I’ve spent a slightly ridiculous amount of time thinking about what Tofino smells like. Not what a candle company thinks the West Coast should smell like. What it actually smells like.

Fir needles crushed under your boots.
Cedar after rain.
Rosemary growing outside the kitchen.
Eucalyptus in the steam.
Lavender.
Salt air.
Wet earth.
That clean, cold smell when you walk into the forest.

For years, I’ve been trying to capture little pieces of this place in scent. On the Inlet, Long Beach, By the Sea Shore, Forest Bathing.

They weren't created because those names sounded nice on a label. Each one started with a place, memory or feeling I wanted to hold onto.

Eventually those scents grew beyond candles into soap, essential oils, bath products and other little rituals.

That’s really what the Blissed Out Bundles are:

Little pieces of Tofino, brought together.

September feels like the perfect time to tell that story.

The windows are still cracked open, but the candles are burning again. Baths get longer. Nights get earlier. Summer starts winding down.

I grew up on Vancouver Island surrounded by women who made things with their hands.

My mum, my nan, my sisters, my aunties. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting around tables with them, making something out of whatever was in front of us. We canned, pickled, baked, sewed and foraged. My nan had a tickle trunk under her stairs, filled with craft supplies for making costumes, hand puppets or whatever our next creative idea happened to be.

Our homes were places where women gathered, created, figured things out and passed things down.

Nobody called it creativity or craftsmanship. It was simply part of how we lived.

I don’t think I understood until much later just how deeply that way of growing up shaped me.