Beth Geddio wants to make practicing daily mindfulness easier.
“We’re all so busy, we can't commit to these big things. And so I want to make encouragement and empowerment something that is easy for us to build into our day,” she said. For Geddio, that’s as simple as lighting a candle.
Lighting candles is how she got the idea for her Philadelphia-based State of Being in the first place. Just over 2 years old, the Fairmount company grew 50% in 2022 and landed a deal with Wayfair, momentum she’s looking to build on in 2023.
The idea for State of Being occurred to Geddio in the early days of pandemic-related lockdowns. Geddio, a self-described extrovert, struggled with the isolation. To boost her mood, she lit candles, using different scents to match what she needed, whether that was something energizing or calming.
To further boost her mood, she turned to something she had known much of her life but had never given a lot of conscious thought to: repeating words of affirmation. That was a practice instilled in her early on by her mother. One day, when she missed saying her affirmations – words or phrases intended to evoke positive thinking – a thought occurred to her. If those affirmations were on a candle, she would never forget them.
The idea for State of Being was born. Geddio formally launched the company in November 2020. After two years of working on the business part time – she previously worked in commercial interior design and later in commercial office furniture sales, from which she was laid off in October – Geddio has decided to focus on State of Being full time.
A Temple University alum originally from Reading, Geddio rents space in Old City Canning Co.’s Kensington studio. There, her sister Mariah Bankemper, hand pours candles. A teacher by trade, Bankemper has a chemistry degree which Geddio said makes her well suited to the hands-on creation.
More than renting space at Old City Canning, Geddio also works with the company’s CEO Stanford Ponson to create scent profiles to match the affirmations and evoke a certain emotion.
Scent is the sense most closely linked with emotion and memory, something that occurs naturally in the brain, but which can be conditioned through procedures that “induce emotional olfactory learning,” according to a study by French neuroscientist Anne-Marie Mouly and development behavioral neuroscientist Regina Sullivan.
That connection is a critical one for Geddio, who wants her consumers to find mindfulness through State of Being. “The whole goal of this is to transform your mindset. It's a big goal to give a candle. Our minds, there's neuroplasticity there. They're always able to change. But can we provide enough repetition, can we provide enough tools that it actually changes?” she said.
The idea with State of Being is that each day the consumer lights the same candle – they burn for roughly 50 hours, meaning a consumer will light it 20 or more times before it burns out – and says aloud the affirmation on it.
By the end of three weeks, as the candle burns down, the brain has linked the scent to the affirmation, Geddio said, “so then anytime you smell this candle … your brain is going to trigger those thoughts and those memories automatically.”
The company currently has 11 candles emblazoned with a single word and a related affirmation like “Fearless,” “Powerful,” “Daring” and “Worthy.”
They come in 9-ounce glass jars and retail for $35 each. Best sellers today are “Loved,” “Resilient,” “Radiant” and “Connected.”
Geddio begins with a word and then works on the affirmation, sometimes drafting upwards of 100 sentences until she gets it right. Then she tests it herself for a week or two to see if it works in different moods.
State of Being’s primary consumer is women – whether buying it for themselves or for a friend. Currently about 90% of sales are direct to consumer, the vast majority of which are through e-commerce. Eventually she hopes it’s closer to an even 50% split. In 2023, Geddio’s looking to establish more wholesale partnerships to get her brand stocked in a range of shops. Last July, she launched on e-commerce giant Wayfair after connecting with a buyer at the New York Now trade show.
While candles have been the sole focus, Geddio is considering other ways of infusing scents and affirmations into everyday life. She’s exploring a new segment of what would be known as intention candles. That idea was stoked, in part, by Geddio recently penning a chapter in Colleen Avis’ second volume of “Sacred Spaces.” It considers how something like a candle can transform a space and how that can be undertaken with intention.
As she looks ahead, Geddio hopes State of Being can become “a complete encouragement business, a place where you can find resources that are going to help encourage you through multiple senses,” she said.
