Voluspa is opening a new flagship as it builds out its DTC presence
On Saturday, the luxury candle brand Voluspa opened a new flagship store in Southern California, the latest step in its plan to build out its direct-to-consumer business.
The store, located in Newport Beach’s Fashion Island Mall, is a few doors down from Voluspa’s previous store. Voluspa opened that location — its first owned retail store ever — in 2019 but closed it in July to move to a bigger space. Its new Fashion Island store displays more SKUs and is organized to look more like a home, with areas resembling the bathroom, living room and kitchen, Voluspa co-founder Troy Arntsen told Modern Retail.
The new flagship is a change in direction for Voluspa, which launched in 1999. The brand conducts the majority of its business via wholesale through accounts such as Nordstrom, Anthropologie, Bloomingdale’s, Galeries Lafayette and John Lewis. Voluspa is also available in hundreds of boutiques and sells via its own website. Now, with sales at an all-time high, Voluspa is looking to boost its DTC business, which has tripled in size since 2019. Voluspa will be opening a second store in Brea, California next year and plans to open a third location sometime before the end of 2025.
“We really look at DTC as a way to elevate our brand and help our customer understand the brand and be inspired by it,” Arntsen told Modern Retail. “We do plan to open additional doors in the future… [but] don’t have specific plans for the number of doors. We’re working on gaining learnings from these first two stores to help inform our future retail plans.”
While Arntsen envisions wholesale remaining the majority of the business, Voluspa wants to deal more directly with its fans through its own stores. Voluspa has 50 scents across more than 400 SKUs, including glass candles, tin candles, diffusers, hand creams, hand lotions and room and body sprays — and its wholesale accounts aren’t able to carry everything. “We thought it was important to have a place to showcase the brand and all of our products in one place,” Arntsen said.
Voluspa’s increased push into DTC also comes as some brands are being more cautious about wholesale expansion. Earlier this year, multiple founders told Modern Retail that it’s been financially difficult to make new wholesale partnerships work. As a result, some are prioritizing Amazon, online marketplaces or their own direct-to-consumer sites.
Today, there are many players in the DTC candle space, including Boy Smells, Otherland, Homesick and Snif. And yet, when Voluspa launched in the late 1990s, its main option for expansion was wholesale. Now, candle brands have many more pathways to reach consumers.
Nikki Baird, vice president of strategy and product at the retail technology company Aptos, told Modern Retail that wholesale brands, especially ones in the fragrance space, stand to benefit from opening their own stores. Even if these brands have digital channels, “stores provide a more tactile way of engaging customers, with smells and feels and the weight of the product in your hands,” she explained.
Beyond that, stores are valuable for collecting customer insights, Baird said. “What kinds of displays do [shoppers] gravitate to?” she asked. “What combinations of products do they like to put together, even if they don’t buy them? It’s as much about what they try but don’t buy as it is about what they ultimately put in a cart, and the store provides a lot more avenues for gathering feedback.”
Voluspa has seen this firsthand. Earlier this year, the brand trialed a fragrance called California Summers at its previous Fashion Island location. It offered the fragrance for three months, and the product sold extremely well, Arntsen said. “We knew we had a hit on our hands,” he explained. “From there, we rolled it out to all our boutique accounts.”
Situations like these prove the value of using stores as a testing ground, Baird said. For many brands, “the store has served as a place they can point to for things they’ve tried that they want to bring to wholesale,” she added. “Without that data, wholesale partners might not be as receptive.”