With the transition into the winter season often being rather grey and dreary, it’s always a luxurious escape when I can pop into the Sarah Baker Perfumes East London studio, poke around, and chat over a cup of tea.
Sarah’s process for creating scents and packaging design starts with an inspiration — a song, a fabric motif, a painting, a family photo, a vintage sitcom, a film, a novel, an artist or a destination. You get it — a single moment can inspire an entire project. Magazine clippings, fashion on Instagram, images selectively culled from internet searches, color swatches, and maquettes populate the studio walls. Today, as always, there is eclectic music setting the scene—whether it’s a Spotify hiphop mix or nostalgic guilty pleasures.
Sarah’s studio is indeed “a whole mood” — long before ‘whole mood’ and ‘big mood’ became the colloquial meme parlance for conveying, “I’m feeling it.”
So what inspired the newest launch? Sarah Baker Perfumes is about to release a new 9ml Luxury Travel Bottle for each of the eight scents offered. And for this launch, the color GREEN is a whole entire mood.
As Sarah says, the new bottles were “inspired by the colour palette of the Golden Gate Bridge's surrounding landscape, eucalyptus leaves, avocado kitchens, 70's mod interior decorating, and house plants.”
We start talking about the verdant hillsides of the Bay Area, Marin County, Golden Gate Park, and specifically Fort Baker, where Sarah and her husband Andy lived while attending the San Francisco Art Institute. The soothing eucalyptus leaves blowing in Pacific winds. The Brady Bunch production set and her parent’s avocado-colored refrigerator and cabinets back in Buffalo, NY. There is a nostalgia for 70’s interiors that featured green and orange. And house plants. Ode to house plants! This is an emotional connection to past family members. We talk about Sarah’s Aunt Mary-Lu’s legendary house plants. We talk about the interior plant worlds created by contemporary plant stylist and connoisseur, Hilton Carter. And this is how the new design was born.
These new green bottles, as companions to Sarah Baker Perfumes orange sunshine bottles, are giving me so much Bay Area energy right now.
Here’s a glimpse of my favorite mood board images from the studio. I hope they brighten your day!
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