The Quality Makers: Erin Kleinberg of SIDIA

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Erin Kleinberg is the Toronto-based founder of SIDIA, a brand born out of tribute to ancestral rituals around self care. What began as a need to create the perfect hand cream steadily grew into an award-winning Hand Serum, and later blossomed into other beautiful collections. 

I actually had the opportunity to review SIDIA and speak with Erin some years ago. It’s been a pleasure to revisit this brand and conversation once again, and be met with admiration of how far Erin has come. Enjoy this read below by diving into the creation of intentional and modern heirlooms as a way of returning to oneself.

Where does the name SIDIA come from?

Sidia was my grandmother's name. She really sparked the idea for this brand. I wanted to celebrate my grandmother's legacy and honor all of her self care rituals that she so generously passed down to me. She was the ultimate matriarch. She was a Holocaust survivor, immigrated to Canada from nothing, and built this wonderful life. She taught me everything I know, so she's the blueprint for the brand.

Tell me more about those self care rituals she passed on to you.

My grandmother was always glistening and slug from her everything shower. She started the everything shower before it was a thing. Even if we were waiting for her and she was late, she didn't care, because she was so dedicated to the hydration, the moisture, the care and the ritual. She always told me: “make sure you take just as good care of yourself as you could do the world around you.” My grandmother loved fashion, beauty, style, design, and always asked me, “Erin, what are they wearing?” She loved all things to do with care and that really stuck with me.

From having this beautiful relationship with your grandma and witnessing her self care routines, what led you to then starting SIDIA as a brand?

One of my main memories with my grandmother is sitting at her kitchen table, having a cup of tea with a side of gossip, and just watching her ferociously and obsessively moisturize her hands. What seemed mundane at the time began singing to me in these loud ways years later. Seeing her take such good care of her hands, and then simultaneously having this background in fashion and beauty, I realized body care had become stale and boring. I had had two children, my relationship with my body was tricky at the time, and of course always is, and I felt things needed to be shaken up. 

I knew I wanted to create this brand that has really sensorial scents and fragrances, but is also paired with clean, efficacious ingredients. I felt like I always had to choose; it was either a very heavily loaded fragrance that made me nauseous, or something packed with clean, amazing, efficacious ingredients that didn't smell to my liking. I wanted to create a marriage of these worlds, and although it all started with candles, soon after, I heavily focused on hand care. Hands are something that people don't pay much attention to, but they're also our first telltale sign of aging, and they work so hard for us. My grandmother ran the world with her little hands. So to me, hands are a really important category that touches everyone. 

Tell me about the growth of your brand and its products, from candles and hand creams to so much more. 

I like to do things a little against the grain, write my own playbook, and I truly like to see what our community thinks of the products. So the reason we moved into solid perfume and body mist, and potentially more coming down the pipeline, is because people love our scents. They are obsessed with the fragrances that we create. We work with world renowned noses, master perfumers, and together, we put so much tender, love and care into building out these worlds of Braless, Wired, Nirvana and Soaked. Our community has told us that they want these types of fragrances – clean, refined, elegant – that still have personality and excitement to them. 

The best part is that they’re also everyday fragrances. You will never get sick of them. They're not too overpowering, they’re loaded perfectly, and they just have an element of je ne sais quoi to them. I give credit to our community – they’re the ones that pushed me to continue to explore fragrance. And that’s what I love most about it: fragrance is such a conduit for storytelling, a connector between people, and it touches everybody. That whole sensorial feeling is what I'm always going for. Each scent is different, but just as engaging and ignited. They transport us somewhere else, but always bring us back to home and to the self.

‍I’d love to hear more about the ‘creation of modern heirlooms.’

I am obsessed with jewelry and all the things my grandmother passed down to me. I wear her pieces all the time. I’ve always wanted our products to feel like pieces of jewelry that are really important to the individual. It's the embodiment of this visceral feeling – something you can touch and something that comforts you. I hope our scents ignite that feeling in others.

You sit at the intersection of ‘modern ritual meets timeless scent.’ What have you learned about scent along the years, since the creation of SIDIA?

Fragrance is so great because I’m still a novice. I am not an expert. As the brand grows, and as the fragrances become more developed, I'm learning more each day. I've noticed that my nose has gotten so good. I can walk through the mall and name what everyone is wearing. I'm always trying to bring women back to themselves, but fragrance brings you back to yourself as well. It’s something you can’t necessarily put your finger on, but you know it. It’s intuitive and it's subjective, but you can smell it and feel it, just like you know yourself. We, as a brand, are very married to the fragrance families we have. We only launch about once a year. I want to heroize these feelings, emotions, worlds that we're trying to build. We do what feels good in our intuition.

Tell me about the different products you offer.

We have handcare, body care and fragrance. The Hand Exfoliant and The Hand Serum go together, but you can take the serum on the go – everyone does. Then we have The Body Exfoliant and The Body Serum. I wanted to make sure the exfoliant was in a flip cap bottle, not a jar, because no one has time to open a jar in the shower. People love that gentle rice exfoliant cleanser that they can use multiple times a week, since it's not very harsh. 

Our body serum is a super nourishing, lightweight, and not greasy, and it comes in a spray nozzle so you truly have no excuses. I'm always thinking: ergonomically, how does this function? And design wise, how does it look, how does it smell, and what is it actually doing for your skin? 

Then we have The Wash and The Cream, our fantastic Solid Perfume and our newest launch - The Body Mist. It's a true fragrance product, but we've also included hyaluronic acid, glycerin and niacinamide, so that it's juicy, skin plumping and refreshing. It’s meant to house our Braless fragrance, which is a woody, floral type scent. We’re slowly filling out each scent world, but taking our sweet time.

I want to give a shoutout to the Solid Perfume. What a wonderful little moment it is, to take a second to yourself and find your favorite fragrance. It’s a balmy, lovely, non-greasy texture that you can just apply anywhere. The packaging truly feels like a heavy, weighted heirloom. I think it’s our most innovative. It's revolutionary. It's different. Amidst a sea of clean beauty, which can be simple and really minimalist, our packaging is rich, moody and sexy. 

I’m also a huge fan of fragrance layering – so now you can have your hand serum, your solid perfume, your mist, your handwash and your body wash. We want you to be able to bring these scent families into every facet of your life.

I love that you believe hand cream should be a pleasure rather than an afterthought. On that note, what else differentiates you from other brands in the industry?

We don't really pay attention to trends, but I do stay in tune with what the general world of fragrance and beyond is up to. It takes us years to finalize a product. We want our fragrances to be different, refreshing and distinct to us. When we don’t play into trends, we stay classic and timeless, but with this modern spin. Grounding and rooting ourselves in the matriarchs that came before us is really at the forefront of my work and this brand. We try to focus our storytelling on: what does it mean to have a female experience? What does it mean to take your bra off at the end of the day? That is what I want to tap into. Whether you're feeling like you need to be Braless, or you want to be perked up with Wired, or you want to be totally zen with Soaked, these worlds are available to you.

I've studied luxury brands for so many years, and I have my sights set on really creating that for SIDIA – a global, household name and brand that is creating the most exquisite, everyday, fine fragrance meets body care. I want to have stores all over the world. My grandmother was embarrassed by her Polish name that was not popular in Toronto, so I want to put her name in lights. How can I make SIDIA be the brand that scales to be something bigger? I want to forever create products that give people a moment of peace, every single day.

Open the door to one of SIDIA’s fragrance worlds to discover your best path back home.