I sat down with ClassBento for an episode of Crafting Success about how Yougi got built. We talked about labelling loopholes, the journey from a kitchen in 2019 to a spot at Selfridges, sole-trader-vs-limited-company decisions, marketing without a budget, easy ways to get press as a small business, and the part I cared most about: why every scent we make has a story behind it.

The full episode is on YouTube Music and Spotify. For anyone who'd rather read, this is the version on the page.

Why every Yougi scent has a story

"The most important part of any business is storytelling." That's the line I kept coming back to in the conversation. It's also the line I'd put on the wall of any small business I ever started again from scratch.

It's easy to interpret "storytelling" as marketing. The captions, the founder reel, the press pitch. That isn't quite what I mean. I mean that every product Yougi makes has a real provenance, and that the provenance is the product, as much as the wax and the wick are.

Every scent has a story. We don't pull blends out of the air.

Happy is inspired by Sicily. The orange groves, the citrus that blooms with ylang-ylang in the evening, that intoxicating floral note you only get walking through them at night.

New Romantic is inspired by bathing rituals in North India, where rose petals are scattered into warm water and sandalwood burns slowly in the background.

Forest Bathing is inspired by shinrin-yoku, the Japanese practice of walking through woodland not for exercise but for the nervous-system reset of being among trees.

When I tell those stories in our Shoreditch workshops, something shifts in the room. The host of Crafting Success put it well: "you just whisked me away." That's exactly what scent does when you give it a place to land. The candle stops being a candle. It becomes a door into somewhere.

This is the part of running a heart-based business that no spreadsheet captures. People don't buy a product, they buy a moment they want to come back to.

How Yougi began: a kitchen, 2019

The honest answer to how did this begin is: in a kitchen, in 2019, with no plan to start a business.

The longer answer is that I'd spent over a decade in buying and product development for major retailers. I'd sat across the table from hundreds of brands. I'd seen, up close, how products are made, marketed, and quietly engineered. I'd also developed an unpleasant little reaction to fragrances I'd previously loved, and when I tried to find out what was actually in the products that were irritating me, I hit the same wall everyone hits.

Parfum. A single legal word that can hide hundreds of synthetic ingredients, used by brands across every price point, including ones marketed as natural.

The shift didn't come from the kitchen. It came from a yoga teacher training in India, where I spent enough time with Ayurveda and yogic philosophy to start asking different questions about what I was using on my body and why. I came back, started experimenting with essential oil blends in my kitchen, and gave the early ones to friends. People kept asking where they could buy them. That was the signal.

The first blend that made me think this might be more than a hobby was Manifest, a blend of frankincense, bergamot, and cedarwood. I made it during a stressful stretch, lit it, and felt the change immediately. One friend turned it into her morning ritual. Another used it for meditation. That was when I understood we weren't selling candles. We were making tools.

On the bits no one tells small business founders

A lot of the Crafting Success episode is the unglamorous practical stuff. The things I wish someone had told me before I started.

Sole trader or limited company, and when to switch. How to talk to a wholesale buyer at John Lewis or Selfridges without overselling. How to get press coverage as a small business when you can't afford a publicist (the answer, mostly, is to make the journalist's job easier than it would be without you). How to scale natural candle production without losing the soul of what made it work in a kitchen. How to know when to compromise and when to dig in.

The episode is the long version of those answers. The short version of all of them is: storytelling first, ingredients honest, customers respected, decisions slow.

The Yougi transparency thesis

Yougi has one non-negotiable, and it's the one most expensive to keep. Every ingredient is listed, named, and explained. Not "parfum." Not "natural fragrance." Lavender essential oil. Bergamot essential oil. Clary sage. The reason it's there. What it does.

This is unglamorous to talk about. It also isn't free. Synthetic alternatives are cheaper, easier to source, and more forgiving in production. We've chosen smaller margins and a longer climb because the alternative is the thing I left a career to get away from.

The buyer in me knew this would also be the most defensible part of the brand. The founder in me has had to keep making peace with the cost of it, season after season, in a market that often rewards opacity.

If you've ever wondered what's actually in a Yougi candle, the answer is on every product page, in plain English. Start with the Soothe range if you want a gentle introduction.

How Yougi got into John Lewis and Selfridges

If you ask me when I stopped feeling like a hobbyist and started feeling like a business owner, the answer has a date. It was the day John Lewis said yes to twenty-four stores. From there came Selfridges, the Time Out Best Classes in London mention, and a wholesale list that grew quickly enough to test whether we could scale without losing the soul of it.

The thing I'm most proud of isn't the stockists. It's that we've grown without quietly compromising on ingredients to make the margins easier. The 100% natural commitment we made in the kitchen is the one on the back of the label today, and it will be the one on the back of the label in every market we enter next.

What's next for Yougi

We're starting to look at the Middle East and the US, and we're thinking carefully about how to do that without losing the studio. Workshops are the part of Yougi I'm most reluctant to compromise on, because they're where the brand actually lives. Two hours, a small group, hands in the wax, one of those quiet shifts in the room as people stop checking their phones. You can't ship that. You can build it again, in another city, slowly. That's the plan.

For now: light something earlier than you think tonight, and let your evening start before bedtime does.

The full conversation with ClassBento on Crafting Success is on YouTube and Spotify. Yougi makes 100% natural aromatherapy candles, essential oils, and diffusers, hand-poured in London. Workshops run weekly from our Shoreditch studio.