As it turns out, wanting to design is completely unrelated to wanting to talk about yourself. However, there`s always an About page so .... Years ago, we (Jackie and Kent, college sweethearts then, happily translated into wife and husband now) traveled a lot -- a big trip to Europe and another to Asia, extended stays in Tucson and Seattle, lots of time in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the California desert and on the South Carolina coast. And we thought, "Hey, we`ll build a whole life around things we really like ... nature and other cultures, architecture and craft and history, photography and tortillas and beer (ok, the last only applies to one of us). And of course each other. Then came a move to New York (yea), 3 kids (triple yea) and corporate jobs (somewhat less yea). Stone + Mann was started somewhere in the middle of all this. Some quick scarf sketches and samples, successful visits to a few NYC stores at Christmastime, a lucky meeting with a young woman starting a showroom in Japan and so it began. After a great 9 years designing scarves and handbags -- drawing on the shapes of Burmese pagodas, the colors of the desert, the cobblestone patterns on old streets -- and working with boutiques and department stores across America and Japan, including Barneys New York, Anthropologie, Felissimo and Nordstrom, we took a hiatus (see kids, above). And now, after a sufficiency of hiatus and based in the beautiful Hudson Valley town of Tarrytown, NY, Stone + Mann is back with a full collection of scarves, and several new branches of individual and home accessories in the works. The collections will grow organically and maybe a little willy-nilly; the whole point is to go with what interests and inspires us, learn more about the world as we go along and let design + commerce mingle as easily as possible with actual life. One of our favorite books is a children`s book, Miss Rumphius, in which a girl grows up to realize her personal ambitions to travel and live by the sea and, most importantly, to fulfill her grandfather`s wish that she do something to make the world more beautiful. Stone + Mann is our gesture in that direction. Stay tuned ... and thanks for the visit. J + K