An English antiques dealer and an American design house walk into a collaboration.

The match

It started with newsletters. Lorfords wanted to reach more American designers, so we wrote two newsletters a month for them, built from the gorgeous lookbooks they shoot every few weeks, and sent them to our database. Before long, the role grew into strategy.

Toby Lorford was coming up on two decades as a dealer, with a huge inventory he wanted to open up to designers and other dealers in a more creative way. Anderson's pitch: let a designer curate their own collection from it, and tell the story around it.

Anderson always looks for collaborations where both sides bring a real audience and a real story. Sister Parish had both: two family businesses, two great stories. He had long admired Eliza as a forward thinker, ever since a dinner at The Carlyle spent talking about where brands like hers were headed. So he emailed her.

On the first Zoom, with Eliza and Freya Simms, who consults for Lorfords, the idea landed quickly. Most of the call, though, was about black Labs. They had each adopted one at almost the same time. You could feel the spark, and that's the part we love most: putting two people together who just get each other.

The idea

Eliza went through Toby's own collection and chose around 60 pieces, the kind her great-grandmother, Sister Parish herself, might have loved. They were styled into six vignettes with Sister Parish wallpapers and fabrics. Lorfords shoots its vignettes in-house, so Eliza joined the shoot over Zoom and art-directed from her screen. The pieces were shoppable on the Sister Parish site, with new vignettes dropping on Saturdays so there was always a reason to come back. In London, it came to life as an installation on Pimlico Road.

The launch

We worked side by side with Eliza and Sister Parish's marketing team on the messaging, and pulled four long conversations into one master brief so both teams told the same story. Press was welcome, but it wasn't the goal. The goal was reaching designers directly, through Lorfords', Sister Parish's and our own audiences, with editorial stories straight from the brands. The films about the collection were watched 45,717 times, and the newsletters were opened 13,546 times across 21,522 sends. It sold, too.