OUR STORY / LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA
From the tideline
to your everyday.
I never set out to create art. I simply wanted to preserve the beauty I encountered along the shoreline.
As a marine scientist and ocean conservationist living in La Jolla, California, I’ve always been drawn to the things others walk past—the tiny, the intricate, and the often overlooked.
Caelie
FOUNDER, CAELIEFORNIA
01 / DISCOVER
Every piece starts
with a walk.
A little curiosity.
A closer look at the coast.
Walking
Every piece starts with a walk to the beach. I love tide pooling, looking for nudibranchs and then walking along the shores looking for drift seaweed.
Collecting
I collect exclusively naturally washed-ashore drift seaweed—never harvested from the ocean—to help protect marine ecosystems.
02 / PRESERVE
Beauty in the details.
Patience in the process.
Curating
The process begins after collection. Each piece of drift seaweed is meticulously curated, with hours spent removing tiny grains of sand, shell fragments, and other natural debris by hand.
Then comes the design process. Every delicate branch is carefully arranged and rearranged, one by one, until the composition feels complete.
Pressing
After hours of arranging each tiny branch, the design is pressed and left undisturbed for several weeks. It’s one of the hardest parts of the process—waiting to see if the composition I envisioned survives the journey.
03 / GIVE BACK
An ocean connection,
made tangible.
My hope is that every piece encourages others to notice the beauty in the little things and to feel a deeper connection to the ocean.
To help protect the waters that inspire my work, 1% of every sale is donated to ocean conservation.
