We were lucky to catch up with Joel Dessaules recently and have shared our conversation below.

Joel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Where does the name Virgin River Naturals come from? That is a question that we are constantly asked, and like everything, there is a good story behind the name. This is the long story short. In 1996, after exhibiting in a trade show in Las Vegas for a jewelry & giftware company that I was working for in New Hampshire, we went on a scenic road trip of the American Southwest. This trip included the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park. A few years later, we moved to Palm Springs, California, opened a design/build design business, and we always ended up in Las Vegas for trade shows and markets. After almost every Las Vegas trip, we would go to Zion for a few days to decompress as it was always our happy place. Over the years, we always knew that if we needed a break or an escape, that Zion was always 6 hours away. During one of these trip, we decided to create a natural product line including candles, fragrances, and bath & body goods. On this same trip, we hiked through the Virgin River, with river mud on our faces for a natural mask. And voila, we came up with the name Virgin River Naturals. While it does pay homage to the river that created Zion, it also implies purity of water and nature. Very fitting for a natural product line.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

We have spent the last 25 years working under my namesake design/build/furnish company, specializing in highly customized home renovations, custom furnishings, interior, exterior, landscape, hardscape, all of which is very detailed to produce high quality turn-key projects. We realized when we had a showroom in Los Angeles, that virtually everyone that came into the showroom left with at least a candle. We always loved candles and had them burning all the time at home and in the showrooms. It became a long-term goal to create a candle and fragrance line that was as hand-crafted and bespoke as our signature custom home projects.

Now, Virgin River Naturals is our primary focus (although we do still do some design work for previous awesome clients) and we are able to give our product line the detailed attention that was otherwise reserved for paying clients. When we first got started, we hired a great branding and design firm to work with us to bring our ideas to life. And while they were working on that, we were busy working on crafting our proprietary wax blend, fragrance blends, custom containers, and all of that good stuff.

In early 2020, we were working on Virgin River Naturals and doing big design jobs too. And then everything stopped. Our jobs got put on hold due to Covid, and that was when we decided it was time to shift our attention to Virgin River Naturals full time. We also thought it would be a better brand story if we lived along the Virgin River, so we left Southern California and relocated to the red rock country of St. George, Utah, about 45 minutes from Zion.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Virgin River Naturals started as a side-hustle, with the idea that it could be scaled up to make it the full-time gig. We went from doing bespoke turn-key design/build/furnish projects to crafting candles and fragrances over the course of about 3 years. During this time, we were and still are, doing some design/build/furnish work, but the shift has been pretty gradual.

We started Virgin River Naturals off with a great website and a few small retailers. We slowly grew our retailers in and around our area and slowly gained sales outside of the area with the help of some dedicated independent sales representatives. We do a local market twice a year and we are doing the World Market in Las Vegas every July and January to expand our customer reach. To further promote and sell our Private Label line, we are doing the las Vegas Souvenir & Resort Gift Show this fall. Our Private Label work allows us to create unique products for specialized venues such as hotels, resorts, spas, museum gift shops and travel destination shops. It is kind of fun to be able to name drop some of our Private Label clients and get peoples attention. With the additional sales and revenue potential with Private Label, we are able to extend beyond the reaches of a regular candle and fragrance line. Our line is truly hand-crafted and perfectly fit to create custom products in addition to our standard and ever expanding regular line.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

When we say that our product is hand-crafted, hand-made, hand-poured and hand-labeled, we mean it. We did not have much previous knowledge of candle making before we got started, and it’s probably for the best that we had no idea how hard it would be to make the best candle available. Like most candle lines, we started out with regular soy wax, which is finicky and problematic in a number of ways. To combat that, we started to blend coconut wax into the wax for a more even, cleaner burn. We upped the blend a notch and incorporated bees wax into our blend. This is not an off-the-shelf wax blend that we can just order, so we have to make it in small batches. Over the years, we have found more efficient ways to produce our products, but there still are no machines. Everything is all hand produced, allowing us to constantly monitor quality every step of the way. If it is not perfect, we do not ship it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://virgin-river.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/virginrivercandle/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VIRGINRIVERNATURALS

Image Credits
Glady Dalton | Heart take the Wheel