Curio Brands, the parent company of Thymes and Capri Blue, has filled out its trifecta of brands.

It acquired Otherland, the candle company founded in 2017 by Abigail Cook Stone, which is distributed in Sephora, Nordstrom and Anthropologie.

“We’ve grown from being digitally native and just having our website to now expanding our footprint into omnichannel,” Stone said. “To meet that role of being omnichannel, there may be a lot not noted there for us — Amazon, wholesale expansion — and that is the place where we plug in with the Curio platform and what their brands have been in a position to achieve.”

Stone founded the brand after working as an art buyer for Ralph Lauren, and saw visual cues as the important thing to selling fragrances online. “In the thought of making a digitally native fragrance brand, bringing this art-forward component and a maximalist approach to design was necessary because we had this query of how can we get people to purchase stuff online before they smell it,” Stone said. “How can we get them over that hurdle of not smelling it first, and thru creating these really impactful visuals?”

That strategy appears to be working. Executives declined to comment on sales, though industry sources said the brand reached roughly $10 million in sales in 2022.

The digital component of the business is a component of what drew Anne Sempowski Ward, chief executive officer of Curio Brands. “Now we have a really strong development on our own dotcoms in Curio Brands,” she said. “But this adds an entire latest lens on how you actually take a brand from a digitally native [stage] and put it into the market.”

She also didn’t rule out any channel or product category for expansion. “We’ve only scratched the surface and we plan to scratch much more of those opportunities to expand,” Sempowski Ward said. “We’re in over 11,000 doors, and that features retailers like Anthropologie and Nordstrom, but it surely also includes many boutiques, in addition to Amazon. There are such a lot of more channels for us to expand in.”

Sempowski Ward can also be serious about innovation in the identical vein as Thymes and Capri Blue. “There are some closer in the house fragrance category beyond candles, reminiscent of diffusers. There’s product categories that we all know how you can do, and we’ve got an entire library of, and already doing that we are able to bring to the Otherland brand,” she said. 

It’s the brand positioning that’s helping her differentiate between her portfolio. “The fantastic thing about that is that we’ve got a fully different positioning than our other two brands. It’s a distinct consumer goal, when you consider the Gen Z goal,” Sempowski Ward said. “In 2017, we bought Capri Blue since it was attractive to the Millennial consumer at the moment, and Thymes is a more mature brand…our next big opportunities are complementing the patron goal, and produce the back end and the entire pieces we all know how you can accomplish that well.”