The story behind Flora Vista

Long time followers know the story of the Flora Vista pattern. It was chronicled in four (long) blogs posts from 2018, but I’ll try to distill it here.

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2017: I had been asking questions but not getting any clear answers in my work. I wanted to go deeper, giving people something from my heart that reinforced my company values of creativity, connection, and craftsmanship. It was a time of inquiry. I threw myself into the Artist’s Way, a 12-week exploration by Julia Cameron that I feel is important for anyone trying to uncover their creative next steps. Then I took an online course called Necessary Creatives. Each week I met with seven strangers who were as open and earnest and vulnerable as I was, women doing the hard work to figure out the answer to the question: what was I put on this earth to make? The closest I got to defining it came from a prompt on May 29th, 2017: running down the hill full speed, water, flowers, safe and protected, collaboration.

Three months later, I understood what those words meant.

North of San Salvador, a small group of us showed up to a small refugee village with three medical professionals to give checkups and hand out antibiotics, toothbrushes and other supplies. I had a bag of gifts with me: pencils, stickers, candy, small journals. I played for hours with the kids, playing tag, futbol on the steep hill leading up to the church, drawing, making cootie catchers with the 30 or so kids waiting with their parents for medical appointments. One of the girls, Dayana, a 12-year-old, made a big impression on me, and she didn’t leave my side all day.

This village is home to about 500 people, many of them displaced during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. The homes are simple, with concrete floors, corrugated metal roofs, open-air kitchens powered by propane. None have running water or toilets, and few have electricity, powered from car batteries. The only flushing toilet in the entire village is at the church, and it only flushes when it’s filled with water from a bucket, because there’s no water intake. Every drop the community uses for drinking, cooking, cleaning and bathing has to be carried in from a source down a steep hill. Water isn’t something you turn on. It’s something you fetch, ration, and protect, and that need touches every part of daily life there, from the church’s one toilet to the meals cooked in the open air.

Back at the orphanage where we were staying that night, I reflected on the day and was struck by how I felt, reminded of the home I had as a kid, running down the hill in my backyard on Flora Vista, playing freely. I turned back to my May 29th morning pages: running down the hill full speed, water, flowers, safe and protected, collaboration. And I finally knew what those words meant. This is what I was supposed to do. Help this community. Do something so these kids could have a safe and protected home, one where water wasn’t a daily struggle.

I knew a little now about what was next and tried to follow the steps. My intuition said “scent,” but I didn’t know much more than that, only that scent connects us. It connects us to our pasts, to our memories, to places, to people. I learned about a school in France that held week-long classes in perfumery, in a 13th-century convent in Provence, home of lavender and clary sage. So I booked a trip alone that summer, which felt selfish and terrifying, flying into Paris and out of Nice, renting a car to drive to the small village that housed the perfume school.

The week was incredible. I got a real education in raw materials, the scent triangle, heart and top and bottom notes. I visited a honey farm, a lavender distillery, an organic lavender and immortelle farm, toured l’Occitane. But the best part of the trip were the friends I made, Ghadi from Lebanon, Rosa from Germany, Ricardo from Spain, Christine from LA, all brought to France for one reason or another, all interested in perfumery, as I was. Again, the point was about connection.

I sat in Grasse, the birthplace of perfumery, and tried to make the pieces come together. The inspiration, the research, the knowledge was there, but it didn’t quite fit yet. I knew what it had to do with, of course: water, flowers, El Salvador, safe and protected. But what the product actually was, I still wasn’t sure.

Home is a powerful place. It’s where our memories are formed, the moments celebrated. It’s where we prepare to show up in the world. It’s where we cuddle with our pets, our partners, our children. Our safe nesting place to retreat when we need it. It’s our protection from the elements and nature. At home we find the structure and security which helps us thrive in this world. If that place is challenged by poverty, displacement, or family circumstance, the potential to thrive is lessened in order to survive. What I saw in El Salvador made that so real to me. When home can’t offer that structure, when there isn’t access to the basic necessities like water to count on, the energy that should go toward thriving has to go toward surviving instead.

I was lucky to grow up in a safe and healthy home, in which we were encouraged to explore and create. We walked to school every morning without incident, played with neighborhood friends in our tree house. But the place that was just mine and my brother’s was the natural cluster of ivy that made an outdoor room at the top of the ivy-covered hill behind our house - our hiding place, our restaurant some days, the turret of our castle on others. Or it served as a timed obstacle course, with the last step running as fast as we could down the hill. I can remember so vividly that feeling of abandon and exhilaration, running down the hill full speed, with cowboy boots on, perfectly free.

The security of home became even more important to me because I lost it. When my brother and I were teenagers, my father became ill, my parents divorced, and the home sold. We were left to figure things out for ourselves.

That’s why I named the new product 735 Flora Vista, my address growing up in Santa Barbara. Our home on the mesa, where I was free to explore, and ultimately, where my creativity was born.

I understood what Flora Vista really was just after the new year in 2018. I wrote: essence of flowers, celebrating play, imagination, healing from destruction. To be connected to childhood: protected, supported, free. To play and give and create.

I finally understood: it was about ritual. That moment in the mirror, connecting to ourselves. Feeling nurtured. Essence, the core, heart, soul, spirit of a thing. 735 Flora Vista became a hydrating facial essence celebrating the botanicals and people of El Salvador.

It was just the right product to nurture our skin by delivering botanical rich hydration, while connecting to the women and girls of a small community in El Salvador with their most essential need - fresh, clean water. And so I drew a pattern to accompany the essence, highlighting the flowers and scents of the area, created packaging, worked with a skincare maker, and released 200 bottles of facial essence, raising money for a water tank in El Salvador. That project is still not fully funded, and we continue to give 10% of each sale of Flora Vista to continue this effort.

The product carried the light, subtle floral scent that shaped that first idea, a hint of jasmine, spice from orange blossoms, the warmth of honey, grown out of the botanicals and the story of people and place: from El Salvador to France, to the hill behind 735 Flora Vista.

That story has stayed the same, but the pattern has grown well beyond where it started. Flora Vista carries the essence of its inception, but instead of using it on your face, you’ll find it wrapping the walls, glowing through porcelain, and engulfing you in fabric, carrying the same feeling of connection, safety, and ritual into your homes.