Zuma

Overview

Type: Product Collaboration
Year: 2023

Zuma runs two references against each other - a futuristic 3D vector grid and glassware motifs borrowed from ancient glass - and lets them share a table. Every piece is designed to mix and match across colors and shapes, so a tablescape ends up looking assembled rather than assigned.   The grid pattern started as one of Wearstler's own iconic motifs, refined into a digital pattern the studio had already been developing when the Serax collaboration began. The glassware runs a parallel logic: a warm amber gradient spread across rectilinear forms, an elevated basic with a nod to historic amber glass.

Creative Process

Getting the grid to feel hand-touched rather than machine-perfect took real back-and-forth between Wearstler's studio and Serax's production team, working the pattern until it read as considered rather than exact. The glassware underwent its own version of that negotiation: working the ombre gradient until the color felt like it was breathing across the glass.

Creative Direction

Zuma's campaign is really a three-way conversation: Serax brought the ceramics and glass to life, Wearstler designed every pattern and shape herself, and photographer-stylist Marie Wynants decided how the story around them would look. Wynants and Wearstler met on their first Serax shoot together, and the way they work hasn't changed since: one instinct pushing toward more, the other pulling toward less. The result, memorably, is a sardine parked inside a Zuma vase like it never considered leaving.

With Zuma, I wanted a pattern that feels like it came from the future to sit right next to a shape borrowed from antiquity. That's really the pleasure of this collection for me — objects that were never supposed to belong together, and somehow do.

Kelly Wearstler