From Szczecin to Abruzzo: The Story Behind Atelier Sylwia
I was born in 1980 in Szczecin, a city in northern Poland, close to the German border. It was a place shaped by history — and so was I.
In 1990, when I was nine years old, my family emigrated to Germany. My mother's family had German roots, and so we followed that thread, as families do — searching for something more stable, more possible. I grew up in Germany, found my footing there, and made it home for many years.
But I have always been someone who moves toward the next horizon.
At twenty-seven, an unexpected opportunity arrived: a small boutique in a village in Switzerland, waiting for someone to take it over. I said yes. I had no detailed plan — only curiosity and the quiet certainty that I wanted to try. That boutique taught me more about craft, about taste, about what women truly want to carry and wear, than anything I had studied before.
After a year, I felt the pull of something larger. I moved to the area around Zurich, and it was there that life took one of its unexpected turns: I met someone, fell in love, and together we made the decision to build something in Italy.
We arrived in Abruzzo in 2009.
If you have never been to Abruzzo, let me tell you — it is not the Italy of postcards. It is quieter than that, wilder, more honest. Mountains that touch the sky, valleys that hold their silence, people who still make things by hand because they know no other way worth knowing. I fell in love with it completely.
We built a business together, and it became something the region knew and respected. That chapter had its years of fullness.
And then it ended.
After that, I moved through different things — jobs, experiments, small attempts to find my footing again. I tried my hand at accessories for dogs. I trained as a nail designer. I kept searching for something that felt like mine. Nothing quite fit.
What I knew, always, was this: I love bags. I have always loved bags — the weight of a beautiful one in your hands, the way a well-made bag changes how you move through the world.
One afternoon, I sat down and began to crochet. Nothing ambitious — just a small book bag, something to keep my hands busy while my mind was elsewhere. My daughter Kiara saw it. She loved it so much that she simply took it and brought it to school the next day.
Her teacher noticed it immediately. She asked Kiara where it came from. She wanted one too.
And then other people started asking.
I sat with that for a while. I had spent years looking for the thing that would make me feel like myself again — and here it was, arriving quietly, through my daughter's hands.
That was the beginning of Atelier Sylwia.
Kiara is sixteen now — seventeen in October —, and she is the face of this brand — not because I needed a model, but because she is the reason any of this exists. She is the one who saw it first. She always has been.
