With her just-launched company The New Savant, YouTube style star Ingrid Nilsen puts her personal touch on scented candles.
Just in Time for Fall, Meet the Brooklyn-Based Studio Making the Coziest Scented Candles
Last summer, after 10 years garnering millions of views, YouTube star Ingrid Nilsen decided to retire from the platform that catapulted her career. “For the first time in over a decade, I was able to take a real break from work and fully be myself offline,” explains Nilsen, a beauty and lifestyle vlogger who helped pioneer the getting-ready-with-me format. Born from her newfound freedom was The New Savant, her new Brooklyn-based scented candles studio launched with her partner Erica Anderson. “It’s something that had been growing in my imagination for years, but it was during this free time that I was able to make it a reality,” she says.
For as long as she can remember, Nilsen has been drawn to the multi-sensory experience of fragrance. “I think I was one of the first YouTubers to burn a candle in the background of a video, and my early viewers remember my Bath and Body Works candle hauls,” she says. “I was all in from the start.” So one day in 2020, as candles boomed amid stay-at-home orders, Nilsen began experimenting with making her own, creating her first batch atop Anderson’s childhood ping pong table in the basement of her dad’s home in Valparaiso, Indiana.
While Nilsen and Anderson, who first met in 2017 at the Lesbians Who Tech conference, have both spent their careers on the Internet, they wanted their joint venture to be a distinct departure from it. “The thing about being on the cutting edge is it can be a front row seat to what we risk losing as we race into the future—and smell is one of these things,” explains Anderson. “Historically, it’s always been the sense with the least language around it—and yet one of the most important because it gets processed in the same part of the brain as emotion and memory. It has this secret power to transport you to another era of your life, or to evoke a strong response to the outside world. It gives us so much information.”
Marrying a small-batch approach—Ingrid hand pours every candle into a sleek, stainless steel can composed of 25% post-consumer waste—with uniquely-crafted scents driven by their shared belief that “luxury doesn't have to be stuffy and serious,” the duo has quickly gained an enthusiastic following. Their first collection sold out in just seven minutes, and their latest drop, the Core Collection, created in collaboration with French fragrance house Givaudan, is being met with much the same fervor. “I love building things and know it always requires partnerships,” explains Anderson, who prior to co-founding The New Savant was an executive producer at Vox Media and held posts at Google and Twitter. “Working with such an established, experienced, and women-led team at Givaudan was such a great opportunity. We both knew it would help Ingrid to be even more creative and also elevate our products.”
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Lauren Valenti
