Piñatas are a hit in this year's election
Amazing Piñatas, a small business in Downtown LA’s fashion district, is capitalizing on this year’s presidential campaign to make a profit.
Francisco Magana, an Amazing Piñatas salesperson, said that the owner, Lorena Robledo, created a Donald Trump piñata sometime last year after she saw piñatas being made south of the border in Tijuana. “We saw they were making piñatas in Mexico, then we decided to give it a try to make a piñata of Trump,” Magana said. “When people saw that we had them, people started ordering more Donald Trump piñatas and we were selling like 15 a week.”
Consumers purchase the piñatas for $120 and Magana says mostly “whites” buy them. Even the Hillary Clinton campaign invested money into the Trump piñatas, he said. “We did one for the Hillary Clinton campaign and they ended up buying more than 100 piñatas for $120.”
When it comes to filling large orders, this was not the first time. Amazing Piñatas has worked with corporations including Vans, Jack in the Box, Warner Brothers and the Hard Summer music festival.
Magana says his shop was the first business to start selling the Trump piñatas and that Robledo decided to sell piñatas not because she was trying to make a political statement but simply because she saw an opportunity to make more money. Since it made money, she and the other employees continued to manufacture them – though sales have recently dropped slightly.
Another small piñata business nearby named Raquel’s Cash N Candy sells both Trump and Clinton piñatas, but the owner refused to be interviewed.