FOUNDER’S NOTE
Design begins where the senses do.
A note on why I started — and what still intrigues me. Every object, space, or experience that has ever moved you started somewhere invisible. Not on a screen. Not on a blueprint.
It started at the threshold of a nerve ending — a texture noticed under a fingertip, a hue caught in peripheral vision, a sound that arrived before the mind had time to name it.
That is where I begin.
“Good design doesn’t decorate the surface. It excavates
something underneath — the precise thing a person was
already, unknowingly, looking for.”
When I founded this company, I kept returning to a single question: what actually activates the senses of pearson? Not what looks polished. Not what follows the conventions of a category. But what reaches past the conscious filter and lands somewhere older — the part of a person that responds before they can explain why.
The answer is never decoration. It is almost always resonance — the feeling that something was designed specifically for how you experience the world. Proportion that feels right before you measure it. Color that evokes a season you didn’t know you missed. A form that asks you touch it.
My work is rooted in the belief that sensory truth is discoverable. It is not simply a matter of taste — it is a matter of attention. To find it, you have to go back to the beginning: what does the body perceive, and in what order? What creates the difference between a person who passes something by and one who stops to look?
That pursuit — quiet, reflective, deeply personal — is the heart of everything I create. Not trends. Not novelty for its own sake. Just the work of finding what is true.
Always unbridled,
Molly Shawen-Kollmann
It started with the sound of a paint shaker.
My grandfather owned a Perry and Derrick paint store in Florence, Kentucky in the early 1980s. My mother worked there alongside him — always beautifully dressed, always the person customers sought out. Her style was bright and whimsical, a little unexpected, completely her own. She was a home stylist long before anyone had a name for that kind of work. I would pretend to be sick just to spend the day there with her.
From her I learned that a space isn't just where you live — it's how you tell the world who you are.
I have always been a stylist. Gymnastics taught me proportion. Choreography taught me flow. A career as a hair stylist and makeup artist taught me transformation and the profound trust it takes to hand someone that kind of power over how you feel.
And underneath all of it, quietly running through everything: a little girl in a paint store in Florence, Kentucky, who couldn't stop touching the color wheels.
My mother was a home stylist before there was a name for it. I suppose I always was too.