How CC Luxury Products came to be; It starts with a hobby…
2013
At the age of fourteen I was diagnosed with cancer. At the time, all of my favorite hobbies were outside - primarily gardening. To protect my weakened immune system, the doctors requested that I refrain from as many of those outdoor activities as much as possible. Shut indoors, I decided to find a new hobby, one that had to be as creative, as fun as, and as introverted as gardening. I went through several hobbies and a good portion of my parent’s bank accounts looking for something new. Finally, always fascinated with candles, I decided that I was going to try candle making… success! Instead of hours of weeding I had hours of cleaning my prep station and preparing the jars. Instead of trimming dead spots off of plants, I trimmed the wicks to size. Instead of the smell of the garden, I had the smell of my candles, and I could make outdoor scents too. For an indoor hobby that wasn’t going to put my immune system at risk, this was the best and most enjoyable. For years I’ve been making candles for myself, as gifts, and just for fun.
2020
During the lockdown from COVID-19, I went through all the phases everyone else did. Getting kicked off of campus (did I mention it was my junior year at college?) and ushered into a world of online learning. Quarantining at my aunt and uncles house because I didn’t want to choose between which parent I was going to stay with. Hours of Animal Crossing and Zoom. I baked many loaves of bread. Made tie-dye shirts. Got sucked into hours of Tik-Tok. Perfected my sandwich making. And yes, I too played Among Us. But most significant: after about three years of not making a candle due to my academic load and social life, I came back to candle making. This hobby that I enjoyed throughout my high school life now became something to help me keep my sanity during a worldwide crisis. This time, I didn’t put it down.
2022
In spring of 2022, I graduated from college! Looking forward to what I wanted to do, I kept thinking of the hobby that has kept me going many times. It’s creative, it’s fun, there is no absolute way to do it, and I am creating something! What can be better than that? At the end of the day, everything I love doing has to do with creation. I like to garden, I like to cook, and I love to make candles. So…what next? The short answer is that my degree inadvertently prepared me for this. Many alumni in my major at my college have become entrepreneurs. The long answer is that I would spend the next year and some change researching the market. What distributors do I want? How do I want my candles to look? Where am I going to sell them? What equipment do I need that I don’t have? What equipment do I need to upgrade? Parts of this year were drowned out with moving apartments, being busy at work and, to be honest, a little bit of executive dysfunction and a lot of nervousness.
2023
In April of 2023, I officially filed to create my business. This was followed by excitement and more nervousness. Most of the summer I would use what I had saved up to start working on getting the supplies I wanted. By the tail end of the year, I had generated enough product to start selling for the first time, releasing six scents and three variations of each.