Here at bloom, we really appreciate smart, beautiful design. When we met the mom duo behind the Brooklyn textile brand Lewis, we knew we had met our match. This month at bloom, we launched our first collaboration with Lewis to bring you a luxurious line of custom crib linens featuring two unique nature-inspired prints. The super-soft bedding is Lewis’ first ever muslin crib sheet and it’s already a huge favorite. High in quality and in thread count, made of 100% certified organic cotton and sized just for our alma cribs.
Lewis is the product of two design-focused women, Liz Libré and Lizzy Ott, five (and soon-to-be six!) children among them. The pair met in high school, attended the same college and both went into creative fields. They founded Lewis after they each became mothers and found a real lack of child-friendly, yet sophisticated, textiles. The bloom x lewis collaboration marries the two ideas seamlessly.
Find out how Liz and Lizzy balance babies, business and the challenges of working with your bff, then shop the collaboration here.
Q: Tell me about the collab with bloom. How did it come to be?
Liz: We were super excited to hear from bloom! They really believed in our product and understood the vision. Since we only carry standard-sized sheets ourselves, we’re thrilled to introduce our line to their customers looking for something beyond a plain sheet.
Lizzy: We were so thrilled they found us. We love aligning ourselves with brands that have similar values, and we really appreciate their dedication to functionality, and different parents’ needs with different crib sizes, easily mobile cribs, etc.
Q: Your products are lovely and it’s clear you have a distinct vision for Lewis. How do you develop your designs?
Liz: We turn to nature as our primary source of inspiration when developing prints — sometimes found outside our door and other times in botany books from the library. We’ll discuss our ideas, and I’ll get to work executing the prints: first with ink and brush and then translate them into a pattern.
Lizzy: For city dwellers, we both value time in nature immensely, and our kids do too. Simultaneously, it matters so much to us that a parent would be as happy with our product in his or her living room as they are with them in the nursery. We really believe that a parent shouldn’t have to give up their taste because they have a baby — there is so much in nature that overlaps as enjoyable for parent and child.
Q: When you were younger did you have any idea you would own and run a business together? Was this always a goal of yours?
Lizzy: I don’t think we knew it when we were very young, but once out of college, we often relied on each other as sounding boards for our own creative endeavours, and have always really valued each other’s opinion. So in hindsight, it’s no surprise! The wheels for an actual business started turning when I was helping Liz design her first nursery, and we were both so disappointed in the soft goods offering available for babies at the time.
Liz: I’ve always valued and trusted Lizzy’s eye. I remember she got these red wide-leg sweatpants in high school from a popular-at-the-time catalog that I then got, then her sister got, then others. They sound horrible now, but they were incredible at the time. I was hooked on her clear vision from very early on.
Q: You’ve also lived sort of parallel lives, growing up together and now raising children side-by-side. How has that affected your dynamic as co-founders of Lewis?
Liz: Because we’re so close, both have young children and are in contact with each other nearly 24/7, our conversations really run the gamut. We can be discussing the color values of a strike-off one minute and debriefing a particularly hideous night of sleep the next. I can’t imagine not having that closeness and openness with a business partner.
Lizzy: It really is amazing how our conversations can go any which way, and we can always come back to what we know needs to get done. There is an empathy when you really understand what someone has been through or is going through that is so important in any sort of partnership — business, marriage or otherwise. We have seen each other through a lot of highs and lows in life, before business was a consideration, so it’s only natural we can work well together.
Hanna Nakano is a Washington, D.C. based writer and photographer, and mother of two.
