After over a decade of being renowned for producing the most beautiful bath essences and personal fragrances, Caroline Hardy has now applied her skill in design and perfume creation to the area of home fragrance with delightful results. In the past Caroline has designed bath and home products for customers as diverse as Henri Bendel, Laura Ashley and Ralph Lauren, Marks and Spencer, Boots and Tesco. ILLUMENS however, has the products of which she is most proud, since they are developed without compromise. Russell comes from a background in design as well having worked for Designers Guild, Osborne and Little and Harvey Nichols.
All of our scented candles and taper diffusers are handmade and carefully packed in Suffolk where we live and work. The ILLUMENS team is small, but that’s the way we like it, Russell and I develop everything ourselves from the initial idea, right through the development of the fragrances and the packaging to the final product. Everything in the process is very carefully considered so that the end product is beautiful to look at, performs amazingly and is affordable!
We work closely with talented artists and designers to make our ideas concrete, and to be exactly what we want them to be. We are both truly passionate about fragrance and design.
Each one of our collections of scented candles and reed diffusers is a very personal reflection of what we love, our experiences and explorations. Our products have a reputation for quality in presentation and performance and we’re proud of that.
At ILLUMENS we have a very loyal customer base, people who order from us, whether it is our trade customers, or those who order our scented candles and reed diffusers online, come back again and again. Many have been with us from the very start of ILLUMENS in 2009 which is such a great validation!
We currently have four ranges ROUGE d’ORIGINE, ABBAYE, WINTER and TIMES AND PLACES. Each one is very different and was developed for a different reason.
ROUGE was our first collection of scented candles and reed diffusers, and we started with twelve fragrances that we just loved, ones that we wanted to use in our home and hoped others would as well. Turns out we were right as the collection is still running today, over five years later! We’ve added a few new ones along the way including a Special Edition ‘Rose Maroc - With Love’ which with its’ heady rose notes and hints of spice, make it the perfect choice for Mothers Day, Valentines Day( or any day you want to tell someone you love them).
ABBAYE was launched in September 2013 and was inspired by a visit to a 17th Century Cistercian abbey in Northern France. We worked with Kate Nicole, a talented young Suffolk artist on the design for the packaging, which we wanted to look like a Grand Tour notebook, and the results are just stunning - like the fragrances which are so popular and sell so well. We named the fragrances after aspects of the Abbaye : ‘Poire 1796’ is so called because there is a pear tree in the grounds planted in that year, and ‘Countess Marie’ was a one time inhabitant of the abbey.
TIMES AND PLACES is a small collection, based around the concept of trying to bottle the fragrance of a memory. So you have ‘Poodle Coiffure’ which is based on my Grandmother or ‘Horses’ Neck’ which is reminiscent of saddle soap and bulging haynets……. If there is a particular fragrance you would live to see in our range then you can always let us know, we’d love to hear your ideas as well.
ILLUMENS scented candles and reed diffusers are our business, our passion and our life - we hope you enjoy using them as much as we enjoy developing them.
