Honing the Dream

I've been in this business a long time. I was up in the middle of the night mixing soaps and making powder incense from sawdust back in '96 when my youngest was just a toddler. Prior to that I was into all kinds of 'crafty' entrepreneurial endeavors ~ I was making bath salts with fragrance oils, some essential oils (patchouli mostly), food coloring and rock salt in the 80's, along with handmade hair bows (remember the 80's craze of big honking hair bows?), and pants purses. I sold in such elegant venues as the local swap meet and the trading post. For the swap meet I'd work every Sunday morning from 7AM to 2PM, my little table strewn with color and scent amongst booths full of rusty farm tools and old LPs. I sold next to nothing, but I persisted, convinced what I was doing would catch on. But my vision was all over the place. If a customer, or potential customer, would ask if I could make a certain color of bow or a certain scent of bath salt and I didn't already have it in stock, I'd order tons of it thinking this was it, this is the next 'in' thing, surely, because someone asked for it. That was a very naive way to think, obviously. I always felt like everybody else knew something I didn't, so I trusted their words instead of my own instincts. I was spreading myself too thin, and going absolutely no where.

So you would think that by now, after all these years of trial and error, finding myself in the rubble of my chaotic creative mind, that I'd have this sh*t down. I'm here to tell you I don't, but I'm getting there ~ ha!

This has been holding me back writing the creative business plan, aka, the story of The Thurifercorium. What's this about? What am I attempting to accomplish? I always come back to the simple answer: To create something beautiful. But is that enough? If I take it a bit further, allow my imagination to just get swept up in it, I think, no, not just beautiful ~ stunning, and not just stunning product, but a stunning setting in which to 'take your leisure', a space, a delicious set of rooms, The Thurifercorium (and I don't have my heart set on that name either because I think my business name is well established, but there could be a thurifercorium within The Scented Djinn's den of decadence) is a place of exotic beauty, a feast for the senses; beautiful music, luscious scents, vibrant, intoxicating color, a shop with an overall aura of hedonistic pleasures. I guess what I'm describing would look like a mishmash of luxurious opium den, a hookah bar, and a Moroccan bazaar wrapped up in an art nouveau motif, with wafting incense smoke, jewel toned jars of incense on dark wooden shelves, chaise seating for incense listening sessions and tea tastings, another room dedicated just to heavily scented handmade soap and balms, and yet another room, a workshop of sorts, dedicated to perfumery, each room lighter and sweeter than the next. That's the vision in a nutshell. A story board follows.

It begs the question, how far would you travel to spend a day in this place?