A second home-fragrance company from the same founder.

NEST was not Laura Slatkin’s first candle business. Before fragrance she spent twelve years on Wall Street, Glossy reported in a January 2019 interview. In 1992 she co-created Slatkin & Co. with her husband, Harry Slatkin, and her brother-in-law, an interior designer; it launched at Saks Fifth Avenue as a luxury home-fragrance line. The Fragrance Foundation’s 2019 profile of her says the range began with twelve fragrances and grew to twenty-four, and that she created home fragrances for fashion and design houses including Christian Dior, Ralph Lauren and Jonathan Adler.

Limited Brands acquired Slatkin & Co. in 2005, Glossy reported. A non-compete clause then kept her from launching a rival brand for three years, during which she helped designer brands develop their own fragrances. When she returned, she told Glossy, she wanted a real home-fragrance company rather than a candle made by a designer, a department store or a cosmetics firm.

The result was NEST Fragrances, launched in 2008. That year is given by Eurazeo’s 2022 press release, which quotes Slatkin saying “since I founded NEST in 2008,” by North Castle Partners, by the Fragrance Foundation and by Glossy in 2026. Early coverage, including BeautyMatter in 2017, used the name NEST Fragrances; the company’s own materials and its owners now use NEST New York.

One scent links the two businesses. The Fragrance Foundation recounts how a perfumer’s sample moved Slatkin in the Slatkin & Co. years and became its Bamboo candle; it quotes her: “When I started NEST Fragrances in 2008, my whole premise was, why can’t every scent be a Bamboo?” The foundation named her a Game Changer honoree in 2019.

Candles first, then perfume.

NEST built its name on candles and widened its range step by step. By 2017 it sold more than twenty home-fragrance collections — scented candles, reed diffusers, liquid soap and hand lotion — and had launched a fine-fragrance collection in 2012, BeautyMatter reported. By early 2019, Glossy reported, it had also moved into personal care. North Castle Partners now lists home fragrance, fine fragrance, personal care and “fragrance technology” among its products.

Its best-known candles are named for single ideas. Bamboo carries the founder’s story; Grapefruit is described by the retailer Bluemercury as pink grapefruit with watery green notes, lily of the valley and coriander blossom; and in October 2026 Glossy reported that NEST had turned its Holiday Classic Candle into an eau de parfum called Wonder, part of a shift into fine fragrance that began in 2021 with perfume oils.

The packaging has been updated. Bluemercury’s product page for the Grapefruit candle tells shoppers that “NEST New York has a new look,” with the same fragrance and formula “now housed in a new design.” The same retailer page gives the candle’s origin as “Made in USA”; we give that as the retailer’s statement.

The brand sells through department stores, specialty beauty retailers, boutiques and spas as well as its own website, North Castle says. Glossy reported in 2026 that fine fragrance sells at Sephora and Ulta, while home fragrance sells mainly in department stores, and named Toni Lakis as chief creative and brand officer and Erwan Le Berrigaud as chief marketing officer. In 2017 BeautyMatter described the business as selling primarily in North America.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make scented candles and home fragrance: Yankee Candle, NEOM, Homesick, Paddywax, Voluspa, NEST New York and LAFCO. Candle brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from founder-led companies that still pour under their original name to labels that now belong to much larger consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a department-store counter.

A candle brand’s identity is usually carried less by the wax than by the vessel, the label and the name given to each scent, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the room where it started. A glass jar, a tin or a coloured tumbler often does the work a logo does elsewhere, and the names of the fragrances — places, seasons, memories — become part of the identity in their own right.

That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its candles are actually poured and its vessels made. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Three owners in a decade.

Control changed hands four years after the launch. Tengram Capital Partners, a private-equity firm investing in consumer brands, bought control of NEST from her in 2012, BeautyMatter reported in December 2017. That month Tengram sold a majority stake to Eurazeo Brands, the consumer division the Paris-listed investment company Eurazeo had launched earlier in 2017; NEST was its first investment, and Slatkin reinvested in the business. At the time she was founder and executive chairman, with Nancy McKay as chief executive; Jill Granoff led Eurazeo Brands. BeautyMatter described Tengram as a firm investing in branded consumer products and retail, whose beauty holdings then included Algenist and This Works.

On 7 November 2022 Eurazeo announced the sale of its majority stake to an investor group led by North Castle Partners, a consumer-focused private-equity firm. Eurazeo’s release says Eurazeo and Slatkin would each keep a minority stake and names Maria Dempsey as chief executive; the law firm Mayer Brown, which advised Eurazeo, confirmed the sale later that month. North Castle lists 2022 as its year of investment, so NEST New York has been majority-owned by the North Castle-led group since 2022.

Through those changes the founder has stayed with the brand. Slatkin was described as founder and executive chairman in 2017 and in 2019, and Eurazeo’s 2022 release quotes her as founder.

For a design guide, NEST New York shows how a candle brand can hold one recognisable identity across three sets of owners and a move from candles into perfume. Compare Lafco, another New York home-fragrance house, and Yankee Candle. For this guide we use black, porcelain and a grapefruit blush with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep NEST New York’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.