Kerri Rosenthal didn’t go to art school. She didn’t go to design school. The impetus to start her eponymous lifestyle brand came from—of all places— a restaurant in Greenwich. Kerri was out to eat with her husband and found herself transfixed by a painting hanging near their table. “I just couldn’t stop looking at it,” she tells Westport Lifestyle. “I came home and the next day I woke up, went to the art store, bought art supplies, and set up a little art studio next to the boiler in the windowless basement of our house in Weston. I started painting. And it unleashed something so intense and passionate in me that I had no idea was there. I didn’t stop painting for a year.”
Friends loved Kerri’s growing collection of original art, and after that first year, she and her husband decided to do a one-weekend-only pop-up sale in downtown Westport. “I sold all of my paintings,” she recalls. The seeds for what would become the Kerri Rosenthal brand had been planted. She built herself a real studio— with windows— and started taking orders for commissioned paintings. Interior designers would come to purchase her work, and ask if she did interiors as well. She never had— but she’s not the type to let that stop her. She teamed up with a partner and launched their own interior design business.
While Kerri may not have a traditional art background, she did have creative roots to draw on during these pursuits: her pre-kids career had been as the president of Oilily, a Dutch children’s clothing company. “They were a lifestyle brand before that term even existed— it was such a creative, colorful, cool place,” she says. “The brand seeped into my blood. It really was the biggest influence for me on an artistic level.”
With what she’d learned at Oilily, she felt ready to take Kerri Rosenthal out of her home and into the Westport world. Her first storefront opened in 2016 in Sconset Square, where she sold her art and curated clothing from labels she loved. “We called it the concept shop,” she says. The brand kept growing, and Kerri’s daughter Ali, who worked in the fashion industry, came on board. (“One day she asked ‘mom, can I just come help you grow your art business?’” Kerri recalls.) With Ali in the mix, expanding into apparel was a natural fit. “We looked at each other and we're like, we should be making our own clothing at this point.” They designed small-batch cashmere sweaters and added those to the growing collection.
When COVID hit, the already sky-high demand went through the stratosphere. “Our messaging— because it's so emotional and real and people couldn't see their family members— was just huge at that time,” says Kerri. “We decided we needed an even bigger space.” And that’s when they found what would become the Kerri Rosenthal flagship, at 181 Main Street. Not only was it a charming, house-style set-up that fit Kerri’s aesthetic, it was the very space they had rented for the first pop-up sale of her art, back in 2009. “It’s the best full-circle story ever,” says Kerri.
Since the flagship opened in 2021, Kerri Rosenthal is bigger than ever. Kerri has 25 employees, a warehouse in Norwalk, and an office space off the Post Road. The brand has expanded into home decor, clothing and accessories, stationary, and so much more. Last year, Kerri launched an exclusive collaboration with Bobbi Brown Beauty, which features her iconic Beauty Is Love painting as the basis for the collection of products and packaging. “My team takes the art and reworks it for everything we make— whether it’s a coffee mug, a baseball hat, a sweater, a pillow, a wallpaper, eyeshadow packaging— it all comes from a painting,” she says.
That art is at the soul of what she does speaks to the connection Kerri’s customers have with her brand. “My drippy heart was one of the first paintings I did, and it was almost virally accepted,” she says. “Everything I paint comes from a happy place, and it’s become a tool to make me feel happy on the inside, too. And that turns around and affects other people, so they have this emotional connection to [the work]. It’s a brand based on love, and it all happened organically.”
You can find Kerri Rosenthal items in other places, of course— at Anthropologie, and Unsubscribed, or as part of her Breast Cancer Awareness collection with Bloomingdales— but there’s something special about walking into her Westport flagship and seeing the home-grown success of the brand. “Creating collaboratively with wonderful people who have become like family– that’s what makes me happy,” says Kerri. “We keep growing, and we’re all in it together.”