January always feels longer than it has any right to. This one more so than most. It’s been exceptionally cold for much of the month, the kind of cold that settles in and changes how you move through your days. Everything takes more effort than usual, even when you’re busy. Especially when you’re busy.
I usually go a little quieter this month. Not because nothing’s happening, but because everything seems to be happening at once and I need a minute to sort through it. When it’s this cold, there’s nowhere to rush to anyway. I don’t tend to know what I think until I’ve sat with it for a bit.
This is our tenth full year, which sounds more official than it feels most days. Ten years is long enough to have a pretty good sense of what you’re good at, and also a very clear sense of what you’ve been stubbornly hanging onto for no good reason.
A lot of this month has been spent sitting at my desk. Going through spreadsheet after spreadsheet. Pulling apart the holiday season. What worked. What didn’t. What completely missed. What surprised us. Where we stretched too far. Where something clicked in a way I didn’t expect. It’s not glamorous, but I love it.
There’s also been the less thrilling January work. Paperwork. Receipts. Invoices I was convinced I’d already dealt with. Digging through folders for my accountant and wondering how it’s possible to generate this much paper in a mostly digital world. Numbers are helpful, but they’re never the whole story. They just give you somewhere to start arguing with yourself.
I’ve also spent a lot of time in the shoppe. Taking time to enjoy being in the space after Rory and I raced to ready it for the holiday season. Moving things around. Touching up paint. Editing shelves. Rethinking how the space flows. Noticing where folks tend to linger and where they don’t. Letting go of pieces, sometimes entire lines, that don’t quite earn their keep anymore.
And then there have been the late nights in my lab. Those are my favourite. Long after everything else is quiet. A glass of wine or two. Just messing around with fragrance without an agenda. Mixing and creating things that might never turn into anything, which is oddly freeing when you’ve spent years trying to make sure everything turns into something.
For a long time, my identity was very tightly wrapped up in my candles. I could walk into a room and talk about my Campfire candle for an hour without coming up for air. And I still love that fragrance. It’s one of my favourites. But I’ve realized I’m more than that. And the work is more than that too. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to really believe that.
This past year made that obvious pretty quickly. Between tariffs, economic uncertainty, and everything else shifting at the same time, there wasn’t much room to overthink. We had to move. And what that showed me is that Farmer’s Son Co. doesn’t have to fit neatly into one box, or frankly, into a tidy sentence.
It can be a candle studio. It can be a shoppe filled with treasures. It can be beautifully fragrant goods that aren’t candles at all. It can be food and flavour. It can be gardening and home pieces. It can be decadent chocolate. It can be all of those things, or just a few of them, depending on the season. I don’t have to keep doing the same thing the same way just because that’s how I started.
Once I let that sink in, things felt lighter. Ideas started connecting in new ways. The work felt more open again. Also less physically punishing, which feels like a reasonable goal at this point.
Scaling back candle production shifted my relationship with fragrance in a good way. Candles will always be part of my vocabulary, but they’re no longer the whole conversation. Letting that go has made room for more curiosity.
Lately, I’ve been working with fragrance notes and accords that are more layered and less resolved. Scents that feel unfinished in a good way. Things I can keep adjusting, revisiting, and living with rather than locking into a single idea.
My LabWorks Discovery candles, launched this past autumn and carried through the holidays, were a great reminder of that. Of how fun it is to create without worrying about where something needs to land or how many boxes it checks. Just following an idea and seeing what happens. Watching people engage with those pieces as conversations rather than finished statements was genuinely energizing and, honestly, a bit of a relief.
That same approach is shaping how I’m thinking about incense cones and room and linen sprays this year. They feel like a natural extension of how people actually live with scent, especially in the depths of winter. They don’t demand attention. They don’t ask to be explained. They just quietly do their thing in the background.
Working alongside Rory has been one of the best parts of this chapter. Not because we’ve fixed anything overnight, but because I don’t have to do the thinking alone.
He’s my husband and my best friend, and being able to sit together and throw ideas around has changed the energy of the work completely. Big ideas. Half baked ideas. Ideas that go nowhere. Ideas that turn into something else entirely a week later. Ideas that land on the maybe pile. Having someone who knows when to say “let’s do it” and when to say “absolutely not” is invaluable.
A lot of our conversations aren’t about problems. They’re about possibility. About what feels exciting right now. About what I want to spend more time on and what I’m happy to stop pretending I enjoy. About how the work fits into our life, not the other way around.
Flavour has been part of that curiosity too, especially after the holidays. If I’m being honest, we tried a lot. Rory and I are the first to admit it. Possibly too much, depending on who you ask. But we wanted to see what was possible.
The holidays are the one time of year when we see more new faces than usual. It felt like the right moment to experiment. To see what resonated. To notice what people came back for and what quietly faded away. Some of it surprised us. Some of it clarified things very quickly. All of it was useful, even the misses.
Flavour, like fragrance, is personal. It’s tied up in memory and mood, but it’s also fun. You can take risks. You can surprise someone. You don’t need everything to be clever or perfectly explained. I’ve found myself drawn to things that feel a little deeper here too. Less novelty. More substance.
Travel helped shake things loose as well. Late December and early January were spent road tripping through Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula with close friends. There’s something useful about being somewhere where your usual habits don’t apply. Different food. Different pace. Fewer opinions about things that don’t actually matter. It was a good reminder that not everything needs to be analyzed to death. Some things are allowed to just be good.
Back home, in the middle of winter, I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom. I was reunited with her seeds in 2024, seeds she saved years ago, and last spring I finally started planting some of them again. It was the first time I’d done that in over a decade. Some came up. Some didn’t. A few surprised me enough that I still think about them now.
I still have so many envelopes and old jars of her seeds I want to work with. Different varieties. Different stories tied to them. Standing there planting them last spring felt familiar in a way I didn’t expect. Like picking up a quiet conversation where it left off.
Even now, spring feels close in my head, even if it feels a long way off outside. Garden tools are on the way. Seeds will get started soon. There are ideas forming that don’t need names or plans yet.
This year feels less about reinvention and more about paying attention. To what works. To what doesn’t. To what still feels fun and worth showing up for.
That feels like a good place to be.
Cheers,
Dan
