About
MADRE is a movement.
Whether it’s gathering for a meal with cherished friends or tucking yourself into bed, MADRE honors the simple, necessary, and universal delights of food and rest.
MADRE is Shay Carrillo and Jeanie Kirk, two women deeply stirred by mothering, both beauty + breakdown, homemaking, food, and how a nourishing home can ripple outwards to support and honor our children, our collective human family, and the natural world. We all eat, and we all rest, therefore MADRE strives to offer linen home essentials that support food, rest, and our community.
Linen napkins are the foundation of MADRE, and we are proud to be slowly growing a deeper offering of tabletop and kitchen goods, bedding, some apparel, and other select home essentials.
OUR LINEN
Shay and Jeanie dreamt up the idea for MADRE from a simple premise: to create linen home essentials that are as close to 100% domestic as possible, meaning: grown, processed, woven, and sewn here in the United States. We soon learned that the long-dormant American linen industry is being rebuilt as we speak, and we are eager for its return and honored to be a part of welcoming flax back to Oregon, where the majority of it will be grown (at least at first). We are thus working (with a number of MADRE mujeres) towards the day when all of our linen products will be created with domestic linen.
In this interim period, before Oregon linen is available, MADRE is committed to a transparent supply chain, offering Oeko-Tex certified, Belgian-grown linen that is woven in a Lithuanian mill that runs on green energy. All of our products are sewn domestically. Until Oregon linen is rolling off the looms, each and every MADRE purchase will serve to signal to the farmers, state, and myriad other linen industry stakeholders that the demand for Oregon linen is steadily growing.
WHY LINEN
Linen is our favorite textile! Ancient, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, hypoallergenic, more absorbent than cotton, and naturally stain resistant, linen doesn’t pile and it is moth repellent.
Linen comes from the flax plant, which grows well with little water, and doesn’t require much if any fertilizer or pesticides. As a result, linen is very nearly naturally organic. The flax plant sequesters carbon, grows well in rotation with other crops, and the components of the flax plant not used to weave linen can all be used by other industries.
We love linen’s strength and durability, nearly as much as how it softens over time. Linen is the ultimate heirloom textile. We dream about MADRE linens being passed along from generation to generation…
WHO WE ARE
The ideas that later became MADRE began to emerge in conversations between Shay Carrillo and Jeanie Kirk in early 2019.
Shay Carrillo, Founding Partner and Chief Creative Officer, has a background in fashion styling, art direction, and photo production, which she drew upon to create Non-Perishable Goods (NPG), that she owned and operated for nine years. Shay is inspired by her ever growing children, Waldorf education, beautiful meals shared with loved ones, and the idea of a warm and inviting home that creates and expresses ritual for art, food & rest.
Jeanie Kirk, Partner and Chief Operations Officer, has worked as a project manager and grant writer in the nonprofit sector for over ten years, working to support the environment, education, human rights, and justice reform. After the birth of her first child, Jeanie and Shay began the conversations that eventually led them to MADRE. Since becoming a mother, Jeanie is committed more than ever to weaving together the threads that bind us all to one another. And to finding beauty in the messiest of places.
OUR COMMITMENT
MADRE is a feminist brand committed to embodying our aspirations for a feminine economy. We believe we are mutually indebted to each other and to our one true madre: MAMA EARTH. Therefore, we commit to you, to ourselves, and to the plants, lands, and waters, to embrace the obligation of our core values: integrity, honesty, transparency, collaboration, and radical inclusivity.
We are keenly aware of the difficulty that comes with working to dismantle white supremacy, which truthfully requires the complete destruction of capitalism and the dreaming of something new, and also needing to house/feed/clothe/support our families. MADRE is committed to listening, to decolonizing our own ways of being in the world, and to continually striving towards anti-racism.