No Boundaries

The art, friendship, and nine-year collaboration behind ABATURE

About ten years ago, I saw a watercolor of a woman online.

She was soft, but powerful. Feminine, but strong. The artist had left parts of the process visible, construction lines tracing the roundness of her cheeks and the edges of her lips. It felt unfinished and completely intentional at the same time.

I was fascinated by her. Captivated, really.

At the time, I was in the earliest stages of starting a business. I didn't know yet what that business would become, and I certainly didn't know how important that image, or the woman who created it, would eventually be to my life.

When I decided to build a beauty brand, I knew I wanted the packaging to do more than hold a product. I wanted it to tell stories about leadership, women, individuality and strength. And somewhere in my memory was still that watercolor.

There was only one problem.

I had lost her.

This was before today's image-search tools and AI. I couldn't remember where I'd found the artwork or who had created it. I only remembered the woman in the painting.

For nearly three years, I searched.

I typed hundreds (maybe thousands) of increasingly specific descriptions into Google, hoping that somehow the internet would give her back to me.

And one day, it did.

Her artist was Sara Woodrow, a Swedish illustrator and designer whose work was every bit as extraordinary as I remembered. Even better, I discovered an entire collection of her work filled with the same expressive lines, washes of ink and watercolor, and women who seemed simultaneously vulnerable and formidable.

There was absolutely no way, I thought, that she would work with me.

Sara was an established artist designing for Kosta Boda, the renowned Swedish crystal company. I was a single mom, a high-school teacher, learning cosmetic chemistry and trying to build a beauty company.

Still, I sent her a message.

And she answered.

A Christmas neither of us knew we were sharing

There was something happening on the other side of the world that I knew nothing about when I sent that message.

While I was building a beauty brand and raising my daughter, Sara was building her family. They were experiencing a difficult season, as were several families in their church community.

It was only a few weeks before Christmas.

Sara later told me that she had been praying every day for help.

Then my message arrived.

I couldn't afford very much. I purchased the rights to use just a few pieces of her artwork digitally as I began building the brand. At the time, I was building my brand with savings from my teaching salary.

To me, it felt small.

To Sara, it wasn't.

She later told me that the money from that first project helped her family, and several others in their community, through the holidays.

And the title of the very first piece of artwork I purchased from her?

No Boundaries.

Nearly a decade later, it's difficult for me to imagine a more fitting beginning.

Forging paths

ABATURE was as much about finding our way as anything else. 

The brand evolved as I did. It went through different ideas and different names while I studied formulation, developed products, and began to understand not just what I wanted to create, but what I wanted the company to stand for.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered an old word: ABATURE- the path a deer creates as it moves through the forest.

It felt like we'd found a word for something we were already building.

A path of our own.

Forging paths naturally became part of our language and, eventually, our philosophy.

Sara helped create the ABATURE deer logo, and her artwork became the cornerstone of our packaging.

Over the next nine years, we created ten human likenesses for the ABATURE skincare line. Each has its own personality and its own story, but together they are intended to reflect something that has mattered to us from the beginning: people should be able to see themselves in beauty regardless of their skin color or gender.

We have deliberately created characters representing different races, genders, personalities and expressions of beauty, and that representation will continue to grow with us.

Every carton has its own vibe, but there is a common thread running through all of them: two women on opposite sides of the world creating something together.

The art that carried me

My relationship with Sara's artwork became personal long before my own face ever appeared on an ABATURE carton.

During my divorce, I purchased another of her original pieces. It was called Embrace It.

A compelling image of a woman riding a horse, holding a staff. She was strong, powerful, and fearless. I hung her above my bedroom door, where she remained for years.

There are pieces of art we enjoy, and then there are pieces that somehow accompany us through our lives. Embrace It became that for me.

I'm not sure I even fully understand yet what this image gave me during those years.

That's the extraordinary thing about art. Sometimes its impact happens long before we have words for it.

When art travels

After my divorce, I traveled to Thailand.

It was one of those trips that became much more than a change of scenery. I was in a period of rebuilding, and Thailand gave me space to experience the world, and myself, a little differently.

I trekked through the jungle. I bathed in the river with elephants. I prayed at a Buddhist temple. And everywhere I went, I was struck by the beauty, generosity and kindness of the Thai people.

I came home changed.

But something happened there that also brought Sara into that chapter of my life.

showed Embrace It to a local Thai artist. Somehow, the piece of Sara's that had meant so much to me during my divorce entered the conversation on the other side of the world that day. He was moved by the image, too, and asked if he could interpret it in his own medium. He asked me to return the next day.

When I did, he had carved Sara's woman and horse into wood by hand.

I brought the carving home and sent it to Sara in Sweden. When it arrived, she wrote to me:

“I received your gift in the post today and as I read your note, I started to cry. I don’t know what to say, it blessed me beyond words.”

She went on to tell me that her desire and prayer had always been for her faith to be reflected through her art, but that she had never imagined her work would travel into the world and return to her in this way.

Perhaps that's one of the things I love most about art: it doesn't require us to share a language, a country, a culture, or even a faith, to recognize something meaningful in one another.

Sara created something in Sweden, it found me in America, I carried it to Thailand, and eventually… it found its way back home to her. 

No boundaries, indeed.

The art became us

Over time, Sara's artwork became even more personal.

When we were choosing the artwork for our FATLIP Plumping Lip Serum, one of Sara's existing portraits immediately caught our attention. There was something familiar about her, she reminded us so much of my daughter, Tori, that she became the face of FATLIP.

And eventually, Sara turned her brush toward me, too. The woman on our Wild Strawberry Lip Scrub carton is me.

Sara drew the portrait from a photograph of me wearing my late father's Stetson hat, a nod to my childhood and early professional years cattle ranching alongside him.

Then came Champagne Lip Butter, representing an entirely different side of me.

One of my closest girlfriends once described me as “a little country and a little cosmopolitan.”

I've never forgotten it.

Those two cartons somehow capture both. One is the grounded country girl in her father's cowboy hat. The other is the beauty entrepreneur in heels and cocktail attire, slightly frazzled in an office chair, and completely in her element.

Sara managed to find me in both.

There is something incredibly intimate about being interpreted through the eyes of an artist you admire. I'm endlessly grateful not only to witness Sara's talent, but to have been invited into it.

Nine years. Two countries. One very quiet friendship.

Somewhere along the way, this stopped being simply a relationship between a founder and an artist. Sara became my friend.

Ours isn't a loud friendship. We don't live in the same city—or even on the same continent. We have shared our lives mostly in small pieces across an ocean: children, businesses, struggles, wins, losses, motherhood and faith. Sara is a mother of four. I have watched her family grow while she has watched mine.

Faith is an important part of who Sara is and an important thread in our friendship. I don't attach a particular dogma to my own spirituality, but I have always been moved by people whose faith genuinely guides the way they live and love others. There is a mutual respect between us that I treasure.

And somehow, despite nine years of working together, we had never actually spoken face-to-face. Until this year.

We finally met over Zoom, and instead of feeling like I was meeting someone for the first time, it felt like talking to a lifelong friend.

The human hand

There is another conversation I think we have to have now, in the age of AI: How do we preserve human artistry?

AI can imitate a style. It can generate an image. It can even surprise us with something beautiful. But I think we have to ask ourselves what happens if, in our excitement over what technology can create for us, we stop supporting artists?

What stories aren't told? What skills aren't passed down? What beautiful, sometimes strange, and deeply personal work never exists because efficiency became more valuable than the human experience behind it?

Supporting artists isn't only about preserving a profession. It's about preserving the distinctly human impulse to create something from our experiences and share it with the world. Without it, we lose some of the beautiful unpredictability of human creativity.

Technology has given us extraordinary tools. We can create faster, explore ideas differently, and do things that would have once seemed impossible. But our work isn't always simply about how quickly we can make something. It's also about the people we make things with.

Human work ethic, family, friendship, and shared experience.

There are days when building this company is extraordinarily difficult. Days when I have to reach deep for the strength to keep going. And on some of those days, I think about the people behind this tiny lip balm brand, and I'm grateful for them.

Knowing that my business supports artists gives the work meaning beyond a product or a balance sheet.

Those things aren't simply part of our brand story.

They are the soul of it.

Finally, Sara

Which brings us to Vanilla Oak.

For years, Sara has drawn the people who inhabit ABATURE's world.

This time, I wanted the woman on the box to be her.

Vanilla Oak felt like the perfect opportunity. Creamy vanilla paired with the warmth of light Scandinavian oak. It immediately made me think of Sara and Sweden.

So after nearly a decade of drawing everyone else, I asked Sara for something different:

a self-portrait.

Playful. Beautiful. Winking back at us from the carton.

The artist finally became the art.

When I look at that box, I don't just see the newest ABATURE product. I see the woman I searched for three years to find. I see a Christmas almost a decade ago when two women who barely knew each other unknowingly answered a need in the other's life. I see ten portraits, hundreds of conversations, motherhood, businesses, heartbreak, growth and an ocean that somehow never felt quite as large as it should have.

Sara Woodrow is an extraordinarily talented artist, but I am even luckier to call her my friend.

Our very first piece together was called No Boundaries.

Nine years later, I think we finally understand what it meant.