Like most Mother’s Days, ours came and passed in the usual way - with certain expectations that are almost impossible to meet, because, well, you are still mothering your way through the day.

A month ago, I (Chelsea) moved back into the studio after 2+ years of working from home. Over the last couple of years, school and childcare haven't always been consistent for our family. We needed flexibility to get through, so it made sense to move my work home.

Every year on April 22, Earth Day marks the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. This anniversary is now widely recognized as the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people each year as a day of action to shift human behavior and create policy change.

We are beyond excited to announce that Grain, our tiny studio in the woods, has joined the community of 4,000+ visionary businesses across 75+ countries to legally commit to balancing purpose and profit as a certified Benefit Corporation. This community of B Corps is driving the global movement of business as a force of good and we are deeply humbled to have our efforts working towards this common goal.

We were planning on writing a newsletter summarizing the highlights from the past year and there were many - from launching our cork collection to shipping our largest order ever to becoming Climate Neutral - but as we enter winter and are surrounded again by so many uncertainties, we can’t help but throw up our hands to the season's call of rest and retreat.

When launching our cork collection last month, we knew we wanted to start off by sharing our fascination with cork itself. Being a rapidly renewable material and a powerful carbon sink is what drew us to cork to begin with.

That said, it is our hope to build furniture and objects to be passed down for generations. In order to do so, we know we need to speak to more than just material features but to the physical connection you experience when living with these objects.

We are thrilled to be launching our new cork collection this week at the Colony co-operative showroom in New York. This collection is three years in the making and is fully inspired by the unique properties of cork itself.

In order to talk about the collection, we first have to share what it is about the material that has fascinated us for years.

Three years ago we began to research a material that had long held our curiosity. It is a rapidly renewable material. It is a powerful carbon sink. And, it fully represents the vision we see for our work and our business as a whole as we adapt and grow into the future.

Though autumn solstice is still a few weeks off, the change of season feels upon us both at home and in the studio. Our kids go back to school (1st Grade! Pre-K!) in person this week with new teachers and class pets. Our studio is feeling a similar eager and optimistic energy with two new woodworkers joining us full-time.

Earlier this month we experienced a record-breaking heatwave here in the Pacific Northwest that is now linked to hundreds of deaths and the loss of over a billion sea creatures. This may not be the best opener for a furniture design-related newsletter, but experiencing that heat makes it hard to think of anything else.

When we launched our Pool Rug in 2016, a designer we admire came up to our booth at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, took one enthusiastic look, and said, “Oh, I get it. It’s the new cowhide rug.” You get used to taking in spontaneous first impressions at trade shows, but this one kind of stuck with us because it gave us insight into what it was about the rug that was exciting. This kind of reciprocal relationship with our clients over time has more deeply shaped our practice than I think we’ll ever know.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran a story about the Michelin-starred restaurant Eleven Madison Park going plant-based that momentarily took our breath away. Within a few hours, several friends had sent us the link. It was clearly a moment they knew we’d want to note.

This Earth Day, we're celebrating that we are officially Climate Neutral Certified!

We joined 215 brands in offsetting all of our 2020 carbon emissions by purchasing carbon credits to fund climate solutions and by committing to reduce our future emissions.

To celebrate spring this year, we want to do something a little different. We want to share a behind-the-scenes look at the costs that go into furniture manufacturing in America from the vantage point of our tiny studio in the woods.

One benefit of being grounded at home has been spending more time exploring the land we inhabit. Living on an island in the present-day Pacific Northwest means hiking wooded trails and combing the shore for washed-up treasure. These are places we know well as they are the places of our childhood. As well as being our current home, they are the ancestral summer fishing grounds of the Suquamish and Salish Coast Tribes that inhabited them for centuries.

Over the past extraordinary year, we asked ourselves many questions. We wondered about our path and considered leaving the studio in service of something more urgently useful. As a recently certified Wilderness First Responder, James wondered if it was too late to go to medical school. Deep into books on regenerative agriculture, I (Chelsea) imagined kelp farming in the Salish Sea.

One of our greatest pleasures is seeing our work out in the world living a life that we could have never imagined ourselves. It is a reminder that putting things out into the world with intention and care does create a ripple effect.

With small children at home and our local preschool back to remote learning this week, we’ve been thinking a lot about boundaries. There are the boundaries between work life and home life. There are the boundaries between being a parent and also trying to be an adult human.

As we continue to sit on the edge of our seats in uncertainty, it feels like a good moment to celebrate things that do feel safe and sound - like working together in community.

Like many on the West Coast, we spent ten days inside our home this month hiding out from wildfire smoke. Though the most threatening fires were at a safe distance from our home and studio, we did have a small brush fire on the island one evening that pushed us to make a go-bag list as we waited for updates from our local fire department.