With Sidia, Erin Kleinberg Is Creating a Body-Care Brand That’s Built to Last

Erin Kleinberg recalls watching her grandmother Sidia apply hand cream in her kitchen like it was yesterday. “I remember so distinctly. She had one of those phones you picked up with a cord, and she would sit there at her little station and call her friends. She would be writing handwritten notes, all her phone numbers and stuff,” Kleinberg says. The ritual of slathering on lotion, taking the time to have an “everything shower,” and the indulgence of smearing your face with layers of skin-care products are acts of self-love that Sidia imparted to Kleinberg—and that inspired the serial entrepreneur to create the sensorial body-care brand that is her namesake (and yes, of course, includes hand-care products). “It reminds me of a slower time.”

Sidia, who died from stomach cancer in 2020 at 79 (“too young,” her beloved granddaughter says), is both a larger-than-life inspiration and a grounded guiding light in Kleinberg’s life. A Holocaust survivor, she immigrated to Canada and built a big, beautiful life in Toronto, with a successful real estate career and tight-knit family. She also taught Kleinberg the importance of taking care of yourself (and your home) first.

“My grandmother loved fashion and beauty, and because she came from nothing and built this whole life up, she really took pride in how she felt and how she cared for herself in addition to how she cared for everyone else,” says Kleinberg, who started her career with a fashion line in her early 20s before co-founding the media brand Coveteur. “She was always teaching me to care as hard for yourself as you do for the world around you, because you need to protect your airbag first.”

Kleinberg founded Sidia in 2020. It was the beginning of the pandemic and not long after her grandmother lost her battle with cancer. “My mind was racing, and I needed creativity to help me get through the mess of it all,” she says. “I also realized that body care was a category that needed disrupting. It was very snoozy.” Kleinberg said she struggled to find clean, efficacious products with smells that were “her style” but not too heavily scented. “I thought, ‘Why can’t there be a world where these things exist together and are multipurpose— products that look the part, feel the part, smell the part, and give you a full sensorial experience in your bathroom?’” Like so many entrepreneurs before her, Kleinberg saw a whitespace in the market and decided to create products to fill it. “I decided I needed to make this body-care and fragrance play in my grandmother’s name, in her honour, in her legacy.”

Kleinberg didn’t only have a dream to create a new line of body-care products—she also had insider knowledge from working on countless cool-girl brands, from Merit and Saie to La Mer and Chanel, over the years via Métier Creative, the agency she co-founded in 2015 after exiting Coveteur. “I’d studied all these luxury brands all these years. I’d taken in all the little Easter eggs and nuggets. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to make a go at this and try to build these best-in-class, incredible quality products that can really give you a moment of joy when you need it.”

One of Sidia’s brand taglines is “Come home to yourself,” which refers to the dichotomy of women’s outer and inner lives. “I’m so happy to be out there running two businesses, having my two kids and everything. But then when I come home to myself at the end of the night, it’s like, I’m in my bathroom. Don’t talk to me,” says Kleinberg, who has a 10-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son, with a laugh. “And so that is the ethos of Sidia: really come home to yourself, celebrate these worlds, these dichotomies.”

She started with candles as a way to introduce consumers to the Sidia world via two key scents —Braless, a relaxed amber-woody fragrance that Kleinberg calls an “ode to liberation,” and Wired, a perky citrus and eucalyptus scent that the founder describes as “uplifting”—that capture that contrast between being on the go all day and then whipping your bra off when you get home. Hand-care products, including a serum and an exfoliating treatment, followed, as have forays into fragrance, including a solid perfume (a surprise megahit) and most recently, a body mist. “I’m so excited to continue the storytelling of fragrance and building out these worlds, continuing to understand who is the woman who embodies Sidia’s different scents,” Kleinberg says about the future of the brand.

When asked about what makes a successful entrepreneur, Kleinberg talks about intuition (“My grandmother taught me from the jump that you have to listen to your gut and your instincts, and what’s made me successful in my career is my intuition—a sort of taste level that comes from within”) and resilience. “The most challenging part of being an entrepreneur is being able to have all these doors slammed in your face. And I think the best entrepreneurs are the ones that can have enough grit and resilience to have a shitty day and get those doors slammed in your face, then wake up the next day with the most massive smile on, ready to charge forth no matter what happened,” she says. “You have to be able to say goodbye to the bad feelings, not linger, act fast, and make decisions quickly.”

There’s also an innate drive that most entrepreneurs simply can’t shake. “I think being an entrepreneur is this passion that you have inside of you,” she says. “I used to know the owner of Danier before he passed away, and he was like, ‘You have this fire in your belly, Erin.’ I can’t fight it.” Instead, she keeps building.

“My goal is to build a forever legacy brand that can withstand the test of time. And I want to put my grandmother’s name in lights. She was kind of embarrassed by her name. It wasn’t very popular here in Toronto, but it’s such a beautiful name that has a global weight to it,” Kleinberg says fondly. “I’m the crazy person that wants to build another Aesop. And many people want to do that, but I have that fiery passion.”

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