Words: Zak Maoui
About two years ago Idris and Sabrina Elba decided to start their own business. Sable Labs is an award-winning melanin inclusive skincare label formulated using, first and foremost, African botanicals. It just felt right for them to go into business together, but are well aware that it's quite unusual for a couple to find success in building a brand together. "People always say 'are you crazy working with your partner, that would never work for me”, but for us it always felt ok," Sabrina Elba tells us via video call from her home in west London, which she has shared with Idris since 2018. "We had shared goals that we’ve envisioned, it’s felt natural."
This has seen the brand, which is now stocked far and wide, flourish, and they together have worked out how they can balance the madness of a start-up (as well as Idris' own career as an actor, and Sabrinas as a model-cum-presenter-cum-just about everything else) with home life. In essence - how do they go from the "Working Idris and Sabrina Elba" to the "Personal Life Idris and Sabrina Elba"?
"It’s not always been easy, you know, and it’s been a learning process," Sabrina continues. "I’ve had to learn to put boundaries in place and learn to not ask Idris about emails at dinner. Work exists in work hours and home is home and home time is family time. I’m still not the best at the discipline between work and home time, Idris is so good at it." Sabrina explains that Idris is well versed at saying “look babe work is done, let’s just chill', and, due to his his longer work days with filming, has fine tuned when he needs to turn his work life off. "I need that and I’m thankful to him for reminding me that sometimes you have to turn your phone off, smell the roses a bit and get out of the work zombie mode we get into," she continues. "I pick up my phone and start looking at emails. It’s automatic, but it’s not good."
For Idris, working together as a couple is something that shouldn't even be second guessed. "We’re friends at the end of the day, as well as Sabrina being just my wife, and we enjoy the vibe of working together," he says, getting a nod of agreement from Sabrina. "It makes it easy and so it doesn't even feel like work." Sabrina adds: "It’s been a journey but I just love it. Shared goals are such a great motivator in a relationship. If you have something that gets you up and excited in the morning, even if that’s a deal, and you're in it together it just makes it all so much more worthwhile. We feel connected by that."
This togetherness is something that the duo wanted to bring to their next role, which is that of poster couple for Calvin Klein's ultra famous Eternity scent. It's a role that is, in short, a massive first: Idris and Sabrina Elba are the first Black couple to front a fragrance campaign as big as this. It's a campaign that is being blasted into airports, high streets and shopping centres around the world. Everybody has a Calvin Klein story, and most people know the fragrance. "The word eternity is aspirational and nothing in unknown intelligence lasts forever," Idris explains. "And we feel that, Sabrina and I, are here to stay regardless of how long it lasts. Our work and bond is eternal."
Their first project together was actually their podcast Coupledom, on which they'd interview couples that they admired and who they believed were getting it right in their field. "This Eternity campaign is the same for us," Sabrina explains. "That bond that you have with someone that should last forever. We talk about our coupledom openly and we’ve bled that into our own brand, and how we use the products together."
For them, the power of appearing and working together, especially with this campaign, meant something bigger. "We represent the first black couple to be a part of this, and i think it’s an exciting progression of the conversation around race," Idris says. "Consumer brands are changing and this is a big brand that has predominantly had one kind of race to front its campaigns. It feels right, and I think we're strong as a couple in it."
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