"Tend Your Inner Garden" [Stalogy 365 Days Notebook] collaboration with A.C. Esguerra // wakako

At Baum-kuchen, some projects require five seconds from conception to execution, and others take a year (or more). For a few years, Stalogy has approached me multiple times to see if I’d be interested in producing collaboration notebooks together - their classic Stalogy 365 Days Notebook (which has amazing ink-friendly writing paper) with our original visual design on the cover. Each time, it’s been humbling to be asked, but I hesitated to move forward. First, there was a warehouse situation. I believe in running a very lean business, especially when it comes to overhead beyond payroll. Baum-kuchen operates in one of the most expensive cities in the U.S., and carrying a lot of physical items not only requires strong cash flow to keep the inventory as an asset but also constant storage space to hold it until all the babies (that’s sometimes how I call all the beloved artifacts we share at BK) find their homes. Then there is my never-ending question: “How many notebooks are too many in the world?” Because at the end of the day, the collaboration Stalogy notebook is still a Stalogy notebook. So even if the outside cover looks different, the inside pages and writing experience are the same. So what’s the point of creating “more” just to build the “limited edition” scarcity model? I know this is an unusual train of thought for a shop owner, but it’s what goes through my mind as I continue to foster Baum-kuchen. For those reasons, I’ve been hesitating to jump into the opportunity to collaborate.

Fast forward to March 2025, we relocated from Altadena to our current location in Eagle Rock, which has slightly more space for inventory. I wouldn’t say we have ample space, but we definitely have more than we ever did. So holding a little more inventory became a possibility when we relocated. We also have die-hard Stalogy fans on the BK team. The writing quality in these notebooks is consistently superb and delicious. So I asked myself another question: “What if the outside graphical elements of the notebook cover could add to the quality of the writing experience?” If we had enough physical space to store a minimum quantity of customized Stalogy notebooks in our studio, what would the notebook look like and what would it communicate to our world?

I mulled the idea for quite a while, exploring it in the back of my mind at the pace of the idea itself. Surprisingly, now that I think about it, I hold a lot of concepts and ideas for BK in the same container. Often, my team is surprised by what seems like a “random” idea that pops out of my mouth, but more often than not, these ideas have been simmering for a long time in an invisible realm.

Last fall, around the time I started imagining the possibility of creating Stalogy collaboration notebooks, I was also knee-deep in tending our newly inherited garden, slowly transforming the space that had been mostly covered in landscape fabric for decades. It was, and still is, a slow, hands-on, intensive process to peel away layers that had suppressed the growth of any kind. But slowly, I could see the soil that was bare and lifeless becoming a little fuller. Some of the native plants I added to the ground were also slowly taking off after each rainfall. Working on a project so tangible and meaningful was transformative, inside and out. It was, and still is, a work in progress, and very much like a dance with the natural world. That’s when I started playing with the concept: “What if journaling and personal writing is like tending the garden that is within each of us?” It’s not about controlling, but rather collaborating in tandem, experimenting, and dancing together with our inner self.

Once the concept of “tend your inner garden” became more crystallized as a guiding inspiration for the Stalogy collaboration notebook, it was time to figure out how to bring the vision to life. That’s when I saw our friend A.C. at a holiday gathering and got the idea to partner with them. Given our shared passion for plants that are native to Southern California, as well as our mutual love for analogue and their beautiful way of bringing illustrative design to tell a powerful story, I couldn’t imagine a more perfect fit.

I can’t believe I first connected with A.C. about this project almost a year ago. Since then, we have exchanged countless emails to build the project’s logistical structure and develop the artistic vision. A.C. handled the visual design almost entirely, aside from the initial starting point, which I shared as part of our project brief. Knowing how skilled and talented A.C. was, made it easy for me to lean in and trust the process as we checked in at various design milestones. I also stayed in ongoing communication with the Stalogy team through our distributor, ensuring what we were creating with A.C. could be produced using their printing technology. I have had a long-standing relationship with our distributor, so sharing this collaboration project with them also felt easy. In the end, the project took time to reach the final stage of printed copies, but it was a delightful and enjoyable process… and I am so grateful to everyone who was involved.

In their design, A.C. featured so many of my favorite native plants in the Santa Monica Mountains, including matilija poppy, California grizzly bear grass, black sage, coastal sagebrush, coastal sunflower, buckwheat, arroyo lupine, California poppy, mugwort, chaparral mallow, miner’s lettuce, common yarrow, and sticky monkeyflower. We decided to offer A5 and B6 sizes with two different designs. The A5 cover shows a sweeping view of the Santa Monica Mountains and a circular BK gate adorned with abundant wildflowers. You can even glimpse the Pacific Ocean on the horizon. The B6-size illustration zooms in on the gate, where you can enjoy more detailed nuances and personalities of each plant and flower.

I am holding both notebooks in my hands right now, and I am thrilled to see every intricate line A.C. deliberately added to the composition, brought to life in sparkling gold foil. When I hold a notebook, I can feel the subtle texture of the wildflower illustration against the smooth black cover. I marvel at the design and ponder what I might see, in my mind’s eye, through the portal that’s framed as a circular BK gate. I can feel the vitality and life-force of these native plants in the way the California poppy opens as the sun rises, and the crown of the mugwort reaches for the sky. I am reminded of the distinct taste of Miner’s lettuce. I love munching on Miner’s lettuce in early spring, as I roam the back trail of the canyon with Mango, picking a sweet leaf and taking in the nourishment with gratitude.

If these notebooks land on your writing desk, I hope you will have opportunities to go through the open gate to tend to your inner world as you would care for your beloved garden. I hope the resilience and generosity of the natural world gently remind you that growth can look different for each of us, and that sometimes the expansion of deep roots happening under our soil is just as important as the gorgeous flowers we see above. Lastly, I hope that these notebooks will be a trusted companion that you can always lean on.

I honestly can’t wait to hear what kind of analogue magic they will bring to you:)

xo

-wakako