Our Values
Our values
At the advent of Olivia Joffrey’s brand launch in 2016, we didn’t know anything about production. We have since learned from our missteps. We’ve arrived at a place in e-commerce where storytelling, integrity in construction, and the joy that the object brings to our customers, is paramount. What excites us is sharing an idea (slow living) with likeminded folks via products that carry the spirit of our core values:
Storytelling
The Olivia Joffrey collection launched in 2016 as a tribute to my mother and her adventurous life lived abroad in the 1960s and 70s. The old photos shared on our online shop and Instagram are the biography of a real woman’s life. From the Spanish writer’s colony where Anne-Marie lived, she fell into an hypnotic, slower pace of life. Wake with the sun, slip on a cotton dress, walk to the mercado, work, meet at the beach with friends, afternoon siesta, evening el paseo, etc. Anne-Marie returned from Spain to her life in California with lessons in simplicity and an attention to a certain graceful rhythm of life. With Olivia Joffrey, I seek to share with you these revelations passed down from my mother.
Salud, amor, pesetas. Y tiempo para Gastarlas
Health, Love and Money. And the time to spend them.
Slow Living
The Olivia Joffrey Studio offers our customers goods and ideas related to slow living. Slow living is a movement about creating opportunities to disconnect and be more present. We create objects for a world that is aching to unplug. We launched with a small collection of cotton caftans inspired by my mother’s small trunk of cotton dresses she brought to Spain in the 1960s to serve as her daily uniform when living abroad. As a brand, Olivia Joffrey now sees caftans as just one part of an holistic view of slow living.
Ecological and Local
Olivia Joffrey is as small as we are slow. Our designs are created at our Santa Barbara studio, with the textile pieces being sewn at a boutique manufacturer in nearby Downtown Los Angeles. By keeping our production radius tight, we eliminate costly shipping, fuel, and environmental waste. In addition to our Made-in-California pledge, as of Spring 2022, all our textile offerings (caftans, napkins, pillows, aprons, sarongs, lounge pants) are transitioning to 100% vintage deadstock textile sources. Now we bringing pieces to life from unused, vintage fabrics that would otherwise be relegated to landfill.
Small
Metaphorically, boundaries to growth create better design. In practice, our commitment to our customers is best served via real human to human connections. While we do not have a brick and mortar retail shop, we often host pop-ups in our Santa Barbara studio courtyard, or at hotels in our region. Similarly, we always include a handwritten note in our pretty packaging of each order. As an online shop with digitally-driven storytelling, our relationship from designer to customer is made via this handwritten note. We no longer sell via a wholesale model, thereby allowing smaller quantities with higher quality materials, less waste, honest prices for the customer, and deeper connection from the storyteller/designer to the customer. Intimacy is about connection from human to human. Commerce is so much more meaningful when it’s intimate.