Courtney Arrington-Baldwin
Founder of Sanctuaire
Courtney Arrington-Baldwin
Launched with 38 self-funded brands founded by women of colour, Sanctuaire is a new online destination dedicated to wellbeing. Here founder Courtney Arrington-Baldwin shares the purpose of her brand.
You went from being a successful civil engineer to launching a wellness brand. That’s quite a transition. How did it come about?
I worked in the construction industry for about 15 years in roles including project engineer and owner’s representative. After many years in that competitive and fast-paced environment, I began to be very stressed. I took a leave of absence, rather than quit altogether, because I was nervous about leaving a very lucrative career that I’d spent two decades building. During this time, I founded a fashion styling company with my husband, wrote a book and started focusing on my personal wellness. I explored food as medicine, meditation, and a variety of wellness rituals. About three years ago, I began to create the concept for Sanctuaire and kept refining it.
You’ve positioned yourself squarely in the luxury space. What are you looking for in the products you curate?
Firstly, they must be founded by a person of colour. It is also important that they have a clean or sustainable effort within their materials and manufacturing. Luxury is not always created by the cost of an item, but can be created by the packaging, product design and ingredients. The first round of brands we have are all owned by women of colour and are self-funded.
You’ve mentioned that we don’t often associate luxury with Black-owned brands. I would also add that we don’t always get to associate them with wellness either, even though there are several. Do you have thoughts on why?
I believe that Black-owned brands are not often associated with luxury because we are frequently not provided opportunities to showcase our products and services in mainstream stores and platforms. If our brands are not shown next to the major mainstream popular brands, they can be seen as inferior or not worthy. For the wellness platforms, we are just now beginning to see more people of colour being represented. In the past, those platforms had not been forced to speak specifically to our demographic. Now we are holding them more accountable and representation is becoming more apparent. I created Sanctuaire to speak to the unique experience of women of colour.
You have a vision for how you want to position yourself and who you want to reach. What’s the masterplan? And how has the pandemic affected these goals?
We shifted our business model from a physical space to an online destination in November 2019. Our main goal is to reach as many women of colour as possible, to provide them with a safe space to explore self-care and wholeness. Long term, I would still love to have a physical space. I am hoping that during this time online we will build our community that will also support the physical space when that time comes.
Interview by Dee Poku
