Searching for a second Ecoand personal care scent led back to Vancouver, childhood walks to school, evergreen branches, pine cones, and the memory behind Cedar Cypress.
When I took over Ecoand, we had a problem.
We only had one personal care scent.
And I knew we needed another one.
But I didn't want to just look at another brand and make our version.
I didn't want to just choose something safe, like lavender or orange, and call it a day.
I wanted something that felt more intentional.
Something that could give Ecoand an identity.
The problem was...
I didn't know what Ecoand smelled like.
So I started searching.
I bought a bunch of essential oils and started smelling them one by one.
Lavender.
Orange.
Bergamot.
Lemon.
Lemongrass.
Tea tree.
At first, I was just looking for something I liked.
Then one day, I smelled one of the forest oils.
And something strange happened.
I wasn't thinking about fragrance anymore.
I was thinking about Vancouver.
The place where I grew up.
Not a famous mountain.
Not a beautiful travel destination.
Not even somewhere people would normally think of when they think about Canada.
Just a normal neighborhood.
My walk to school.
The evergreen branches hanging over people's fences.
Picking up pine cones.
Pulling needles from trees and crushing them between my fingers.
Then carrying that smell with me for the rest of the day.
And the strange thing was...
These were not big moments.
They were just ordinary parts of being a kid.
At the time, I never thought they would matter.
But years later, that smell brought all of them back.
It reminded me of a time when life felt simple.
When I wasn't thinking about the future.
When I wasn't worried about whether I was making the right decisions.
And that's what Cedar Cypress represents to me.
It's not just a hand wash.
It's not just a scent.
It's a reminder of a chapter of my life that I didn't realize was important until much later.
I think that's one of the things entrepreneurship has given me.
It has made me pay attention.
It has made me look back at small moments that I used to ignore and realize that they were actually shaping who I became.
Of course, creating this scent was not something I did alone.
I started with a memory.
But turning that memory into something real required a team of people who knew how to bring it to life.
From refining the blend, to developing the formula, to putting it into a bottle that someone else can bring into their own home.
And maybe that's what I love about building products.
Something that begins as a small feeling inside one person's life can eventually become part of someone else's story.
I started searching for a new scent for Ecoand.
But along the way, I found a part of my own story that I had forgotten.