At Theophora, our people are our greatest asset. Every product that leaves this studio passes through the hands of a small, dedicated team — each with their own area of responsibility, their own exacting standards, and their own firm views on the best patch of afternoon sun.
Allow us to introduce them.
Boots specialises in real-time document editing — usually by sitting on the spacebar — and desk management. Her editorial method is direct: no document is considered finished until she has lain across it, and her revisions (typically several hundred consecutive spaces, or a decisive row of wwwwww) arrive without warning and without apology. As Assistant Editor she also holds the warmth-logistics portfolio, keeping every keyboard, laptop and freshly printed page at optimal operating temperature. Little leaves the studio without passing beneath her first.
Our first and only rabbit, Charli rose through the ranks on the strength of her digging. She specialises in checking local soil density, supervising perimeter landscaping, and ensuring the lawn maintenance programme stays on track — work carried out through unannounced site inspections whose findings are final. No leafy green enters the premises without her assessment, and no plant is permitted to exceed its approved height for long. Her groundwork quietly underpins the entire Psyche by Theophora growing operation. She does not take meetings before breakfast.
Tabby manages the household on her own terms. She holds no fixed title by design — her oversight is total, and largely invisible. Meetings are attended in theory; her portfolio remains classified. She communicates chiefly through the silver chime that precedes her and the meaningful absence that follows, granting the occasional brief visual update before withdrawing to resume work as a fleeting shadow — reliably materialising, however, at the sound of a rattled treat cannister.
The team is, of course, the household. And the household is the whole point.
Oikos (οἶκος) is the ancient Greek word for the home — not the building, but the whole living system of people, animals, land and work that keeps a household running. It's the root of economy (oikonomia, the managing of a household) and ecology (oikologia, the study of the home). For the Greeks, the oikos was the basic unit of the world. For Theophora, it still is.
Everything here grows out of one suburban section in Christchurch, New Zealand — a garden run on circular principles, worm farms feeding soil, soil feeding plants, plants becoming Psyche's habitat, Aphrodite's botanicals, and the pressed flowers on a card. Boots, Tabby and Charli aren't decoration bolted on top; they live at the centre of the thing that makes everything else possible.
Theophora is run by one maker in Christchurch, New Zealand, who designs, makes, restores and writes most of what the studio releases. The household, the garden and the three staff above are all hers. Founder and staff alike, the in-house team is entirely female 💪.
Some specialist work is contracted out. The substrates for Hephaestus by Theophora is made to order by an independent woodworker — a sole trader we're very grateful to work with.