A Start up Story

Throughout this course, I have been working on creating what I call is my Covid project turned into side business. During these challenging times I found out I was living in a home with life-threatening levels of radon (for those who aren’t familiar Radon is a radioactive, colorless, odorless, tasteless noble gas that can accumulate to high levels in an enclosed area such as a house and become a risk to the health of you and your family). On top of this I discovered high levels of VOC’s and toxic compounds in our air, mainly due to my occasional habit of burning paraffin and soy-based candles. Knowing these factors, my partner and I knew we had to make some changes in our home for the benefit of our health. 

During the summer I hung out with my friend Carolyn, we met in school on a semester abroad in Italy. She was pretty much my only friend in my “covid circle”. She had been experiencing severe allergic reactions to and also suffers from eczema, therefore she started to make her own hand soap, lip balm, and lotion made from pure, natural, and locally sourced ingredients that contained very little if any fragrances to help her sensitive skin. 

Now, coincidently while I was seeking a natural alternative to replaced my awful habit of burning chemically harmful candles, I wanted to diversify the farm and get into beekeeping. I pushed my father to allow me to do this, and although he gave me the no-go, he connected with a local bee farmer and they began a partnership with him.

I mentioned this to Carolyn, as I was excited to have bees on our land and we both came up with the idea of sourcing some beeswax from the Bee-guy to experiment with making natural products including lip balm, creams, and candles for my home. 

With her knowledge in hand and body products and my knowledge of essential oils and sourcing natural materials we pursued to create beeswax candles that would be scented with pure essential oils using upcycled glass containers and a natural hemp wick.

Our mission from the very beginning was to produce and promote high quality, sustainable, and most importantly natural home and body products using 100% pure ingredients free from any synthetic materials and harmful fragrances.

We especially wanted to integrate as much locally sourced ingredients and support local suppliers when purchasing our materials. We pressed fresh herbs and native flowers we personally grew from seed to create a botanically inspired product line. In doing this and experimenting with beeswax and essential oil blends we discovered our business name, Apis Botanicals. “Apis” being the latin name for bee and “Botanicals” being the overall inspiration and common theme among our products. 

Fast forward 3 months later, after pouring and re-pouring over thousands of candles and hundreds of burn and air quality tests, we have curated a botanical line of candles in 4 scents being Lavender Eucalyptus (our best seller), Citrus Mint, Mulled Wine, and Unscented for those who have sensitivities to smells. We changed and experimented with our logo and packaging over a dozen times, and still may change it up.

In addition, we are proud to celebrate the holiday season with introducing a holiday themed collection made in limited quantities in special scents of Winter Forest, Candy Cane, Holiday Spice, and Candied Orange (this one was an accident). We hopped on the bandwagon and decided to make dried oranges as decoration for our mulled spice candle and discovered the amazing scent of cinnamon sugared orange. We made a second trip to our essential oil supplier in Calgary to purchase cinnamon leaf, nutmeg, blood orange, and peppermint oils to create this amazing blend. Overall, we are happy with the final result and still continue to perfect our product. We are in the introductory phase of selling our product to hopefully receive positive and constructive feedback to improve our product. 

In addition to candles we expanded to create beeswax wraps made from unused quilting remnants from previous projects, as well as new 100% cotton and linen fabrics from a Canadian company called Figo fabrics. This company supports graphic designers from all over the world to create such fun and modern fabrics I believe everyone would love to see in their kitchen. I specifically chose fabric from their Treehouse collection not only because the patterns are fun, vibrant, and colourful but because the prints were designed by Canadian graphic designer, Annie Chen. When sourcing new materials such as fabric I put a lot of research into how I can make our products stand out from the rest, while ensuring the quality and supporting local. This has been one of the biggest challenges as supplies are very limited and hard to source efficiently on a small scale. 

From this experience, we have learned and continue learning from our mistakes, working with such a dynamic natural product like beeswax is no small feat as we remind ourselves if this was easy everyone would do it. I am most proud of the fact that we were able to kick start our creativity and what positive mindset we had left into making something amazing during these difficult times. As we continue our journey we hope to grow our business and use it to inspire others, promote a sustainable lifestyle and support the local community. We bee-lieve in ourselves as you should too!