“Growing up in Jamaica shaped me into someone who pays attention to the little details, how a scent can stop you in your tracks, shift your mood and bring back a whole memory,” Annya “Annie” White-Brown, founder of NaturalAnnie Essentials told Westfair’s Fairfield County Business Journal in a recent interview. “That’s why I create bold, vibrant fragrances and names, starting with my first candle, Island Vibes, inspired by the fruity, feel-good energy I grew up around.”
The business is located in Bridgeport, where Brown came to live after her parents moved to the United States in 2006, and where she has lived ever since.
When her daughter Tiffany was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus, and later developed a severe skin breakout after multiple surgeries, Brown quickly found that prescribed medicine wasn’t working. It was then that she started creating her own “essential” preparations – homemade treatments that gave Tiffany – now 11 and thriving – significant relief. Before long, she was making a variety of products at home, and friends and family fell in love with them.
“They encouraged me to sell them, and that’s how NaturalAnnie Essentials started,” Brown said.
Asked how she turned her homespun enterprise into a viable commercial entity, Brown said she got certified in product formulation and aromatherapy, which, even though it was not a legal requirement, was important to her since she was selling skincare. She then “started small” by selling at pop-ups and on Etsy, to learn what customers liked and how online selling worked.
“The biggest hurdles were figuring out pricing and consistency at scale,” she said, “and then getting all the proper business documentation in place, which I completed once the business proved viable.”
Only after that did she launch the company’s official website.
Brown operated NaturalAnnie Essentials out of her home until 2020, by which point she said she simply didn’t have the space or the capital to manufacture both skincare products and what had become NaturalAnnie’s signature soy candles in the way she wanted.
The business is currently concentrated on the sale of candles, although Brown said she “absolutely” plans to reintroduce the skincare line “when the timing and capacity are right.”
While she thinks that there is still “room for growth” in how Bridgeport supports small businesses, she added that she received a first grant from the city in 2021 and another in 2025 through the Bridgeport Regional Business Council (BRBC).
“Outside of that,” Brown said, “we’ve been building NaturalAnnie Essentials primarily through our own hard work since 2015.”
The crucial question for any start-up is, of course, how to get product on to the shelves, and Brown’s experience, which she shared with us, was salutary.
“I literally walked into a store, introduced myself and showed the owner my products. She loved them and agreed to carry our full line. A month later she closed the store without telling us and we never got our products back, but I kept going, kept pitching and eventually got on Faire (a wholesale platform), which helped us expand.”
Indeed, she added, the platform has “opened the door to retailers far beyond our local area and helped us scale quickly into dozens of stores.” NaturalAnnie Essentials are now available in more than 1,000 stores across the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Ghana.
Family-owned and operated, NaturalAnnie Essentials has a team of six. All the candles are handmade in the Bridgeport studio, which also serves as Connecticut’s first candle bar, an open-to-the-public workshop where participants, individually or in groups, can make their own candles.
The company is planning to relaunch its website in 2026, with a tighter focus on six signature scents. Brown said that she would be scaling back the candle collection and putting more energy into expanding the candle bar – one of her goals being eventually to franchise the popular candle-making experience.
