By Erin Delmore
Correspondent
“In the car industry, it’s very demanding, it’s very fast-paced, but coming here, it’s like three times faster than what I used to do,” said Tathiana Carrasco, CEO and partner at Applique Technologies International.
Carrasco was a top performer at BMW when inspiration struck.
“I saw a lot of claims in the past two years before I left BMW and one of those days, I was just driving and hit one of the potholes and was like, OK, if no one’s going to do it, I’m the one who’s going to do it,” she said.
She founded a manufacturing company that creates equipment and materials for asphalt repair. The equipment is multi-use and the materials don’t smell. She says she’s engineered a technology that’s cheaper and gets the work done faster. Welcome news to her clients: municipalities throughout New Jersey and the northeast.
“It’s not an easy thing to get up [and say], ‘Oh, yeah, I’m just going to start my business the next morning,’ so it takes a lot of you, and it takes a lot of guts,” she said.
Not a first for Carrasco. She left her home in Panama — and all her friends and family there — at age 18.
“To this day, I still miss home, you know. Every day I’m always looking at the news, all over the place, especially in Panama to see what’s going on. But it always gives me a peace of mind and a big smile on my face every time I just put my foot right into my country,” she said.
She struck up a friendship with a next door neighbor. They had kids the same age. Just by luck, they’re from the very same town in Panama.
“We became like sisters, amiga del alma. Like sisters,” said Melida Melise-Grant.
They’ve been best friends for around a quarter century.
“You’re in a place where you don’t really have much friends. You don’t know [many] people and here you find someone, it’s like, oh wow, she understands me. She’s from my country. And we start talking our language, and we’re cooking food and we’re exchanging recipes,” Melise-Grant said.
“You always have to make something that’ll [help you] remember home, and that’ll be that rice or a different type of beans or the plantains and also the music. The music, that brings you, when you have those moments, you’re sad, and growing up and being in this country, the music was the one that kept me alive because they teach you growing up that life is just a smile all the time, that you have to live it. You have to make it fun, and people, you forget that,” Carrasco said.
That resiliency paid off. Applique Technologies International employs 10 people and was just nominated by NJBIZ as the Emerging Company of the Year.
Last year, New Jersey business and trade groups awarded Carrasco with the Albert Einstein Award for Innovation — named for one of New Jersey’s finest immigrant entrepreneurs. You could say Carrasco is “paving the road” for generations to come.