Kristen Pumphrey - At Home with Fragrance: Creating Modern Scents for Your Space

We were walking along a sunny ridge of the Ewoldsen Trail in Big Sur when I smelled it. Sage. Not just any sage, but white sage that had been frying on the grassy slope of the trail just below. The salty Pacific Ocean glimmered in the midday sun. In front of us, the trail climbed upward before dipping back down into a cool and lush redwood grove. But all I could think about was the smell of that dry, sharp, sun-baked white sage.

It was a scent memory I took back to our studio in Los Angeles, locked into my brain the way you memorize your phone number as a kid. I kept thinking about this concept, of recreating the smell of that trailsea salt and eucalyptus and redwood and white sageand a year later, after revisions and sampling, we released a scent, Golden Coast, inspired by that moment.

But of course, you know, it wasnt just about the smell of the sage. We had long looked forward to our trip to Big Sur, not just because of its remote location, steep waterfalls, dense forests, and boutique hotels that we couldnt really afford. It was because we really needed some time off.

Just the year prior, my business had a huge break when our handmade candles got picked up by a major national retailer, catapulting us onto a roller-coaster ride of growth and expansion that consumed my life. Tom and I had also gotten married and he officially joined the business in the form of my Lead Candle Pourer. What started as an Etsy shop (but really a labor of love) in a second bedroom, had burgeoned into a business that, at the time, sold to hundreds of shops and several big retailers, such as Urban Outfitters and CB2. We employed people nowpeople that made the candles and shipped them and wrote sales orders right alongside us. After we got that big order, Tom and I worked for sixty days straight, taking only one day off, to get it all done.

We hustled because we didnt know how many more doors would be open to uswe saw this as our shot. I started P.F. Candle Co., (which stands for Pommes Fritesa play on my last name) in 2008, which was right at the beginning of the recession, and it was getting to a point where I struggled to make ends meet. I even considered giving up on my dream, which was pretty simpleto make a living by selling handmade stuff. But that eventual lucky break felt like a sign that I should take it and run, and although I would not recommend running yourself into the ground in quite the same way, I have zero regrets for the long hours and relentlessness that defined those early years.

So it was a pretty big thing for us when we chose to go away for a weekend. In retrospect, I think we only took one actual day off from work. We left our team of four in charge of the operations and set out on a trip to Big Sur, where we rented a tiny cabin and built fires at night, drank beer and ate organic food, read books by the riparian Big Sur River, and went hiking.

Why that moment was so importantthe experience of hiking through all these ecosystems and smelling the flaky redwoods, the cool creek bed, the invigorating white sageis that it was the moment we turned from being a company that sold handmade candles to a home fragrance company.

I learned to make candles at the age of twelve, so when I started my business, I naturally took them up alongside other goods. But candles were the thing that stuck, and over the years, I snowballed my scent intuition into actual training and conceptualizing, going from something smells good to something smells good, and its dry white sage. That trip was the first time I harnessed my own power of memory into a scent that would later become one of our bestsellers.

Scent is about so much more than just the way something smells. Scent is an experience. I think thats why Im so drawn to this industryI didnt want to just create a product that someone would use and be done with. I wanted to create a functional product that gave someone an experience that lasted longer than a moment.

Once I began to notice scents, my senses were heightened. The sense of smell is primordial; we learn to smell before we learn to speak. It communicates without words. It can tell you when somethings good (like cookies) or bad (like a gas leak). Scent and the means by which you use itlighting a candle or some incenseconnect you to your space around you and create rituals that help soothe the stress of our relentless cultural pace.

Its not just that scent and fragrance can enhance your life and space, and make you more attuned to the world around you. Its also that having a deeper connection to how things are made gives meaning to the items you choose to keep around you. We wrote this book not just as a primer for you to understand why things smell like they do but as an homage to our rootsDIY.

Our little business has grown a lot since that hike in 2014. We are now a team of seventy, and we are sold in thousands of boutiques and chains worldwide, including our own shops in Los Angeles and San Francisco. This concept of DIY has driven everything that we have done. We grew the business with zero funding or business expertise, and were basically schooled on the internet and learned as we went.

At the tail end of writing this book, the entire world was hit with the Coronavirus pandemic. Overnight, our world changed, and we suddenly found ourselves inside for long hours at a time. I dont think Ive ever burned so many candles in my life. I was panicked, thinking that everything we had worked forthe business we had so carefully built, the employees we had hired, all the candles we had madewould vanish overnight. But a funny thing happened: As we closed our doors, our customers found us online. They sent us DMs on Instagram letting us know how much a candle or room spraya tiny piece of normalmeant to them, how it was helping them get through. They sent gifts to nurses and frontline workers, or just to their cousin who was working from home, to connect and break up the drudgery. Not only were they using these products as aromatherapy, they were shaping their interior life through scent and design. It was everything we had written about in the book coming to life. The products you choose to use in your home matter. They can comfort you, give you meaning, or give you a semblance of normalcy and control.

In the chapters ahead, youll learn about what fragrance is and what it smells like. Then youll see how to incorporate fragrance into your home design, or how to use it as an aromatherapy tool. Fragrance is in everything, from our dish soap to our bug repellent. Once you become aware, you can harness this to shape the world around you, and bring intentionality where there wasnt any before. And the fun part? Lots of DIY projects to get your hands moving. The connection to the things that you use on a daily basiswhether by learning more about the companies you shop from, or by making the products yourselfis something that will stick with you.

KRISTEN

Part I
Fragrance Primer