A lifelong fascination with fragrance inspired Alicia Tsai to create a candle company driven by storytelling.

Scent and memory are closely intertwined. For Alicia Tsai, the founder of home fragrance brand Aerangis, the quest for a candle that captured the smell of the orchids her grandfather grew during her childhood in Taiwan ultimately spurred her to start her own company. “I was working in fragrance product development, and I felt like I was always searching for that scent,” she says. Like many makers, unable to find the thing she wanted to buy, Tsai created it herself. In 2017, she started making small batches of candles, experimenting with the idea of storytelling through fragrance. By 2019, she had officially launched her own company, naming it for that orchid species her grandfather had grown in the family’s greenhouse.

Though fragrance had always intrigued Tsai, it never struck her as something she could turn into a career. She moved from Taiwan to New York in her early twenties, and eventually enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “I loved beauty products and anything with a scent,” she recalls. “I was asking one of my professors about that aspect of the industry, and they told me that there was actually a program at the school dedicated to fragrance.” She joined the program and started working in fragrance product development after graduation.