Skandinavisk founder Shaun Russell on making a lifestyle brand from candles

0:28Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Modern Retail Podcast. and Skandavis and Sean are both based in Copenhagen. And so I want to talk about just the general, you know, running a company overseas. But there are a lot of interesting things that go across borders with Sean's company. It's a B Corp for one thing. It's expanded its product line over the years. It has a really interesting B2B model I want to get into that I was reading about. I want to talk about this, the history of the company, all that jazz. But Sean, how are you doing? Yeah, I'm very good. Thanks, Cale. It's going to be exciting to have you come over to the Nordic region and join us in the far north.

1:00I can't wait. It'll be very different than New York. But first, tell me, us, about yourself, who you are, and how you got into the candle, et cetera, business. Yeah, well, sure. Backstory is, you probably tell by the accent, I'm from England, London, and I've been working in branding, marketing, advertising all my career working largely for big american companies actually uh uh and it was while i was living in sydney australia uh and working down there that i met and fell in love with a blonde scandinavian girl a gardener organic gardener and doctor who who took me back to scandinavia a region i'd never visited before in my life uh never planned to visit uh but always had some vague positive associations with the region, because after all, many people do, even if they don't fully understand why.

1:53So we came to Scandinavia more than 20 years ago. And for the first 10 years, I carried on doing my kind of corporate American style life. And 10 years in, I decided to flip the script and created a brand that celebrated the region that was now my adopted home, Scandinavia. Was the idea that you wanted to launch a brand that embraced Scandinavia, or did you have the product in mind first? It was very much the former. After 10 years living in the region, firstly in Denmark, then in Sweden, and having Nordic roles, it kind of gets into your blood. And I started to understand what made the region tick, what made it different, why it's such a reference for the rest of the world.

2:37and I felt the the secret of Scalinawa is is is in balance in the in the in the balance with nature the domination of nature that surrounds the region the balance within society which is famous for but also balance of the individual balance of the self and so that was my starting point for creating a brand I actually didn't know what type of products I was gonna gonna use to tell that story initially. So it took me some time to identify what would be the ideal product that would be able to translate that story to a global audience. Correct me if I'm wrong, but candles were your first product. Is that correct?

3:17Yes, that's correct. Walk me through that. Yeah, so I'm walking around a trade show in Sweden about 12 years ago, and I'm thinking, I need a physical symbol of Scandinavia that can be like a canvas to tell the story to other people. And I walked past this small artisan candle manufacturer, and I realized, of course, it has to be candles. Candlelight is a very famous symbol of Scandinavian living. It's a source of heat and light. It's a moment of togetherness. It's informality. It's inclusive. It's a place for storytelling. So I thought it has to start with candles. Now, I'd never had any business in candles, before uh absolutely nothing close um but i thought this is the perfect uh vehicle canvas to start telling the story of scandinavia and i think the the next step there for me was when i when i realized i wanted to tell people the story of scandinavia through candlelight and i looked at the candle industry i could see that the industry outside scandinavia was very difficult different to the one inside.

4:27The one outside is dominated by home fragrances, scented candles, etc. While the one in Scandinavia is typically unscented, white, standard pillar candles. So I decided I had to put fragrance into the flame. And if I could put fragrance into the flame, I could take people to different parts of Scandinavia through that sensory experience. And yeah, that was actually sort of my next question, which is what is the candle industry like in Scandinavia? And you answered that. So then I guess I'll ask my next question, which is, when you were initially formulating this, was this about telling the story of Scandinavia for Scandinavians?

5:04Or was it about explaining it to others so that you would expand beyond that? It's very much explaining to others. So for people like myself, foreign people who have some positive associations with Scandinavia, but they don't really understand why. And the Scandinavians themselves are firstly too humble to promote themselves. That's kind of an anathema to who they are as people. And secondly, they don't consider themselves Scandinavian. It's a geographical identifier. It's not really a term that they, a kind of flag that they stand behind, you know, they're Danes or Swedes or Norwegians or if they're Finns in the Nordics.

5:44So I kind of wanted to be the person who could reach foreign audiences with a story that says, hey, there is this region of the world that generally gets things a little bit better in almost every area. It's respect for nature. It's balance within society. It's balance of individuals' everyday lives. You know, this is something you should learn more about. And I thought if I could touch people through a sensory experience, almost through the heart as much as the nose, I have a better chance of getting that message across than something perhaps more academic or, yeah, perhaps something more academic or theoretical.

6:28This is a weird tangent, but I'll bring it back here. But like, I remember I once went to an event and I met this man who was, I believe, like a worldwide beloved nose. Like his entire thing was that he was able to connect a feeling with an actual scent and was hired by many big brands and small brands, etc. And I was fascinated with just how he did that and the type of, I guess, knowledge he had to accrue to do that. So how did you go about that? What was your process of figuring out what the scents of these different regions were? And did you bring someone in to help make that? Do you have a really good nose yourself?

7:06Definitely don't have a good nose myself, no. as my wife will attest. To start with, I thought, having lived there more than a decade, I very much already knew the themes that I wanted to focus on. And there were three from the very beginning that remain actually some of our best-selling fragrances. And I'll just give you that insight. In Scandinavia, surrounded by wood and water, more than half of the region is forested, it's spruce pine and fir evergreen um no one is more than 50 kilometers from water there's hundreds of thousands of islands you've got some of the longest wildest coastlines on earth you're surrounded by the north atlantic the baltic and the arctic oceans um so you're very much surrounded by the scale and power of nature it's on your doorstep of course there's also the balance of light and dark as well which is much more dramatic up here but within that scale you've got this ability or they have this ability to create these cozy everyday moments as represented by the danish word hygge yeah but it could equally be the swedish word mousse or the norwegian word causa or where you're going in finland uh lempoa is a word that represents this kind of fellowship and uh community um that is so important uh of life in the everyday so those three stories were the first three fragrances that we tried to create a boreal scent a cold water scent and then a warm cozy inclusive scent those were the starting point and then from that point other fragrances emerge you want to take people to the Norwegian fjords which are the fruit basket of Norway or the archipelagos that fall off the coast of Sweden and Finland or the tranquility of Scandinavian life each fragrance is like a chapter in the story of scandinavia individually they'll tell people something that is exotic but precious to scandinavians uh but together the more let's say chapters you experience the more you get a perspective on on life in scandinavia that was that's the logic in how we create fragrances in terms of who helped me create those fragrances there's uh obviously a number of people now but at the very beginning there were two people who remain key to this whole process.

9:22The first one is my wife, this Danish gardener who grew up in Sweden and spent her holidays in Norway, is an organic gardener who knows what to plant in soils that freeze and seasons with short but intense amounts of sunlight. So she could very much help me with understanding the flora in that space or that moment or that time of year. and then I found by a very indirect route my own nose my French perfume because they're literally all French um that's the that's still the industry is based in the south of France and I found one very open-minded perfumer very experienced uh and I said would you like to come to Scandinavia I can help educate you about this region and you can I want to use your artistry to interpret the experiences that we have and translate them into sense for body and home.

10:15And that's a relationship now that's about 10 years old. We've hiked through the fjords, we've swam in Swedish lakes, we've cycled over cobblestones in Copenhagen, we've been in summer, winter, spring, autumn. He's picked up a very powerful knowledge of the Scandinavian region, And similarly, we've trusted him to interpret that with his own expertise into fragrances that don't follow convention, don't follow industry trends, but are just true to the experience that we try to bring to life based on our own experiences up here. So like when you're walking with him, this, you know, this perfume expert, and you say, I want to recreate water of Denmark, what is it like?

11:04Does he look towards the bark of the trees nearby? Like what are the things when it's something that's more, I guess, ephemeral than like an actual plant? yeah so there's the ability you can be direct uh like with our skog forest fragrance which is very much a kind of uh interpretation of pine spruce and fir so it's very uh clear and then as you say there can be uh tranquil how do you what's the sense of tranquility what's the sense of coziness what's the sense of hibernation um then it's based on direct experience and then his interpretations can go different ways and essentially he comes up with a recipe we test it we have a discussion about it we maybe want to kind of reduce the impact of one or two fragrance notes enhance something else to get something that we both feel is reflective of of of the story we want to tell so that is quite an interesting creative journey because it's ephemeral it's extremely subjective.

12:04It's intangible. And because I've worked in the creative industries for most of my career, I've always enjoyed that, you know, idea to realization. But with fragrance, because you can't even touch it, it's even more abstract. And it's incredibly rewarding. Got it. So let's go into, you mentioned the home and body care products. Walk me through the last eight years in terms of expansion, how you approach the actual business side of things? Yeah. So we started with scented candles and then expanded into diffusers because they are the primary product categories, I think, globally in home fragrance.

12:43And then we were getting, we were reaching out to, we were working with retail partners and, of course, and end customers. And there was a feedback coming back. We love your fragrances. They're so different. They're fresh to the natural when are you going to do something for the skin and we probably took two years to formulate our first personal care collection so we started working on our personal care collection probably only 18 months after launching with home fragrances but it took maybe two more years to get that into the market that has evolved it's now in its third iteration or entering its third iteration beginning of next year it's gone through all personal care we're now fine fragrance through eau de toilette sprays in four different scent variations as well as hair care partly because of the expansion into hospitality which is a growing area of the business for us and of course if you're in the bathroom of a five-star eco hotel you want you You want the shampoo and conditioner just as much as you want the body wash and lotion.

13:51So those are product categories we've developed specific to those channels. And then they have a halo effect on the rest of our business elsewhere. Yeah. Would you say your customers are the same between candles and body care? Or are they sometimes different customers? Oh, that's an interesting question. And I wouldn't have a direct answer for that. I think we have, like any brand, a lot of brand loyalists who will buy lots of different things. I think what I've found, though, in the countries where we are the most mature, such as Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Northern Europe, essentially, we're most well known for our candles.

14:34You mentioned it yourself, Cale. So that's what they lean towards. was further afield, countries like the United States or China, Japan, where we are a niche emerging brand. And they discover us, our hand creams, for example, or eau de toilette sprays, are just as important, if not more, than the canners and diffusers that started the business. Can you talk a little about how you approached retail? Because you said you sought out retailers, you were available in retailers. Were they mostly independent boutiques? And especially given that you're in northern Europe where there is a lot of fragmentation between countries how do you approach that when you're looking at the UK and Scandinavia and France for example yeah well I would say to any of your listeners it's it distribution is one of the hardest challenges for any business both creating it and then managing it and it's the job is never done um every single year you question your distribution you question your distribution am I in the right places I'm in Am I in enough places?

15:39Am I in the right position in those places? Do they prefer us? So it's a constant, constant challenge. But there is, let's say, an evolution for any brand which we followed unknowingly, because, of course, I'd never started a company before. You start off with the independents and typically the best ones you can reach. I was traveling the capital cities of Europe with a bag of candles over my shoulder. I would walk into a store that I targeted, found on Google or seen through reviews like in London or Paris, Colette in Paris, Scandium in London, Liberty. And I would go in and say, hi, can I talk to the manager?

16:22I've got something I think they should have a look at. And it was an incredibly humbling experience. You have to leave your ego at the door. You know, I'd done everything in corporate business before, the frequent flyer points, the fancy hotels, the restaurants, the suits, the works. and then I was walking to a small independent and saying, can I speak to the manager? The store assistant was probably, could have been the age of my children and the manager was probably not much older. And I would open my bag and I would show them what I've got and essentially say, is that good enough? Fortunately for us, from the very beginning, we got into the right places.

16:59And I set myself a target at the very beginning, which was typically unrealistic. So I have to get into 100 doors before Christmas. If I don't do that, you know, this may not work. And I wasn't thinking about borders because I always thought of this as an export brand that could reach foreign audiences. So I was probably illogically going for multiple countries, capital cities, trying to get into the right premium independent. And come the end of the first 12 months, we were in just over 100 dollars, miraculously. And then you can then use that to say to a bigger box retailer, a department store or a small chain, hey, we're in this place in London, this place, we're in Colette in Paris, we're in somewhere in New York, you know, maybe you should consider us.

17:49And that typically those bigger box retailers are afraid to be first movers. So they, if they see you somewhere else credible, and they're often looking at those places because they are early adopters, you know, those places are the pioneers for new brands. we started to see that domino effect gradually happen. Now, of course, that doesn't make it easy. But from the independents, you gradually move to the bigger box retailers while trying to retain your best independence. And now we have a balance of key accounts around the world. E-tailers, which of course, 10 years ago was very, very small, particularly in beauty and fragrance.

18:28You can't smell the internet. And as well as independence, still makes up the majority of our business. You know, that's how we started with wholesale. So wholesale is the predominant, like your online store is on much smaller scale? Well, the online store was always there from day one because we felt we needed to have our online brand home to protect the brand and our pricing integrity and send a message to the retailers that we were serious. And that's gone through its own multiple evolutions. I think we're on the third e-commerce platform, Cale. The most expensive. Actually, what are you on now?

19:03because I always hear that Shopify in Europe is very bespoke, difficult to do with shipping. So what have you found works the best? Well, I've used Shopify. I like Shopify a lot. The problem is multi-currency, really difficult on Shopify. And of course, in Europe, you've got multi-currency. I mean, it's just unavoidable. Then we went to WooCommerce, and now we're on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. So we've got the Ferrari engine. And that's working out well? Yeah, well, we've gone 12 months now with Commerce Cloud. We transitioned last summer. So, you know, get rid of all the bugs and fix development.

19:41And, yeah, we're moving now into peak season. And to be honest, by the end of last year, our web shop, scandinavis.com, was our largest single channel. And we expect that to continue to be. And that was a strategic decision we made about three years ago to really prioritize our direct channel for all the obvious reasons. Got it, got it. I wanted to switch gears a little bit because I know that you focus a lot on sustainability and being an eco-friendly brand and you're a B-core, if I'm not mistaken. And I always try to ask founders in this space, just A, talk a little about the process, why you decided to do that specifically, and B, how important was that as sort of a market?

20:25Like, was that something that you could show to customers or just something you knew that you could prove and so you would get that certification as is? No, good questions. Quickly on the latter, before I answer the former, I believe that B Corp would be a marketing advantage and I was proven wrong. Oh, really? But I'll come back to that. So we are ambassadors for an approach to life that already exists, okay, Scandinavia. So we are celebrating the Scandinavian approach to life. And when you get past the survival stages of business, you start thinking about your responsibility as a company. And are you living up to the standards that you are advocating for?

21:13You know, are you walking the talk? And we wanted to know if we were, and we were looking at certification, third-party validation, partly because we thought it could elevate awareness of our brand, but also because it would be a true test of whether we were actually meeting higher standards. And for us at the time, and still I totally believe that the B Corp process, because it's a complete company certification, is undoubtedly the most comprehensive, the most brutal audit of a company's impact on its workers, on its communities, on its suppliers, on its customers, and on the planet. So we went through that process in 2019.

21:52We also admired the B Corps ahead of us. Typically, brands we admired. Patagonia, of course, is the kind of hero brand, but there's plenty more. Dr. Bronner's in the United States is a fantastic activist, pioneering in new ways of doing business, and then many more besides. So we did the B Corps certification process. It was one of the hardest things we've ever done. um i think alongside starting your own company it's equal to that uh but it taught me the massive difference between how good you think you are as a as a company as a leader as a person and how good you truly act because it reveals all your guilty secrets and it reveals everything you should be thinking about but you haven't even weren't even aware that you you should be but once it tells you that process tells you you're almost embarrassed to admit that it had never even crossed your mind.

22:48We scraped through. We scraped through in 2019. But you found that that did not help the marketing at all? No, so we scraped through and we thought, hooray, we're a B Corp, but humbled by the entire process. And now we could put the logo on all our products and hopefully see a massive bump in sales. The reality is it isn't yet really reached a kind of a level of awareness, I'd say, in the shopper's mindsets that creates a massive shift in decision making. Ultimately, it's a non-profit organization that doesn't have a vast marketing budget. It's all about self-improvement as opposed to kind of promotion.

23:33and B-Corts use it as almost like a lighthouse for taking necessary steps to becoming more responsible and more responsible. What it did do, however, because I definitely don't regret it, because firstly, it teaches you how to be more responsible and it inspires you to get even better. But secondly, it draws a different type of person to you, whether it's young talents who are wanting to start their career but you know have different priorities to the kind of 90s capitalist i was or or whether it's um retailers who are looking to you know leave their own lighter footprint and take more responsibility for their own actions any of existing or future partners that you have as a company when when they realize they're working with the b cult there is a there's a kind of stickiness to that and of course senior executives as well who may be feeling that what they're doing in the company they're working for, which is just profit focused, is that they need greater meaning in their business lives.

24:39So it has a real glow to it in that respect. But as a pure marketing tool, yeah, that hasn't yet really fully happened. And no hard feeling, because now I understand what its true value is. Yeah, that's super fascinating. The idea that it helps on sort of like the business side of things, like that sort of marketing, but not necessarily on the consumer side of things. I never even thought of that, but that makes a lot of sense. We're almost running out of time, but I have a million more questions. First, I want to quickly touch on the hospitality aspects of things. Can you give just a brief history of how that started and how important, do you view that as a supplementary thing to introduce people to the brand?

25:21I feel like that's difficult to do, but also puts you in such a good placement when you're at a boutique hotel, for example? How do you approach that? What are your thoughts with it? And how is it scaling? Yeah, I think with anything, if you start your own brand, you have to be open to opportunity. You have to have your ears open and you have to catch chances if they cross, if they pass you, even if not necessarily what you were planning. And this was a good example. Five Star Eco Hotel opening up in Copenhagen approaches us because they want local brand heroes in in all their in all 500 of their rooms and i said to them we'll be delighted to to do this for you we didn't have a hotel solution and we didn't want to do miniatures so we said it's full sizes and we'll provide a refill solution for your housekeeping but we don't do hair care it's not in our plans um you know i'm bald so why would i even think of making a hair care brand and they said oh can't you do hair care and i said no i can't and then i said i can maybe connect you to some other scandinavian hair care brand and after a couple of months of backwards and forwards i said to myself what am i doing i'm turning business away here hospitality is a tremendous place for trial uh and awareness you know like way better than retail because you can walk straight past our display in a shop but if you're getting out of bed and you need a shower you're going to actually put our brand all over your body uh and so when we kind of came to that conclusion and i've seen a couple of the u.s brands be very good at that um marlin and gertz i think is one example who really actively embraced hospitality relatively early um uh we decided to make a hair care line and uh since then we uh we're now in 20 hotels around the world uh and that business is really picking up fast.

27:10And we now realize that many of the people who experience us, they don't find us in shops. It's because they've stayed at a hotel where our brand is present. Yeah, I've talked with many founders who have, they hope to do that, but they're trying to find the right hotel partner, which is another can of worms of figuring out, you know, what, you know, how to forge those partnerships and make sure that the two brands align, but also just, you know, it's distribution that in not free branding, but a different type of branding that you really is really hard to come by. We're just about running out of time, but I always try to ask just about your future plans, what you're focused on.

27:43So what are you thinking about for the rest of the year and then 2024 in terms of growth and any other types of expansions that might be on the horizon? The big, I guess the big move in addition to the hospitality priority that has really started to gather momentum is uh travel retail uh we are a destination brand scandinavis scandinavia you know so it's we're very familiar to people on the move uh we knew we already experienced very uh good performance in airport locations through uh other retail partners that we work with um but the whole travel retail thing post pandemic and the opening up of the skies and um you know just general uh routes is a huge opportunity for our brand we're actually going down to can in a month's time to exhibit at the tfwa fair which is the biggest of its kind in the world um chanel everyone from chanel down exhibits there i think it's the only place chanel even exhibits uh and we'll be there with our own stand uh opening ourselves up to the world not just of travel retail but you know opening ourselves up to the world as this small independent Scandinavian brand from the far north.

29:00Well, that's super exciting. Good luck and have fun. And Sean, thanks so much for joining. I love this conversation. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Modern Retail Podcast, a show by Digiday. If you haven't already, please do subscribe and head to Apple Podcasts to leave us a review and a rating. See you next week.