of the same award, with Emiti.
Among the country’s top entrepreneurs.
Honorable mention and feature story.
The first Pixán, built and lived in.
2018 · National television
Shark Tank México
We pitched Emiti to the investors in season 4, episode 9. Filmed in January and aired in July 2018.
TechCrunch Disrupt · Berlin, Germany · 2017
Emiti among the top 50 startups.
Lessons · Setbacks
Awards tell one side of the story. This is the other.
Setback 01 · 2013 · São Paulo, Brazil
“I put everything in.
We lost by a landslide.”
2013
FI-WARE Smart City, European Union. All my savings in the team, my 28th birthday in Brazil and a crushing defeat.
2014
I grew the team and reinvested with a loan against my car’s title: 1st place at FI-WARE Smart Society in Seville.
We were selected as Mexico’s team with CARES; I got the project off the ground with my then-partner. The following year we reached two finals in Spain, Seville and Gran Canaria; we weren’t allowed to compete in both, and in Seville we won.
Setback 02 · 2018 · Emiti, Shark Tank México
“We won over the Sharks.
The watch never made it to market.”
MX$15M
A valuation of 15 million pesos. The negotiation dragged on too long and debt wore the team down.
Land
There are variables I can’t control; I decide where I put my time and my capital. I went back to the land.
Maybe I got overconfident: I thought the product was more mature than it was, and I couldn’t raise the investment that scaling required. Then COVID hit.
What came next
Instead of continuing to invest in technology, I decided to invest in land. That’s where Pixán and the CNC workshop were born.
Today I’m an ejidatario (communal landholder) in Cerro Azul, a community in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, where I steward my share of 40 hectares (99 acres), and I own one hectare (2.5 acres) in an ecotourism area 45 minutes from Puerto Vallarta.
Speaking
CONACYT, México Innova, Campus Party and the Government of Jalisco: design, innovation and entrepreneurship.
Advisory
For entrepreneurs, companies and developers who want to turn an idea into a product, a project or a business.
From concept to prototype, packaging and launch.
Grants, awards and accelerator programs.
Story, numbers and delivery in front of investors.
Design, modular construction and real estate development.
Contact
322 362 88 28
@juanmanuelromeromena
Juan Manuel Romero MenaArchitect · Founder of Habitat Product