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Smells of roses

The year that Sterland was appointed CEO, the company’s bestseller, Skin Food, celebrated its 90th birthday – and it was her genius idea to create the now well-known Nice Cream Van, and drive it around festivals, lidos, beaches and surf competitions – ‘quite literally spreading the word’, says Sterland. ‘Skin Food embodies Weleda’s sustainable approach to product development – get it right, and it stands the test of time. Made from natural ingredients of sunflower oil, blended with beeswax and herbal extracts of viola tricolor, calendula, camomile and rosemary, it’s also a great price (£10.95 for 75ml) – a tube lasts for ages and it has a great name, too!’

Port Eliot was a turning point. Six months later, I visit the Weleda garden in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, the real beginning. There, once again, it’s Sterland who echoes my thoughts… ‘As I get older, I realise what a visionary our founder, Rudolf Steiner, was. He left us with a body of work, including over 6,000 books and lectures, from which there’s so much to learn about human development, education and living healthily.’

Weleda’s headquaters in Derbeyshire

How to live wholly – to furnish our lives with purpose and passion, and learn to better support our beings. That old furniture, then, is not just made to last, it is designed for life. And living is the thing.

Psychologies will be collaborating with Weleda in a year-long series of columns – ‘In the Garden with Weleda’. Read the first one here.

In partnership with Weleda. Images: Weleda.

Weleda: upholding the founding values

Some brands really feel like part of the furniture. Always there, relied upon, doing their job perfectly – no fuss. For Weleda, the pioneering beauty brand founded in 1921, the part it has played in myriad lives – from baby’s first nappy balm to grandmother’s beloved hand cream – remains unchanged, almost 100 years since it first launched.

Founded by Rudolf Steiner, visionary doctor Ita Wegman, and chemist Oskar Schmiedel, the trio understood that the human body possesses its own remarkable ability to heal itself, but that it also needs a helping hand at times.

To support, not interfere, is the gentle ideology that typifies Weleda – and Steiner developed a unique approach to healthcare, which uses nature’s own ingredients to bolster our body’s health response. This holistic approach – named ‘anthroposophy’ by Steiner – encourages each of us to see ourselves as complete circles of mind, body and spirit, inextricably linked to and affected by the natural world around us. ‘In harmony with man and nature’ is the motto – and it runs through every single part of the Weleda brand.

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This moisturizer with a light texture regulates the moisture level of the skin and protects the skin from environmental influences.

Upholding the founding values

Those old faithful pieces of furniture, though, can sometimes benefit from being cast in new light. A visit to the Port Eliot Festival, in Cornwall, last summer – where Weleda sponsored the beautiful holistic treatment offering – brought things back into impressive perspective for me. There, I was reintroduced to a brand that I’d always used (the Calendula range for babies is a staple in our bathroom, as is that iconic green tube of Skin Food), but had somehow taken for granted.

I sat, for upward of an hour, with newly appointed managing director, Jayn Sterland, and Claire Hattersley, garden manager for Weleda UK. With them, I began to learn about how things are grown, harvested, protected, and how it is actually possible (though immensely challenging) to uphold the founding values of this iconic brand.