Before Jon Bresler founded LAFCO in 1992, he got his start as a European skincare importer, specializing in perfumes and candles by some of world’s most notable names—from Santa Maria Novella and Lorenzo Villoresi to Eau d’Italie and KORRES.
In tandem, in those early days, Bresler helped introduce Claus Porto to the U.S. in 1993, reviving a historic Portuguese soap factory and bringing its heritage to new audiences. By 2006, he turned his attention to candle-making, inspired by years of working with traditional European artisans in fragrance, soap, glass, and design. LAFCO’s soy-based candles quickly stood out, transforming the brand from an importer into a household name.
Today, LAFCO continues to tell stories through scent, partnering with local communities and working closely with collaborators like MANE to source responsibly and uplift artisans. After more than thirty years in the business, Bresler shared with Whitewall the inspiration behind LAFCO’s room-specific candles and what’s next for the brand.
Jon Bresler on Discovering Botanical Skincare
Courtesy of LAFCO.
Courtesy of LAFCO.
WHITEWALL: How did you get your start in the botanical skincare industry?
JON BRESLER: I come from a kind of middle class family and I followed in the footsteps of others and went to law school and started practicing law and I hated it. And one day I walked out during lunch and never went back.
And a friend/colleague/somebody said why don’t you just take a break, move to Switzerland for a year. You can live in my house and you can just write. And I jumped at the opportunity.
There I was, alone in Zurich, and needed to fill my time. I wound up wandering the streets of small towns in Italy in Switzerland—the Zurich area. I became fascinated with botanical skincare. When I came back to the states, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do and friends encouraged me to start a business importing botanical skincare.
“I was in the pursuit of enriching my life and doing something really fun and interesting,”
-Jon Bresler
WW: What brands or companies did you encounter during your time as an importer that later inspired the creation of LAFCO?
JB: My big, lofty goal was to become the importer of what was at the time the crown jewel in this space—Santa Maria Novella from Florence. I visited Santa Maria Novella four or five times a year. It was family owned at the time and they said, “We’re not interested, but you’re welcome to hang out with us.”
I hung out with the Stefani family for a year and a half or so, until finally one day they said, “We really like you. We like how fascinated with our brand you are. You’re the first person who’s ever come here and not talked about money. All you want to do is learn about homeopathic skin care. We can’t have you as an importer because we don’t make enough product, but if you’d like to open the first ever Santa Maria Novella store outside of Florence, let’s do that.” So, LAFCO became a retailer, and we opened a Santa Maria Novella store.
In my learning of homeopathic pharmacy, I also learned fragrance, and was adopted by another famous perfumer in Florence named Lorenzo Villoresi. Lorenzo allowed me to import and distribute his line. I would spend hours and hours and hours talking about fragrance with Lorenzo. I credit Lorenzo for teaching me everything I know about fragrance.
I was luckily approached by a lot of brands, but I picked one brand in particular to also import called Eau d’Italie, which is a fragrance brand out of the Le Sirenuse hotel in Positano. I took that line for a few reasons. First of all, because they told me if I was their importer, I could come to Positano for two weeks every summer. Two, they’re lovely, fabulous people. At the time, yes, I was interested in building a business, but I was not in the pursuit of money. I was in the pursuit of enriching my life and doing something really fun and interesting and bringing a product to the U.S. that had a story and that had a reason for being.
WW: Before founding LAFCO, you were involved with a soap company, Claus Porto. How did that come about?
JB: I wound up in Portugal at an old factory that produced soap. And so in 1993, I designed a line of soaps called Claus Porto and it became quite successful. It was the first time somebody had done a very artful product, introducing European style apothecary into the United States.
Founding LAFCO
Courtesy of LAFCO.
Courtesy of LAFCO.
WW: When you founded LAFCO, several other candle brands—such as Diptyque—were already well established. How did LAFCO’s founding stand out at the time?
In 2006, I began developing a candle line, which we launched in 2007. The candle line really became an expression of some of the core values of LAFCO.
First and foremost is that we make a soy candle. Our candles are 85% soy. People who say their candles are soy or they say they are soy blend, they’re not. It is very difficult, very expensive. And very development wise, time consuming to make a soy candle. In 2006, when I was looking for somebody to make our candles, and I said I wanted to make soy, they all laughed at me and said, you’re crazy. The challenge of nobody ever doing it before was right up my alley.
Number one, soy. Number two, colored glass. Nobody had ever made a candle in colored glass. I like burning candles, but personally don’t like clear candle glasses. I really don’t like looking at the flame flickering. So I thought, well, let’s try to think about doing something in color. I had to develop a technique in hand blown glass that enabled the glass to remain translucent and modeled so that you could still see the candle burning.
The third thing is creating candles that are themed for different types of houses. And let’s try to play with the association of fragrance, color, and room in our candle collection. That was the basis for our house and home candle collection. Ech of our fragrance candles has the name of a room with an associated color.
WW: How does a soy-based candle differ from a paraffin one?
JB: Two pluses that outweigh the myriad of minuses of soy. The two pluses are, you’re not burning a petroleum byproduct indoors. There’s no release of benzene and toluene and all of these other carcinogens that you get when you burn petroleum indoors.
Additionally, paraffin burns very hot. Soy burns cool. The melted wax in paraffin is about 175 degrees. The melted wax in soy is about 130 degrees. Top notes are more volatile. They spark off quickly. The idea is to create a fragrance where you can deliver the heart of the fragrance. Paraffin burns so hot that you can’t control the flash off of your pop notes. That’s why some people love paraffin candles because they’re so strong. This is the flashing off of the top notes. In soy, because you have this cooler burn, it doesn’t flash off the top notes. You’re able to deliver the full composition of the fragrance while it’s burning. And that’s why our fragrances would not smell the same if you put them in a paraffin candle.
“We are planting around 15-18,000 trees a year,”
-Jon Bresler
WW: Could you elaborate on LAFCO’s involvement with the Canopy Project?
JB: We have to walk a fine line between being in the gift market and being sustainable. When you’re in the gift market, they want lots of packaging. They want to give it as a gift.
Seven or so years ago, I came to the conclusion that there’s too much packaging in our bar soap. It was in a rigid cardboard box, so I changed the shape of the bar and we put it in a very, very lightweight, recyclable paper.
We made a deal with the Canopy Tree Project, which is a subdivision of earthday.org. For every three bars of soap we sell—whether it’s wholesale, internet, wherever—we plant the tree with the Canopy Project. It’s not a one-time marketing thing. We are planting around 15-18,000 trees a year.
Celebrating Communities with LAFCO
Courtesy of LAFCO.
Courtesy of LAFCO.
WW: What inspired the “Source and Story” candle collection?
JB: We’ve learned that Mane has programs where they’ve identified particular raw materials that are important to them as a fragrance company. They realized that with the globalization of the world, unless they protect these communities, they’re going to disappear. And their raw materials are going to disappear.
Sources and stories is where we highlight these raw materials and I create a fragrance around one or two of these furo materials. They are small batch materials. We are participating in the Fair Trade Program. We’re participating in the investment through Mane in these communities and telling the story of how these communities are being empowered by the changes in their community.
One of the candles—Andean Myrtle, Inca Myrtle—is a myrtle that is now harvested by the Quechua tribe in Peru, who are descendants of Inca. They’ve been growing and harvesting this myrtle for centuries and using it as a medicinal plant and as a food flavoring. It is a wonderful fragrance ingredient. It uses schinus molle, which is also harvested by the Quechua. And it also uses a Peruvian lime, which is also harvested by a small community group of farmers in Peru. The Peruvian lime is a different varietal from the regular lime. It’s very small.
Courtesy of LAFCO.
WW: What was the inspiration behind the “Absolut” collection?
JB: This company in the Czech Republic makes some of our house and home glass, but they are significantly more expensive than the other sources for our glass in Poland and Mexico. Bohemian glass is older than Italian glass. Bohemian glass is really the best of the best. Most bohemian glass makers are gone. But the Eastern European glass industry is dying very quickly as the glass industry moved to China. And as people’s tastes in glassware changed.
The Czech company is father and son owned. Over the years, I’ve become very close with them. Four or five years ago, right before the pandemic, they were really struggling. I also thought it was time that LAFCO reassert themselves as the leader in decorative hand blown glass. I decided with this Czech company to make a really exquisite highly artisanal type of glass.
So, I designed four types of glass with them. The style is called makia. It is a technique where the molten ball of glass is rolled in glass fragments of different colors and different sizes. It is a tremendous skill to be able to do this without melting it into the cup. I came up with this concept of “absolute.” When perfumery first started, the way perfume was made was that rose petals or whatever were layered onto fat. The fat would absorb the fragrance, and then the fragrance would be rendered out of the fat. And what you got was an absolute.
So, what better type of story to tell with this 330-year-old bohemian art glass company? Let’s talk about how fragrances were made 300 years ago by a fat extraction. Let’s talk about what an absolute is, and what the beauty of an absolute is.
A New Path in Fragrance
Courtesy of LAFCO.
Courtesy of LAFCO.
WW: What made you realize that this was the right moment to launch a fragrance category?
JB: I’ve wanted to launch fragrance for the last ten years. I wasn’t sure of the success of it because we saw niche perfumery trend up, up, up, up, up. Prices got really high. And in the last year and a half or so, we’ve seen a new emerging market come in to try to satisfy a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar perfume price because there is a segment of the market, a big one, that doesn’t want to spend three-hundred-dollars on a bottle of perfume. When I saw all of these brands coming in at this mid tier, I said to my team, “This is our opportunity.” That’s why we’re doing it now.
WW: In your opinion, what makes a fragrance truly great?
JB: For me, a good fragrance must have evoke memories of people, places, or things. That’s it. That is the language of perfume. Scent is transmitted neurologically to the part of your brain that is responsible for memory and emotion. And when you speak to a lay person and you say, what do you think of this fragrance or this smell? They will most often say it reminds me of this.
