Manila · since 2020
Kristine Malabanan
My lola paid me per collar when I was fourteen. She said: do it right once, so you do not have to do it twice. I say the same thing to new labellers.
- Role
- Senior labeller
- Centre
- Manila
- Joined
- 2020
- Works on
- Retail product imagery, segmentation
Kristine Malabanan grew up in Lipa, Batangas, in a house where there was always a sewing machine running. Her grandmother made school uniforms and barong for a shop in town, and from the age of fourteen Kristine sewed collars for her after school.
She finished senior high school in 2018 and worked in a garment workshop until it closed during the lockdowns of 2020. Rungwell at Home was recruiting in Batangas that summer. She joined a cohort that trained entirely online, on laptops couriered to their homes, and met her teammates in person for the first time eight months later.
She moved to Manila and to the centre’s eighth floor in 2022 and became a senior labeller the following year. She now works on product segmentation for retail clients, drawing precise outlines around packaging so that shop cameras can tell one brand of instant noodles from another, and helps train each new Rungwell at Home cohort in Batangas.
Her object is her grandmother’s dressmaking scissors, which she keeps in her locker. “I don’t use them. I just like that they are here.”