Partnership info
Overview
- Type
- Product Collaboration
- Year
- 2023
Ann Sacks has been sourcing and making tile and stone since 1981, and somewhere along the way it became the tile brand designers actually name-check. It's part of the Kohler family now — the same Kohler that's been making things in Wisconsin since 1873, currently on its fourth generation of family leadership — but the real engine is still the Portland, Oregon factory, where the MADE by Ann Sacks line has been hand-producing guest-designer and in-house collections for more than 35 years. Twenty-two showrooms across North America carry the work, but the identity still comes from that one factory floor. Wearstler's relationship with Ann Sacks goes back to 2016, when Tableau, Maven, and Liaison launched together as her opening statement. Scout and Senso followed in 2022, Fade in 2023, and by the time Treillage arrived it was her ninth collection for the brand overall and sixth specifically for the MADE line — a near decade-long collaboration that's stayed exactly as unpredictable as it started.
The Partnership
Bulgari didn't have to sell Kelly on any of this. She already worked this way. B.Zero1 distills the Colosseum's ancient architecture into pure proportion; Tubogas takes a coiling technique from the 1940s and lets it resurface, decades later, exactly as it was. Both operate on the same idea: past, present, and future held in the same object rather than one era chosen over the others. That's the instinct she brings to a room too: history and the present treated as the same material rather than two competing ones. Endorsing the house wasn't an outside ask. It read like a description of her own design principle.
What we created
None of this reads as a one-off endorsement, because none of it was one. What started as a single shoot in early 2024 -- two looks, one for Tubogas, one for B.Zero1 — kept finding reasons to continue: a Cabochon pendant worn and posted that spring, a full Tubogas campaign by August timed to the collection's relaunch, a necklace gifted on top of the contracted post because posting alone didn't feel like enough gratitude. By March 2025, Bulgari wasn't sending a single request anymore. It was sending eighteen pieces, a watch, and a bag, curated entirely to Kelly's own direction rather than the brand's — proof that somewhere along the way, the brief had quietly changed hands.
The design of the B.Zero1 speaks to the harmony of past, present, and future. This same approach informs my own work and keeps me inspired.