The Sketching Files: The Making of a Logo
Horse. Rose. Water. Glass. A look inside the making of the Marichal Lahens logo.
Every finished design begins somewhere far less polished.
A line. A shape. An idea put to paper.
The Marichal Lahens logo began this way. But before the first sketch, there was a question: how do we create a symbol personal enough to carry a name, yet enduring enough to become something entirely its own?
The answer emerged through three symbols: a horse, a rose, and water brought together within the lines of a stained-glass window.
Each holds a connection to the story behind Marichal Lahens. Together, they became our mark.
El Caballo
The first element begins with the name itself.
Marichal traces its history to maréschal, an Old French word historically associated with the care and keeping of horses and which later evolved into the title of marshal, a high-ranking military or state officer.
The horse became a way of looking backward into the history of the name and carrying a fragment of that lineage into the identity of Marichal Lahens.
But its meaning is personal, too.
Our founder's younger sister grew up with a deep love of horses. For years, she dreamed of having one of her own. That childhood fascination gave the horse another layer of meaning one rooted not only in the history of a family name, but within the family itself.
It made the symbol feel inevitable.
Across the earliest drawings, the horse changed repeatedly. Its lines, proportions, movement, and relationship to the surrounding elements were explored until it began to feel less like an illustration and more like part of a larger visual language.
La Rosa
The rose comes from somewhere entirely different.
It comes from home.
Our founder grew up in Winter Park, Florida, where Park Avenue formed part of the landscape of her childhood. Within its gardens, she spent countless hours reading, writing, wandering, and thinking.
The rose became a quiet reference to those years and to a place that helped shape the person who would eventually create Marichal Lahens.
There is something beautiful about allowing a childhood memory to find its way into an object created years later.
Without its story, it is simply a rose.
To us, it carries a place with it.
El agua
And then there is water.
Our founder has always been drawn to it.
Growing up in Central Florida meant growing up among lakes. Later came a deep love of the ocean. Across different places and different chapters, water remained a constant a source of beauty, movement, discovery, and calm.
It felt natural for it to find its way into the logo.
Rather than representing one particular lake or stretch of ocean, the water remains abstract. It is a reference to the landscapes that have followed our founder throughout her life and to the feeling of being drawn, again and again, toward the water.
The Glass
The final element is not contained within the logo.
It is the form that holds everything together.
The Marichal Lahens mark was conceived as a stained-glass window, an homage to an art form that profoundly influenced the visual world of the brand.
That connection began at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park.
It was there that our founder encountered the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany and developed a fascination with the extraordinary possibilities of glass its color, intricacy, craftsmanship, and ability to transform completely in the presence of light.
The museum is home to the world's most comprehensive collection of works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, spanning his celebrated leaded-glass windows and lamps alongside art glass, jewelry, paintings, pottery, and architectural works.
For us, stained glass offered something beyond ornament.
Individual fragments each with their own shape, color, and character are joined together to create something that can only be understood in its entirety.
There was something fitting about allowing our own mark to take the same form.
A horse.
A rose.
Water.
Separate stories held together within a single window.
Finding the Form
Four ideas with very different origins.
A horse drawn from the history of a name and a childhood dream.
A rose from a place that shaped a childhood.
Water from the landscapes that have always felt like home.
And stained glass from an encounter with art that changed the way our founder looked at beauty, color, and craftsmanship.
The challenge was finding a way for all of them to exist as one.
The earliest drawings were imperfect and exploratory. Lines overlapped. Proportions changed. Elements moved, disappeared, and returned.
With every iteration, the mark became more resolved.
The horse, rose, and water stopped existing as individual symbols. The framework surrounding them began to resemble the leading of a stained-glass window. Slowly, separate references became a single composition.
From Sketch to Symbol
Eventually, the lines became certain.
What began on paper as a collection of histories, places, memories, and influences became the mark of Marichal Lahens.
Its meaning is not immediately obvious.
We prefer it that way.
The mark can first be encountered simply as something beautiful. Look closer, however, and there is more to discover.
A name.
A family.
A childhood.
A landscape.
An encounter with art.
Pieces of a personal history, drawn together and transformed into something new.
That idea feels particularly fitting for Marichal Lahens.
We believe beauty becomes richer when we understand where it came from. That objects can hold history. That familiar forms can reveal unexpected stories. And that the smallest details can carry meaning far beyond what is immediately visible.
Our logo was created with that same belief.
So rather than preserving only the finished mark, we wanted to preserve the lines that came before it.
The experiments.
The revisions.
The imperfect drawings.
The process of becoming.
Because every object has a beginning.
This was ours.
From the Marichal Lahens design archive.
The Sketching Files documents the drawings, experiments, and creative processes behind the world of Marichal Lahens.