Bath products made by hand, then a showroom.

Thymes is a bath, body and home-fragrance brand based in Minneapolis, and dates its founding to 1982. Castanea Partners’ February 2015 announcement of its investment describes Thymes as founded in 1982 and headquartered in Minneapolis, and the company’s own 40th-anniversary article, published in September 2022, tells the founding story.

In the company’s account, its founder — whom the brand does not name — had a love of nature and of art, and had run an art gallery. She used her savings and that experience to hand-craft fragrant bath and body products in her kitchen, with local ingredients including herbs from her own garden. The anniversary article adds that she had grown dissatisfied with the ingredients in the beauty products she could buy. When the gallery space became a showroom for her products and the display sold out, the company says, “Thymes was born.” An earlier company profile on the Top Workplaces site gives a slightly different version, describing Thymes as a home-based business started in 1982 by two women making soaps and bath salts, inspired by art and nature. Neither account names the founders.

Some early collections have lasted. The anniversary article says Goldleaf, Eucalyptus, Lavender and Mandarin Coriander were still popular after more than thirty years, and that Frasier Fir, which it calls “the quintessential holiday fragrance,” launched in 2004 and has since become a holiday tradition for many of its customers, the company says. The same article says that for Thymes fragrance comes first, and that the company favours plant-based, renewable ingredients and pays close attention to packaging design and the overall experience of using its products. When Castanea invested in 2015 it listed lotions, bar soaps, bubble baths, candles, fragrance mists, potpourris, reed diffusers and refresher oils among Thymes’ products, sold through specialty retailers across the United States.

Investors, a merger and CURiO.

Thymes has passed through several private-equity owners. In February 2015 PE Professional reported that Stone-Goff Partners had sold its stake in Thymes to Castanea Partners. Castanea announced the investment on 2 February 2015, together with a group of co-investors organised by Troy Stanfield that included Stanfield Capital, RCP and Northstar Mezzanine, as well as Thymes’ management. A later PE Professional report dates that purchase to December 2014, and describes Thymes as by then a portfolio company of Castanea Partners, RCP Advisors, Stanfield Capital and Northstar Capital.

In 2016 Thymes combined with DPM Fragrance, the Starkville, Mississippi company founded in 1999 by Tom Reed and the owner of Capri Blue and Aspen Bay Candles. PE Professional reported in October 2016 that Thymes had acquired DPM, with secured financing from TCF Capital Funding, and that the combined company had been renamed CURiO, which it described as a new platform in the bath, body and home-fragrance market. It listed Thymes’ own brands at the time as Thymes, Goldleaf and Frasier Fir.

Ownership changed again five years later. The investment bank Baird, which advised CURiO on the sale, lists CURiO Brands, a portfolio company of Castanea and Stanfield, as sold to York Capital in December 2021. In June 2023 Retail Dive reported that CURiO, whose portfolio it gave as Capri Blue and Thymes, had acquired the New York candle brand Otherland, and named Anne Sempowski Ward as CURiO’s chief executive. Otherland’s co-founders, Abigail Cook Stone and Sayyid Markar, stayed on, and Otherland remained based in New York City, the publication reported.

Candles and home fragrance.

The seven brands in this group are all candle and home-fragrance names: Capri Blue, Colonial Candle, Village Candle, Maison Berger Paris, Root Candles, Thymes and Bridgewater Candle Company. Candle and home-fragrance brands sit at many different points in the trade, from family workshops that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a small gift shop to a department store or its own website.

A candle brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a fragrance name, a jar, a label and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its candles and fragrances are actually 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 labels and packaging have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand built from named collections.

Today the Thymes website is operated by CURiO Brands, LLC, which lists offices in Minneapolis and in Starkville. Thymes sells bath and body products, home-fragrance products such as candles and diffusers, and home-care products, and arranges its range by fragrance collection, among them Frasier Fir, Goldleaf, Lemon Leaf and Simmered Cider. The company says its formulas are made without parabens, SLS/SLES or phthalates, and that its products are never tested on animals. On its story page it describes its fragrances as balancing “familiarity and intrigue” and “rooted in botanical perfumery” and its bath, body, home-care and home-fragrance products as “beautifully packaged.”

Packaging is part of how the brand presents itself. In its 40th-anniversary article the company says its products are created by an in-house team of designers and innovation strategists, and it singles out details such as the carton of its Simmered Cider diffuser, with its red palette, the height of the Goldleaf bubble-bath bottle and the shape of the Lemon Leaf hand-wash bottle. Frasier Fir carries a registered-trademark symbol on the company’s website.

For a design guide, Thymes shows a fragrance brand presented through named collections, each with its own packaging, rather than through a single product. Compare Capri Blue, its stablemate under CURiO, and Root Candles, an Ohio candle maker still owned by its founding family. For this guide we use fir green, gold and warm cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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