Via Maris Is Judaica for the 21st Century

Dana Hollar Schwartz did not intend to start a design brand dedicated to innovating traditional Jewish ceremonial objects. The Canadian New Yorker, who works full-time in PR, is all too familiar with the struggles of running a small business. "If anything, I know too much about how hard it is to have brands," she says.

A fruitless search for a great-looking mezuzah—a small object mounted to the doorways of Jewish homes containing verses from the Torah—and several conversations with friends who’d had similarly disappointing experiences shopping for Judaica that matched their love of contemporary design (editor’s note: SAME) led her to reconsider: “When I had this idea, I felt so strongly that it needed to exist and was kind of like, ‘I’m going to take one for the team. I'm going to do it myself.’”

Anyone who has struggled to shop for mezuzahs, menorahs, or any other object under the Judaica umbrella has likely experienced a sea of so-so designs, with a few recent exceptions. The launch of Via Maris earlier this month, two years after the idea was hatched, ushers in a collective sigh of relief. The collection, designed in partnership with product designer Jamie Wolfond, who’s best known around these parts for founding Good Thing, succeeds not only in making beautiful objects for a contemporary home, but also in solving some very real problems that come with them.

We’ve seen brands redesign everything from the toothbrush to bedding to even toilet paper in recent years claiming to “disrupt” their vertical. Schwartz and Wolfond, however, set out to make inherently useful items, and tackled several design challenges that many of us familiar with Jewish customs might relate to.

“We just got to focus on what product design is about,” Schwartz said.

The mezuzah, for example, can be installed with concealed screws or a command strip, versus unattractive standard screws that typically interrupt a mezuzah's design. The Block Chanukiah doubles as a storage vessel for candles or anything else you might desire, so you don’t have to stash it away beyond the eight nights a year of its use.

Perhaps the most exciting innovation for someone who grew up dreading the household chore of scraping stubborn candle wax off ornately decorated candleholders during the holidays every year: Next month Via Maris launches what Schwartz calls “low-drip, low-smoke” candles. In Jewish tradition it’s custom to never blow candles out, so the team developed another design hack to reduce the burn time of the candles.

Another notable feature of the designs is that they eschew symbolism and traditional motifs. “We wanted it to feel really fresh and contemporary in terms of how people could choose to interact with those objects,” she said.

And she's not stopping here. The second collection, coming this winter, will cover the next frontier on the Jewish calendar, and another realm of Judaica that could certainly use an update: the Passover tablescape.