President and Creative Director
Livia Cowan founded Mariposa over twenty years ago as a personal quest, a worldwide journey, in search of the handmade and the beautiful. What began as a youthful endeavor (Livia drove the truck; her parents’ garage was the warehouse) has become a successful company that’s really an extended family. In partnership with our retailers, we offer our customers the specialized knowledge and aesthetic loyalty that’s behind every Mariposa piece they bring home.
Livia was always passionate about her mission: to raise the everyday life of tableware to the summit of what it can be. This has meant a happy marriage of our designers’ original, innovative ideas with the age-old techniques and superb materials of the finest Italian, French, Eastern European and Mexican artisans working in ceramics, cutlery, glass, and aluminum.
It has meant, on Livia’s part, a commitment to unique design. All Mariposa’s designers are artists: painters and sculptors. Our craftsmen, the very best we can find, have become our friends, and view each piece they make as art, not product. (We’ve worked with the same aluminum artisans in Mexico for fifteen years.) But in an age when so little is made by hand, we never question our mission to keep such individual crafts alive — they’re simply better.
