We are married design duo Alex Sommer and Laura Keller. We live in a sixteenth century cottage with our daughter Marley and slipper-snapper French Bulldog, Vesper in the Suffolk countryside. We worked for over two decades in the fashion industry, the last 18 of which through our creative consultancy 2Som Studio, designing and providing trend forecasts to many casual and sportswear brands. In 2018 we decided to combine our creativity with a new focus and, after many months of development, launched CONCRETE & WAX.

From a little man-cave concrete tinkering, inspiration was born. He inspired her with his concrete creations which made her start thinking about wax believing that the two contrasting materials would work beautifully together. Some girl-time candle-making experiments followed and after much R&D, prototyping, sampling and testing we can now say assuredly, HE is Mr Concrete and SHE is Mrs Wax.

In order to create our collection we sought out true craftsmen in our local area to transform our designs on paper into the 3D forms from which we cast the moulds. The concrete designs were formed in aluminium, and the candles from layered plywood. We then set about mixing and testing our concrete and wax creations to achieve the perfect formulas for each - we’re not going to lie, there were quite a few disasters en route. Somewhere during our concrete testing we had a creative epiphany and decided to try out a camouflage effect - 4 days of nervous waiting later, when the concrete had finally set and was ready to be released from the mould, we waited with bated breath. We loved the result so much that the camouflage collection was born - and will be added to as our collection grows.