Close your eyes and step back in time. It’s the late 1970s and you’re stepping through a neon sign, onto a glistening, overcrowded dance floor. Loud, genre-defying, decade-defining DJ sets fill your ears and glittering ensembles catch your eye. You slip into a sense of euphoria and a vibrant haze of bliss as the beat takes control of your body, and you relish in the anonymity of reflecting lights and the powerful, unifying force of music. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from, what kind of day you had or the week set forth in front of you. For tonight, you’re home.
Open your eyes. In reality, it’s 2023 and you’re spending time with friends in your living room or getting some work done in a make-shift home office. But strike a match and light a Discothèque candle, and you’ll bring some of that decades-past magic to the modern day.
A luxury fragrance brand founded between LA and London, Discothèque builds on the enchantment and inclusive exclusivity of ‘70s and early ‘80s disco. As beautiful as they are addictive in scent, each candle serves as a stairway to a cult-favourite club or a glimpse at a legendary party. With the belief that every fragrance should have a soul, founders Hanover Booth, Jessie Willner, and Whitney Moulton developed the brand with the utmost care for each and every step — from the research stage to the packaging. Made with sustainable, vegan wax, hand-poured in small batches, and housed in one-of-a-kind gradient glasses, the candles are offered in a range of nine. All of which — from the amber flames of Chez Castel to the black currant and honey of Paradise Garage — come with a story to tell.
We had the pleasure of speaking with Booth, Willner, and Moulton about all things Discothèque, from starting their business to their future dreams.
Discover more Discothèque here.
Read the interview…
How has 2023 treated you?
Hanover Booth: It’s been a whirlwind since we launched the brand just about a year ago! It’s been as hectic as you’d expect any new business to be, but we set out to create the discothèque universe of our dreams so that we’d have eternal excuses to do what we love while we work. Something amazing about the past year is that since we’ve launched, we’ve entered a world that’s invited such an influx of things we love — whether it’s the stories, music, DJs, fashion, or what went down on one night at any of these places, there’s a sense of euphoria with it that has become so much more than home fragrance. We get to be a part of that and what to keep developing products, telling stories and making things that bring that so-called inclusive exclusivity to our customers.
How did you all first connect?
Jessie Willner: We all grew up in LA and our lives overlapped before we knew it as adults — my dad dated Hanover’s mom in his 20s and Hanover and Whitney went to preschool together (we have the evidence on VHS). But we became inseparable in our early 20s, and have held on tight ever since. You know when you meet someone and it just makes sense? Kinda like love at first sight. I think the universe kept throwing us at each other and it took some time for us to realise it, but caught on eventually. We’ve gone through lot of darkness together which I think gives us such resolve to have the best times of our lives together.
How did you get into candle-making? Did you know a lot about the process prior to deciding to start the brand?
Whitney Moulton: It was kind of one-thing-led-to-another. We’ve worked and traveled together for years, falling in love with new cities by falling in love with its DJs and dancefloors. Linking that to fragrance led us to candles. Music and scent are intimately intertwined because they both create crazy sensory experiences that can evoke emotions, trigger memories or transport you somewhere else entirely. We learned everything from there along the way, in working with incredible experts in the field.
What sparked the idea for Discothèque? Can you tell us a bit about its mission statement?
JW: So much of our friendship has happened while dancing… not good dancing, but like insane dancing, rolling on the floor because your favourite song has come on dancing. No inhibitions, drinks flying, overwhelmed and screaming the lyrics in the crowd. Those feel like the moments that happened on the dance floors in these clubs we dedicated the fragrances to, people loved every second they were in. You can hear it in the music and you can see it in the fashion, they pushed each other to go further and lean into whatever they were feeling. People were so excited about every new idea or album that came out. We wanted to capture that feeling somehow. Fragrance is incredible because it’s one of the most provocative senses and can bring you right back to any moment in your memory that contains the same scent. Something that can make you feel completely different from you did a second ago is rare in the world, and fragrance is one of those things. So is listening to the right song at the right time. So is walking into a room filled with indescribable energy. We wanted to capture that fleeting feeling and bottle it up. We set out to create fragrances that inspire you to bring the best nights of your life home with you.
HB: Throughout the years of making leather jackets through The Mighty Company, we always say that if any of our samples can pass “the dance test” then we can send them off to production, because they’ve made it. If they could make it through a night out of wild dancing, having loads of people knocking into you, getting miscellaneous drinks spilled on it, and just going wherever the night may take it — it’s passed the ultimate test. During the pandemic, our love of dancing had to be confined to our own homes. We’d make dance floors in our living rooms, bedrooms or kitchens and we would always set the mood with candlelight and good tunes. This led us to the idea of bringing the disco home with you and the concept of Discothèque was born.
WM: We knew we wanted to highlight legendary and influential clubs known for their unique atmosphere and cultural significance—the ones we wish we could teleport ourselves into in present day. To narrow this down, we interviewed loads of friends and asked them for their greatest club stories, curating a collection of the most unforgettable, profound and bizarre. Then we finally decided on the nine clubs we knew we wanted to start with.
What was the process like of starting your own company?
JW: We spent a year developing the fragrances, with a lot of back and forth and trial and error. We wanted each to feel very singular, since they’re all inspired by very different cities, people and energy. It was all about how to get each club to come alive in the scents. We created all aspects of the branding and design ourselves, so that was an extensive process that we did concurrently. For every single visual, we outsourced nothing… we wanted our passion for the subject matter to feel evident throughout all our products and through the screen. Every candle is made to be an immersive world, just like the club that inspired it: we created playlists for each one so you feel like you’re there while you burn it, we compiled history about each club to educate readers who have never heard of it, we worked with LA-based writer Jessica Garrison to create a fictional story of a night in each club.
What were some of the challenges you encountered?
HB: With our backgrounds being in fashion, there was a natural learning curve when we had to bridge the two. On the business side, we quickly learned that fashion and fragrance run on very different calendars and obviously the latter isn’t collection based. We had to rewire our brains to get into this new mentality and it was quite liberating once we did. Production also operates completely differently. It kind of unlocked a bit of creativity that allowed us to dive deeper into making a very full life of the brand without the time pressures of fashion. On the flip side, we do all of our design, photography, content, etc. in house for both of our brands so had to transition between the worlds of capturing clothing on models to capturing still objets that standalone.
How do you develop the fragrances?
JW: To bring the candles to life, we took real memories and accounts of each club and then connected them to scent notes, almost like like word association, creating a fictional world made up of fragrance combinations we associated with these stories. Rather than the club itself, we wanted to make it smell like the best night of your life, the person on the dance floor you fell in love with, a moment with a stranger that turned into a lifelong friendship.
WM: The goal was to create a result that encapsulates the spirit of the club, so that anyone can take a little piece of those legendary parties, fleeting feelings and hedonistic dancefloors home with them.
HB: Our favourite thing about fashion is when you see the joy it brings when someone puts something on and feels like it makes them the best version of themselves. With fragrance, the sense of smell is so powerful and when combined with people’s imagination, it can evoke any feeling or complete a missing and necessary element. A whole world can be created within a candle, and with the scents, stories, music and history, that’s exactly what we did. It’s more than just a candle, it’s a full sensory experience. It’s a magical device that when lit can transport you back in time to a place where anything goes. When your Discothèque candle is burning, there are no rules: you can do or be anything you want.
How do you ensure your candles are sustainable? Was it difficult to figure out how to accomplish such?
JW: When we were first creating the brand, it was really important to us that everything was made in the UK and ethically-sourced. Sustainability is a huge part of the brand, but so is ethical production and making sure the talented people creating each product get paid what they deserve. When you’re making product locally you can really ensure the conditions and quality is what you want, so we’ve always been pretty hands-on in every factory we’ve used. The candles are hand-poured using high-grade, vegan wax and every glass they are poured into is pigmented in layers by hand, each colour being heat-set individually. This creates a result that can live on in your home, as a cocktail glass, flower vase, or just something special to keep special things in.
Do you each have a favourite candle of yours?
JW: Paradise Garage
HB: Crisco Disco
WM: Mudd Club
Is there an accomplishment you’re most proud of?
JW: Building another brand-new company from scratch! You have so very many highs and lows in business — I think just making sure we don’t forget to celebrate every little win together and take the harder stuff in stride. We’re friends first, which makes us very lucky to get to ride those waves together, whether down or up.
What are your future plans for the brand?
HB: The future is the most exciting part for us, because we feel like the world is our oyster when it comes to this brand. As we’ve gone along, we’ve only gotten more inspired by people’s connections with the clubs and scents. We’ve been developing perfume for the past year and cannot contain how excited we are about them. There are so many more stories to tell about unforgettable places, so many more scents to create, and so many more different ways to experience them. We’ll just keep expanding the Discothèque dance floor until it takes over the world.
