Well this is exciting! If the anticipation of holidays weren’t enough to make you giddy, we have a little more joy coming your way — Baxter & Co.!
We’ve been working for months and months now, pulling together a thoughtfully selected collection of designed goods that allow Sudara to partner with some truly amazing designers. This time of year often means a few extra purchases for the people we love and we can probably all relate with the growing desire to not just buy for the sake of buying. Which is why we have pulled together some wonderfully lovely, meaningful gifts for loved ones that have a social impact in more ways than one.
This week’s collaboration is with the dynamic, socially conscious co-owners of Baxter & Co. and co-founders of Conscious Magazine, Rachael & Elena Baxter.
We teamed up with them to create a whimsy little 5 pack of hand-illustrated holiday cards. Perfect for hostess gifts, holiday thank you and year-end notes.
Here’s a bit of interview correspondence with Rachael and Elena Baxter that tells more about their convictions, their inspiration and what keeps them busy. Enjoy!
Why did you start Baxter & Co?
Baxter & Co. was created for a number of reasons, but mostly because we love to create! Also, we are art lovers and frequently visit galleries, museums and always gravitate towards public art when out and about. Over the past 8-9 months, we found ourselves making more time to pay attention to art and design and so we simply made the choice to let our imagination run wild.
While most of our time is spent on our sister company, Conscious Magazine, where we focus on powerful storytelling of global initiatives, we’re constantly diving into heavy material that is deeply inspiring, but can also weigh on you. Because of this, we knew we needed a “hobby” for our self-care by doing something that enabled us to slow down and enjoy stiller moments. Of course our entrepreneurial side started stirring and so we not only wanted to create, but to share with others and go through the challenge of creating an art brand.
Talk a little more about what excites you about this collaboration with Sudara:
You are sisters, co-founders of Conscious magazine and co-owners of Baxter & Co. First off, we love that and find you two wonderfully inspiring. Secondly, how did this sort of sibling collaboration come together for you two?
We definitely have had quite the opposite experiences in life, but when it comes to Conscious we’re almost always on the same page, which is because we share the same values. Having this helps us make clear decisions on what stories we want to produce or which direction we want to take the magazine. We also believe it’s important to stay true to who we are and having shared values supports the accountability. That is true for design too. The sibling collaboration is such a long story, but it started from a conversation we had many years ago while in NJ on our mom’s basement couch. I’m speaking more to Conscious Magazine (which started as a blog under the name Red Rover Style – long story) but we knew we could create something beautiful together, and we’ve stuck together ever since.
We all know there’s no such thing as a ‘typical day’ but what’s life like for you both these days? How do you both spend your time?
We have a very nontraditional schedule like so many creatives, but a typical day for us would start like this: exercise, coffee, good reads, social media engagement, emails, meetings, event in the evening, and lots of stress and joys in between. Most of our weekdays are split between Conscious Magazine and consulting work, and so that leaves the late hours and weekend time to create for Baxter & Co. When we do work on a new Baxter & Co. collection, we think about what story we want to tell with 8-10 different images, and then we go from there. If we are out and about, we’re constantly snapping photos of art and sharing those stories through our Instagram. There’s still another arm to B&C that we’d like to focus on such as distribution and more collaborations.
We love your clean, editorial approach to design. What are some of the places you draw inspiration from for your designs?
We definitely adopted a minimalist lifestyle, which has been translated into our wardrobe to even our own living spaces. I think we wanted to live in a blank space to allow the imagination to run free. We also love simple lines and colors. We think ultimately, though, our inspiration comes from fashion or interior design and then challenging ourselves to be innovative with less.
What does your creative process look like? Do you both handle various aspects of the design?
The creative process begins with the question, “what story do we want to tell?”.
Together we concept the ideas, and once one blurts out an idea, we equally get excited – our facial expressions liven up, maybe some clapping happens, high fiving, dancing, cheering – just imagine how the crowd reacts when their favorite sports team experiences a win.
As for the designs, we do them together from the drawing to fixing lines in photoshop. There are times we make mistakes and so we can clean up stragglers using PS tools. Painting and sometimes glittering is our favorite part. We don’t use too much color because we want to stay true to the aesthetic, but we can’t help that color is really fun. We have a page dedicated on our website to “color”.
