Member Work/Life: Victoria Mierzwa
Every time I open Instagram, someone is hawking a new candle brand. As a candle consumer, my cart is wide open. But as a writer, I could do without the impenetrable marketing copy expounding on our “deeply personal” relationship with scent. LOHN is the exception. Victoria Mierzwa and Katerina Juskey co-founded the Canadian brand in 2018 after years in cosmetics and perfumery. Juskey worked at Estee Lauder in R&D for MAC and Tom Ford, while Mierzwa was first in product development working with brands like Le Labo and Byredo and eventually moved to sales and marketing at L’Oreal. The pair share a lifelong passion for fragrance, but LOHN also draws on their respective cultural backgrounds. Juskey is half Estonian and Lithuanian, and Mierzwa is Polish: LOHN means ‘scent’ in Estonian, and the brand references the amber road, an ancient trade route that crossed those countries. The brand also strikes the right notes (ha) between accessible and artisanal, and all candles are hand poured in their Toronto studio. Now, LOHN has teamed up with East Room on a collaborative WFH candle called, Work Environment: a soothing, woodsy scent that burns the work week away.
When did you launch Lohn and why?
⎯⎯⎯ My co-founder Kat and I have a bit of a history. We actually know each other from high school, and we both ended up going to Queens to study chemical engineering. When we graduated, neither of us was super passionate about pursuing a career in the chemical industry, but we both were really passionate about cosmetics. At the time, you kind of had to know someone who knew someone to kind of get you into that field because it was just so limited. I stumbled into a job working for a cosmetic manufacturer in Burlington that supplied the amenities to hotels. So that was my introduction into brands like Le Labo, Byredo, and the world of cosmetic formulation, packaging development, product development, and manufacturing. I just loved how all the pieces kind of went together. I ended up leaving that position to work at L 'Oreal in sales for a brand called SkinCeuticals. I kind of got both sides, the side of making it and then the side of actually selling it, which was interesting because a business won't exist without sales.
And then Kat got a job with Estee Lauder working in R&D and then went and studied perfumery at a school called Isipca. And meanwhile, the two of us had sort of been keeping an eye on each other just through LinkedIn. I had worked at Sephora one of the summers in between my years of school was really into buying cosmetics and candles and fragrance as I had been like my whole life, and she had been playing around with candle making and had already come up with the name Lohn. Her background is Estonian and Lithuanian, and Lohn is a word in Estonian that means scent. So that's where that came from.
So the two of us connected on LinkedIn, and we had inspiration, ideas, things that we wanted to kind of make together. Soaps were on the table, candles, body lotions, that sort of thing. We knew we didn't want to do skincare. And then chatted for hours on end.
Did you always think about starting your own business?
⎯⎯⎯Yeah, both of us, like Kat's dad owns his own dental practice. My dad's an electrical contractor. So we saw our parents doing their own thing. I've always been a very creative person, into art and design, and I needed an outlet for that. I knew that product design and development was something that I could apply that creativity.
When did you officially launch?
⎯⎯⎯ In 2018. We spent two years before that working full time working with our friend who's a graphic designer on the branding, the logo, the scents, the packaging, definitely took our time. Like there was a few moments of like, shit to get off the pot. I think it's like, okay, at some point, we have to launch. It'll never be perfect. And because we're gonna reiterate or iterate, but we started selling our products at like markets and craft markets. So I think our first market was a Mother's Day market in 2018. So I was still working full time, Kat was as well. And then it wasn't until 2020 where Kat was like, ‘Okay, are you going to do this full time?’ because she had already quit the summer before. She had just made the leap, and this was in January slash February, literally a month before COVID.
What did you first launch with?
⎯⎯⎯ So we launched with four candles, two of which are our number one best-sellers to this day. They're part of what we call our Amber Road collection. I'm Polish and Kat is Estonian and Lithuanian. We researched and found these ancient trade routes that were used to transport things like amber, tea spices, things that would be used in perfumery. And the first of these roads was called the Amber Road, and it crossed from the Baltic Sea through to the rest of Europe, and kind of crossed these countries. And that's where, I don't have one with me, but there's a constellation-looking graphic on the back of our candles, and it's actually an abstract interpretation of this journey. So that's where the idea to create collections based on roads came from.
What we've learned in the long run is that kind of complexity in storytelling gets a little bit lost when it comes to like explaining it to the consumer. So we sort of have dialled it down and just explained that, you know, Lohn means scent and our mission with Lohn is to set your journey and our scents are inspired by journey.
There's obviously a personal element to Lohn that translates both to the scents and the packaging. But what did you think was missing from the market?
⎯⎯⎯ Colour, for us, was something that we noticed had been missing. Everything at that time was very minimal, very black and white. Everyone was kind of following what Boissance was doing, what Byredo was doing. And there was a gap, I think, between the more inexpensive brands that maybe people would find at HomeSense, or at Bed Bath and Beyond, and then the more high-end candles that you'd get at Le Labo, Byredo, Diptyque. So we wanted to sort of bridge the gap between quality and price point. We took the knowledge that we learned in the industry when it came to production and raw material sourcing to give it a very handcrafted and luxury touch to the product—more elevated than your cinnamon bun candle.
The colour aspect was always just so fun. Packaging is the number-one thing that's going to sell your product. So we're like, let's go big or go home. 2020 was a whole year of COVID and navigating the ecommerce boom, navigating getting into more retail stores. Then we were like, with our current packaging, it might not be able to stand on the shelf. So that's where we rejigged everything and relaunched in 2021.
Tell me about the relaunch. What was the impetus for it?
⎯⎯⎯ I think around September 2020, we were approached by a sales rep group that wanted to represent us and sell our products. And we had this idea like, oh, if we're gonna do well in retail and want to make an impact and want to get into stores like Sephora and Anthropolie and Indigo, et cetera, we're gonna have to, you know, take it up a notch. Packaging can kind of get battered when it's on the shelf; it can't be too delicate, it needs to be more robust, it needs to have all the information on there for a customer to be able to read. So we started working with a new graphic designer who just brought a different look and feel. But it was kind of like an elevated version of what we had already started with.
I think in hindsight, we definitely underestimated how long it would take. Just the planning and execution. I know nothing can ever be perfect, but you do have to make sure you have all your ducks in a row before you plan a launch. I think would be really difficult to do now with having a business that's much more established versus where we were at, in terms of the number of doors that carried us, the number of ecommerce sales we did. So I'm glad that we did it. It was definitely intense. 2021 was a crazy year because Kat got married, I got married, and then we relaunched the packaging. I don't know how we didn't lose our minds. But I'm glad we did it, it laid the framework for how all of our new products.
How do you decide who to collaborate with? And how did the East Room opportunity come about?
⎯⎯⎯ Kat and I have always wondered that too, as individuals, who would we want to purchase a collaboration candle from? So one of our first collabs was with an influencer named Alyssa Garrison behind Random Acts of Pastel. And that to us was like a big thing, like this person had a fairly large following. And we got the opportunity to create a brand new product with them. And then it sort of evolved into collaborating instead with brands. So it's always been a mix of influencer and brands.
But it is tough, like not everyone should make a candle. We've received inquiries from people that want to do custom. And I'm like, okay, well, maybe wait until you have an established brand or community that, you know, would want to buy into this, you know, what your scent is and, and, you know, bring your brand into their home before, you know, creating your own scent, because scent is wonderful. It's amazing. It's very nostalgic. So it helps tie memories, it helps you associate a certain place with that smell. Like for instance, the hotel I was just in in Florida, I'll never forget what it smells like. But that's not to say that just because you have a custom scent, it's going to fly off the shelf. Or just because you've created a custom collab, it's going to fly off the shelf. One of my favourite collabs that we did was with Bloom. We always wanted to do a pumpkin spice, but it didn't really like fit in our scent portfolio. But they create a pumpkin spice blend. So we're like, okay, great. This is awesome. We can do a limited-edition type scent, test it out with our customers, see if it's something we'd want to do ourselves. But yeah, we've always done a mix of brands and influencers. And some of the fun ones we've done have been with, like, Rethink Breast Cancer. I think one of my favourites, which was one of the ones I worked on this year, was the East Room, because East Room has been burning our candles for years. So they've been able have their clientele sort of experience our scents, they've been able to like add it to the experience of East Room. So I think the evolution was just natural, because they've been buying our candles for at least the last two years, before finally deciding to create a scent of their own.
Can you describe the East Room scent?
⎯⎯⎯ Absolutely. So it is actually a 100% essential oil based scent of cedarwood and eucalyptus. So very energizing, awakening, but also very like grounding and warming with the cedarwood. The East Room interiors are super exceptional. There are very natural elements mixed with pops of colour and cool materials, so those two essential oils seem to be a good fit.
And what does the future look like?
⎯⎯⎯ Scent is the number one thing. It's always tempting to go out and make a lot of new fragrances, but I think people have really fallen in love with what we're doing, so making different versions using our same fragrances in other forms, be it hand wash or lotion or potentially fine fragrance.
–East Roomis a shared workspace company providing design-forward office solutions, authentic programming and a diverse community to established companies and enterprising freelancers. We explore art, design, music, and entrepreneurship. Visit ourNews & Stories page to read more.
