Gifts for Women, By Women, For the Woman Who Raised You
11 women-led brands I would gift to my own mother.
Every year around this time my inbox fills with the same pastel-scented press push. Peonies! Spa robes! A candle that smells like “her!” The Mother’s Day industrial complex has a specific tone that I find punishing, mostly because it flattens mothers into a single sentimental archetype. My own mother, for the record, would rather be sent a good book and left alone.
What follows is the opposite of that. A handful of considered indie brands I actually shop, most of them founded or co-run by women who are themselves mothers, most making things that will outlast the peonies by about forty years.
FEWER FINER // Brooklyn, NY
Madison Snider Podpirka started Fewer Finer in 2018 out of what I can only describe as a devotional relationship to small, significant objects. The brand operates out of a townhouse in Williamsburg. Custom work ranges from heirloom re-imagination to hand engraving. This feels like being invited into someone’s home.
Madison made me custom charms of my dogs, Hank and Birdie, and I cannot think of a more treasured gift. If your mother has a pet she talks about more than her children (we all know one), this is the gift.
DEAR CECILIA // Los Angeles, CA
Dear Cecilia is a bag line built, as the tagline goes, “for the love of horses”. The whole proposition is equestrian without being costume-y, which is harder to pull off than it looks. But Mom doesn’t have to be a regular in the tack room to partake.
The piece to know is the Leonora canvas tote, which has become my personal argument for the chic mom bag. It holds everything a mother actually carries without looking like a diaper bag or a tote from a literary festival. I would give it to a new mother and a mother of teenagers with equal confidence.
LILY EVE // New York, NY
Lily Eve does one of my favorite sleights of hand in contemporary accessories: clutches sewn from vintage Hermès beach towels, coats cut from Hermès blankets. The logic is perfect! You take an object that was already Hermès, already beautiful, already archival, and you turn it into something wearable and one of a kind. The coats especially have a collector energy I find hard to resist.
For Mother’s Day, I would point you toward a Cabana clutch in whatever towel she happens to have in stock when you look. Each one is different. A mother who already owns her good handbags and doesn’t need another one will understand exactly what she’s looking at.
CASA GUSTO // West Palm Beach, FL
Casa Gusto is Valerie and Besty Smith’s Palm Beach studio, and it is the single most romantic retail experience in South Florida. Everything in the store has a hand in it somewhere, but the papier-mâché is the draw for me. Flowers, fruit, whole trompe-l’œil tableaux, all made by hand in their workshop, all looking like something pulled from a seventeenth-century still life.
The Tole flowers are the move. A single papier-mâché tulip or geranium in an antique pot will outperform a $200 bouquet on every axis. It lasts forever. It photographs better. It signals that the giver knows something. For a mother who already has the house and the garden, this is where to find her something she has never seen before.
LA BONNE BROSSE // Paris, FR
La Bonne Brosse is the French hair brush brand that has taken over every beauty editor’s bathroom in the last two years, and the hype is warranted. The brushes are handmade in France from cellulose acetate and boar bristle, in candy-hued colorways that belong in a Slim Aarons photograph. They feel weighted and arrive in a ceremonial little box. Give a mother the N.01 Universal, which is the all-purpose brush, in whatever shade matches her vanity.
STEPHANIE WINDSOR // Los Angeles, CA
Stephanie Windsor deals in vintage watches, and she deals in the ones I want. Her eye runs toward the 1960s and 1970s pieces that most dealers overlook in favor of the obvious Rolexes: small-case Cartiers, Piagets in unexpected stones, an ADP that used to live on a woman’s wrist at a lunch. Her curation is flawless.
A vintage watch is the gift that will outlast the giver. Stephanie’s inventory moves, so the advice is to look now and buy when you see it, not the other way around. Your mother will wear it for the rest of her life, and your daughter will wear it after that.
MOTTE STUDIO // Los Angeles, CA
Motte is Claire Bigbie’s studio, and the work sits at the intersection of functional object and sculpture in a way that stopped my scroll dead in its tracks. The tulip candles are the signature. A hand-sculpted flower wrapped around a waxed base, each one a real candle, each one too beautiful to actually burn. I have never lit mine. I don’t plan to!
The wine swans are the other must. It is an object that makes a dinner table. For a mother who entertains, or a mother who simply likes beautiful things, Motte is where I would shop first.
ST. ROSE // Australia
St. Rose is an Australian perfume house that has been flying under the American radar for too long. The compositions are restrained: no gourmand cloud, no oud assault. French Poetry is the safe bet for Mother’s Day, a clean musk with a hint of bergamot that works on anyone.
UNDERWATER WEAVING STUDIO // Brooklyn, NY
Underwater Weaving is a Brooklyn basket studio founded by Baskets for Breakfast ’s Erin Pollard and her mom. The baskets are hand-woven in sculptural shapes that owe more to ceramic practice than to traditional basketry: curved forms, asymmetric silhouettes, pieces that function as vessels but read as objects. The craft is old, but their point of view is contemporary. A crafted basket is a sleeper Mother’s Day gift. Pragmatism, but make it chic! It holds the mail, onions, her laptop, or nothing at all. Or for an activity to do together, buy the basket kits and DIY.
MARIE DAÂGE // Paris
Marie Daâge is the only fine china line I would register for now, and I stand by that. The house hand-paints Limoges porcelain to order in something like three hundred color combinations, which means you can spec a set in exactly the oxblood-and-ivory or the pale-blue-and-gold you already see on your mother’s table. The custom element is what separates it from the competition.
For a mother who entertains, a set of dessert plates in a color she loves is a gift that will be used at every dinner party she hosts for the next thirty years. The custom lead time is real, which is something to flag if you are reading this close to Mother’s Day. Order now for next year, or order a single piece from ABASK’s ready-to-ship inventory.
SANGRE DE FRUTA // Vancouver, BC
Sangre de Fruta is Allison Audrey Weldon’s botanical apothecary out of British Columbia. Glass bottles, letterpress labels, a color palette pulled from a seventeenth-century herbarium — swoon.
The body serum in Garden of Earthly Delights is the Mother’s Day pick. Rose, neroli, jasmine, bergamot — it’s really a whole floral cabinet. Give it a little something extra and tuck in a packet of their bath salts.