OUR STORY // In Our Words

After chronic illness and newfound disability took her career in custom fabrication, artist AJ Hawkins took the ashes of one dream and brought forth another - to create a community-centered lifestyle brand for the death positive and darkly-inclined. In 2018, she launched KALMA - a place to find thoughtfully sourced, handmade and vintage goods that honor mortality, celebrate beauty and cultivate curiosity.  

Named for the Finnish folk character who represents death and decomposition, KALMA honors that decay is not an end but a transmutation - a vital process that makes loss into life, ends into beginnings, old into new.

Hawkins spent much of the early years of KALMA housebound and bedbound recovering from rare side effects of medical treatment. It was the access to community provided by social media—and the art, advocacy and education content AJ shared there—that enabled KALMA to grow into a global brand. It was the grief and isolation of these years that galvanized KALMA’s mission to create community spaces for tending grief and weaving networks of community care.

In 2024, KALMA opened its brick-and-mortar storefront in historic downtown Port Townsend, WA. Within it, KALMA launched The Parlor—a multi-faceted community care initiative and gathering space centered on the transformative tending of grief and joy.

While AJ has poured so much of their personhood into KALMA, KALMA is so much more than AJ herself. KALMA could not exist without the steadfast support of AJ’s spouse, Daniel, and an ever-growing constellation of community members who pour their care, time, and wisdom into this space.

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