ta projected that the market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.4 per cent from 2025 to 2029. The analytics firm also confirmed that, in terms of global comparison, the United States generates the highest revenue in this market segment. The American consumer’s love for candles has given rise to a plethora of niche or culturally connective scents available via indie candle brands.  From retail players like Bonita Fierce, which taps into scents popular with the Latin American community like ‘cafecito con leche’, to The New Savant, which is creating surprising fragrances for the modern consumer, the candle market is rich with variety.  One candle brand gaining traction right now is Emme NYC. The company was co-founded by Erica Luo and her husband Mark Fuqua.  The idea for the candle brand first sparked in 2019, after Luo and Fuqua, who are Asian American, moved from San Francisco to New York City. Homesick for both their families and the scents of their cultural backgrounds, Luo and Fuqua were inspired to create candles featuring ube, yuzu and pandan, scents they couldn’t find accurately portrayed in the market.  From their initial candle drops, Luo and Fuqua have launched into the home and body care categories and are plotting out Emme’s next phase.  Building a brand out of a cultural connection As Fuqua recalled to Inside Retail, the idea for Emme came from a place of nostalgia and a uniquely timed opportunity. “It was a mix of homesickness from moving across the country for the first time, and then with the pandemic coming into play, it was unclear when we’d be able to go home. So it made us think about what home really means,” he said. “Speaking for myself, I was never really in touch with my culture or anything like that, up until that point. But once I was removed from it, I realized that that was a huge aspect of making a place feel like home.” Fuqua, who comes from a mixed Filipino-American background, and Luo, who is Chinese American, tried to reconnect with the feeling of home through scent, but when they tried to find candles that smelled like “home”, they found that a lot of these smells that they grew up with either didn’t exist or were severely misrepresented. That’s where the idea for Emme came in.  They knew that many people from similar backgrounds likely were feeling similar emotions.  The brand officially launched in July 2020 with a single stock-keeping unit (SKU), a honey jasmine scented candle that was inspired by a boba tea drink that Luo and Fuqua used to get after school. Since then, the co-founders have launched a mix of candle sizes in a wide variety of scents, ranging from best-sellers like lychee, melon, or matcha to limited-edition scents like a calamansi-guava fusion or White Rabbit, a popular milk-based, chewy candy from China.  Over the past few years, Emme has expanded its product range with the launch of reed diffusers and hand washes.  Fuqua and Luo are currently working on their next product drops. The first will be focused on room and line sprays and will launch before the end of June. Their next candle drop, a collection dubbed “Rooted”, will be based on woodsy and earthy scents and launch before the end of July. What’s next in store for Emme Like many successful brands that launched during the pandemic, Emme’s presence on TikTok helped drive consumer awareness and sales. After creating a video about their launch story for a contest, in which they were runners-up, Luo and Fuqua won a different kind of prize: virality.  Several of their initial videos for Emme received hundreds of thousands to several million views per post.  This traction, largely fueled by attention from the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community and those wanting to support AAPI-owned brands, helped increase the brand’s profits by 371 per cent from 2021 to 2022.  However, while video virality certainly helped magnify the brand’s presence, Luo and Fuqua explained that they don’t want their sales to rely on their social media output.  Especially now that they have a one-and-a-half-year-old child.   As Luo noted, she and her husband didn’t have maternity or paternity leave as small business owners.   “Being required to put your face out there, in the hospital or when you are just weeks off after giving birth is not ideal,” she told Inside Retail.  “I think a lot of people do buy because of the relation that they have to our story. But in the next stages of the business, we want to be able to move beyond just the reach that social media has, to see what other ways we can evolve the business.” For example, in addition to launching into multiple new product categories, Luo and Fuqua eventually hope to open up a community-focused retail space, such as a cafe, where consumers can check out Emme candles and have a place to connect with one another.  Additionally, the co-founders explained that while a majority of the brand’s scents were inspired by Asian-American and Pacific-Islander culture, they want to start shifting the focus of their brand story to be a bit more nuanced.  Luo stated that she wants to capture the feeling of “belonging everywhere and nowhere at the same time”, and she and Fuqua are now in the stages of determining exactly what that looks like.  “As we have different backgrounds, we aren’t able to focus on a specific niche. Instead, we want to be the place where we tell the stories of these blended cultures,” Fuqua concluded.