Aunt Anna Kept Everything
By Flo 39
The things that inspire Flo 39 were never meant to become designs. They were simply part of our family. Paintings. Old travel souvenirs. Photographs. Objects brought home from Europe and kept for decades. Things that hung on walls or sat on shelves long before we ever thought about creating a brand.
Flo 39 was started by three friends, all from Italian-American families. When we tell these stories, we tend to say “we," partly because the memories and influences overlap so much and partly because Flo 39 has always felt like a shared family story.
For all three of us, Italy was never just somewhere our families came from. It was part of everyday life: hearing Italian spoken, eating homemade food (yes, a lot of pasta), and spending Sunday afternoons around loud, lively tables with people talking over one another.
Aunt Anna was part of that world. She was born on the East Coast to Italian immigrant parents, went to college, and moved to Italy where she taught grammar school at Camp Darby, the U.S. Army base near Pisa. She lived in Livorno and spent time with relatives scattered around Italy, from Asciano in Tuscany, where our Zio Prete (affectionately "Uncle Priest" in English) lived, to Pomarico in Basilicata in the south, where our great-grandmother lived.
After twelve years living abroad, when Anna came home, she brought Italy with her. There was an inlaid wood Italian desk, a gold-leaf mirror, paintings, a textured little statue (see photo at right), and boxes of things she had saved. Because let us just say: Anna kept everything.
For years, they were simply Anna's things. Beautiful things we had grown up seeing without really thinking very much about them. Years later, those paintings and mementos became part of the visual landscape of our own family.
When we started Flo 39, we began looking at familiar things differently, noticing the colors, composition, typography, and imagery that had always been around us.
That is why so many Flo 39 designs begin with something real: a vintage travel guide, an old illustration, a photograph we took, a painting that belonged to someone we loved, a symbol spotted on a building, or a piece of typography that caught our attention.
What interests us is taking something with history and giving it another life — keeping what made it distinctive while allowing it to feel natural now.
Our Piccola Guida T-shirt design (left) began with a very small, pink travel guide that caught our eye in a box of mementos while rummaging through the garage. It was Anna’s Piccola Guida di Montenero, literally a little guide that she picked up in the 1950s on a visit to the hilltop town of Montenero.
Something about its simple vintage typography perfectly placed on the small cover made us feel it should be seen.
A chalk portrait of Anna made in Italy in the 1950s now hangs in the Flo 39 boutique in San Carlos. Her portrait is a reminder that Flo 39 did not really begin in 2025, even though that is when we started the company. The influences behind it go back much further — through the women and men in our families, the places they lived and traveled, the things they chose to save, and the stories that came down with them.
We suspect there are still things tucked away in family boxes and albums that we have not rediscovered yet. That may be one of our favorite parts of building Flo 39.