Bring on the Belugas!

It was a perfect morning for an adventure. Crystal clear bluebird sky, windless, with the St. Lawrence as calm as a reflecting pool. I had been prepping for this day for weeks and anticipating it for a year. Erica was my reluctant --- and until recently unwitting --- accomplice.

As we slid our tandem kayak into the clear, frigid water at the small marina down the hill from our house, the tranquility of our surroundings did its best to quiet the nagging anxiety in my stomach. We were heading off with both the tide and the current pushing us out toward sea, so turning back would be hard, and there wasn't another spot to pull out for 24 kilometers. Our plan was to paddle along the craggy, empty coastline and see sights only visible from the water. Our daughter, Malka, would pick us up in a few hours at Port au Persil --- a tiny ancient hamlet with a church, a few houses and, crucially, a protected cove with a dock and a ramp.

The first few miles were uneventful as we slid past the shoreline with surprising speed. A couple of porpoises surfaced far off to starboard, caught their breath, and dove out of view. Then, as we came to the first promontory --- a small mountain cape protruding into the flow --- I noticed the water surface in the cove ahead shimmering, as though whitecaps had appeared from nowhere. Yet the water remained glassy. We glided closer and began to hear the telltale "pssssshhhhhhaaaaaaahhhhh" of an aquatic mammal exhaling. We were floating straight into a massive pod of beluga whales.

Breathless, stunned, we lifted our paddles and watched for twenty or thirty minutes as wave after wave of belugas swam to, under and past our kayak. Huge clouds of whiteness moving slowly and breathing loudly, they barely seemed to notice us. If these had been orcas, I'm certain I would have been terrified. But these gentle giants posed no danger, and I felt perfectly calm --- awestruck by their presence and our impossible luck.

Charlevoix has a permanent beluga colony, and we have watched them many times from the national park where they live. You are not allowed to approach them in a boat and can be fined for coming within 400 meters of one. It is a different story, of course, when they come to you.

By the time we drifted to the headlands, they were gone. When we finally arrived at Port au Persil, Malka was waiting. We were spent --- physically and emotionally. I looked at Erica and didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.

What I was thinking, though: we had chosen a beluga as our logo a year before that morning on the water. I had wondered, occasionally, whether it was too on-the-nose --- too cute, too obvious. Floating among them that morning, I stopped wondering.

This is why we live in Charlevoix.

Charlevoix is a place that rewards attention. Many of its most striking features are immediately visible --- the mountains, the estuary, the tides. But one of the most powerful lies hidden below the surface.

During the last ice age, a massive glacier carved what is now the Saguenay Fjord from the Laurentian Mountains. The thousand-foot cliffs that plummet to icy water are stunning enough. But the glacier continued another thousand feet below the waterline before gouging a channel into the St. Lawrence. Where the fjord meets the river, a massive submerged cliff forces super-cold water upward to meet relatively warmer water --- creating perfect conditions for krill, and for the whales that feed on them. And just past that underwater cliff, perched on shoals that reveal themselves only when the twenty-foot tide recedes, sits a lighthouse surrounded entirely by water.

With its refined caisson neck --- what lighthouse aficionados call a sparkplug design --- this beautiful, functional architectural icon became the inspiration for our Sans Savon bottle.

Even with uniquely differentiated and powerfully effective formulations, we knew Sans Savon would need to stand on the shoulders of an authentic brand. We reached out to our good friend Helen Steed to bring that vision to life.

Helen worked with me at Bumble and bumble, starting as a creative team manager and rising to Creative Director before leaving to become one of the first --- and most consequential --- employees at Glossier. After Glossier, she led creative at a celebrated agency, spearheading the launch and rebranding of companies like Supergoop, before going independent and working only with clients she genuinely wanted to work with. Thankfully, we fit that description.

Helen assembled a team she felt would be inspired by our vision. Through a combination of research, pre-work and live interviews, the team pushed and probed, added their own insights, and synthesized a clear brand story. When they presented their first pass at the brand foundations, it felt like something that had always existed and was only now being unearthed. The color palette anchored on Charlevoix photography. Simple, whimsical storytelling set in fairytale fonts. It all hung together --- and it felt like us. No fakery. No hyperbole. Just an authentic love of nature and a search for balance.

For photography, we sought local Charlevoix photographers whose work we could license. We discovered Francis Gagnon --- a stunning photographer who lives in Charlevoix and travels the world capturing the landscapes he loves --- and his images featured heavily in our early brand thinking. When we finally connected, however, Francis told us he had stepped back from commercial work to focus solely on his art. He was gracious enough to recommend several other photographers, and through that thread we found Laurent Lucuix. Laurent lives on the Gaspé Peninsula across the river from Charlevoix but had photographed the region extensively, commissioning a small plane to reach locations impossible to access any other way. After reviewing our brand guidelines and learning about Sans Savon's mission, he agreed to license us the images that now populate our entire website. I have done my best since launching to contribute my own timelapse photography in a similar spirit, but Laurent's images remain the foundation.

The bottle design came together through genuine collaboration. We arrived with a vision: a deep blue-green vessel with a heaviness and gravitas that would feel like glass despite being made from super-thick recycled plastic --- something that would look as natural in a spare modern kitchen as in a hand-hewn cabin. We brought the idea of wave-like embossing to reflect the tidal patterns visible from our porch, but it didn't make the final cut. Helen's team brought the caisson neck --- and that became the bottle's signature.

The last piece to fall into place was secondary packaging, and it was the hardest. We had set ourselves two mandates that pulled in opposite directions: the bottles should be "forever bottles," clean and unadorned, with no labels that would show wear through years of refilling. And our environmental footprint should be as small as possible --- no bulky luxury boxes. We explored wrapping the bottles in paper, which solved the labeling problem elegantly but proved impossible to scale. After many wrong turns, we realized we could design a fitted bag that achieved the same visual effect as wrapping while remaining operationally practical. With that final piece in place, the brand was ready.

When you're doing something for the first time, everything takes longer than you expect. Launching Sans Savon was no exception --- the full gestation period, from idea to first sale, ran just over twelve months. As part of our soft launch, Erica and I wrote to a long list of friends asking them to test the site and buy only if they felt genuinely enticed. Even before the email went out, my childhood friends were jockeying to be first. And then, before any of them could get there, a complete stranger --- unknown to any of us --- somehow discovered the site and placed an order. It felt like a good omen.

It was a proud moment. And yet, looking back now over the ensuing two years, just the beginning.

One of my favorite elements of the brand that Helen and her team brought to life? Our logo: the simple outline of a beluga.

Maybe, somehow, they know we've been celebrating them.

Postscript: To watch a video of me and Erica floating through belugas, check out my personal Instagram @elihalliwell and scroll down to August 15, 2025. And turn on the sound!