Laurie Stern, Velvet & Sweet Pea's Purrfumery

Name: Laurie Stern

Age: 55

Occupation: Owner of Velvet & Sweet Pea's Purrfumery

What do you do? I own a natural perfume business. I make things out of what I think are the most exquisite materials on the planet – the essences of trees, herbs, spices, flowers, nuts, seeds and fruits. I use all organic alcohols, organic jojoba oils and beeswax from our bees to make my solid perfumes and lockets and things like that.

How did you get into this – just picking things, collecting them, smelling them? It’s kind of crazy. I had a wedding flower business for many, many years. It sort of just naturally flowed into this. I got very burnt out. It’s very exhausting. You go to work at 2 in the morning — there’s a lot of stress. It was a wonderful business for many years.

But I feel like I still get to make bouquets. I just work with their ethereal sort of elements. Once I started studying it and teaching myself, I really had a great time with it, and all these essences just blew my mind open.

Where do you get your inspiration? Just the trees and the plants in my own garden. I have my own garden I call the perfumer’s garden. It’s in El Cerrito. Gary (Lazar), my husband, is a landscape architect — he made a lot of really gorgeous fragrant plants in the garden which I make essences with and tinctures from. I have an apothecary’s garden on my deck, which is a lot of healing plants. And hikes – I love the smells of the woods and nature and pines and firs; I love flowers. When I travel I always go to the flower markets and try to sniff my way around.

What do you do for fun? Oh god, what do I do for fun? We’ve been working too hard. We love to travel, but we haven’t traveled enough recently in the last few years. We’ve done a couple of little cruises, but I think we need to travel more. We’ve been too caught up in work and kitty rescue – I do pet rescue, I love cats. My business is named after two of our rescue kitties.

I think I’ve been doing too much; I’m looking forward to more relaxation and fun. We used to go to hot springs, and we used to do lot of things like that that were very restorative.

Corrections: The original version of this article incorrectly spelled the last name of Stern's husband. It is Lazar, not Lizar. Also the story quoted Stern incorrectly referring to her "salad perfumes." She said "solid perfumes." The article has been corrected.