Why We Began

It began, as so much does now, with a phone in a dark room. One video, then another, then dozens: women filmed in the front seats of their cars, many of them women of color, telling the camera that they had lost their jobs, then their homes, and that the car was where they lived now. Some were composed. Most were crying. All of them were trying to hold on to something.

I kept scrolling, and then I stopped scrolling, and I called my sister.

Two sisters, one question

My name is Jacqy. I am the former publisher and editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, and I have made things all my life: I run several small brands of my own, and I know what it is to put something you have imagined into the world and hope someone sees it. My sister, Laura, is the chief operating officer of a publishing house. She knows how stories are made and, just as importantly, how they are kept alive.

The question I asked her that night was simple. Should we build something? Not a fundraiser, not a directory, but something that would honor the people in our community who make beautiful things, at the very moment when making a living from making has rarely felt harder.

She said yes before I had finished the question.

The difference between a list and a voice

We already knew what we did not want to build. There are many sites and directories that invite us to support businesses owned by women and people of color, to shop with intention, to buy from the communities we come from. They matter, and we are grateful for them. But most of them do not choose. Everything is listed and very little is discerned, so the truly remarkable work sits beside the ordinary, and none of it is given the attention it deserves.

We wanted discretion. We wanted to seek out the makers whose imaginations run wild, whose work could only have come from them, and to give each of them what a list never can: a voice, a story and a beautiful place to be seen.

The table on Saturdays

Laura will tell you she is not the creative one. But for years, every weekend, she and her daughter covered the kitchen table in craft paper and glue and paint and made things together, for no reason except the joy of it. That daughter, our niece, grew up to be an artist. She is, in many ways, the person this publication is for: talented, original, and setting out into a world that does not always know how to value what artists do.

So Ochriva is built around a single conviction. Original work deserves serious attention. The women and founders of color whose brands appear in these pages are not here as a cause. They are here because their work is extraordinary, and because extraordinary work should be written about with care, photographed with care and placed before readers who will love it.

What we are building

Ochriva is an editorial publication first: stories about original brands and the people behind them, and essays on the objects, materials and rooms that shape a life. In time it will grow into Ourisan, a society where founders can apply, belong and support one another. Every brand in our stories is chosen for its vision, never for payment, and any sponsored partnership will always be clearly labeled.

Back to the screen

I still scroll at night. The videos have not stopped, and the hard season has not ended. But somewhere in that same endless feed, between the women in their cars, there is a potter at her wheel, a weaver at his loom, a young woman setting up a first shop from a kitchen table covered in craft paper.

We started Ochriva so that she would have somewhere to be seen. And so that the next time someone scrolls late into the night, looking for a reason to hope, they might find it here.

Jacqy and Laura