Marissa Boswell
MAR MAR's candles are good, but man, the founder is GREAT.
By way of Grand Rapids Michigan, Marissa Boswell shares how she pivoted from being a buyer for beautiful boutiques to starting her own business: MAR MAR, the best candles and scents in the game.
She talks about her hopes for her child and the future, she talks about trying (not only in work, but in life) and why it's a non-negotiable.
Photography by Lauren Lotz
Scent 101 with Marissa Boswell
Date: Thursday, October 17
Admission: $100
Where are you from and where do you live now?
I'm originally from northern Michigan, grew up there, and lived there for most of my life. We moved to Los Angeles in 2017. It felt like something had shifted and it felt like a lot of our friends were leaving town and it kind of felt like “party’s over” a little bit. But we would always say, you're not running away, you're running to something. And I think my husband and I both knew that if we both wanted to keep pursuing creative work, that we needed to do it somewhere else. So we packed as much as we could fit in a 5x8 storage cube and shipped it out here, moved the day after Halloween, and lived in a back house in Venice, and it kind of all sort of unfolded from there. 
Can you tell me how and when you made the pivot and why? How did you know it was a good time to shift?
I was a buyer in Michigan for a mid-size boutique. And I did a lot of clothing, fragrance, home items, jewelry buying. It was a small enough store that I did all of it, but my favorite thing to buy had always been home fragrance. And I really just enjoyed meeting the designers. I liked to travel and find things and unearth things on Instagram or Pinterest or whatever. I was really thinking that I could get a job as a buyer out here [LA] given my skillset and my experience. And I was really humbled. With small stores, generally the owner or manager acts as a buyer. And I just didn't have enough experience to run a big store.
I started thinking about what I really liked and what I was actually passionate about and it always seemed like fragrance in some format. I knew the market and I knew that there was a hole in terms of the specific type of home fragrance, that price point, the ingredients, the story, and the packaging. 
Unlock the gate a little for us, how did you actually get started with MARMAR?
I took classes. I literally Googled “best perfume school, Los Angeles” and I found this place called The Institute for Art and Olfaction. I'll forever sing their praises. I went and did an open session by myself. I was super nervous. It was five or six other people, some of whom were trying to start indie perfume brands, some candles. A lot of these people knew exactly what they were talking about and I had no idea.
But the cool thing was that the instructors were really good at not holding my hand. They were really good at making it accessible for everybody, asking “what kind of scent do you want to make? How do you want it to feel?” They are very all about open resources, sharing resources, sharing knowledge. From there, I started to try and meet as many vendors as possible, which also proved to be really difficult because nobody will tell you who they work with. At least at the time. And the places that did have openings for production or sampling, had 5,000 piece minimums, which I couldn't afford. Then I finally found my current factory.
It took a year to sample three fragrances because I just kept dragging my feet. I remember the woman I was working with, I was emailing her to tell her I wasn't ready to push the go button on my production run. And she just was like, “you have to fucking do something, I don't want to have this conversation again in three months.” And one of our friends used to just say, “if you do something, something will happen.” If nothing else, I’m pulling this lever and if it fails, I'll have Christmas gifts for all my friends for two years. And if it goes well, then there we go.
I was not really prepared for it to go as well as it did. It got picked up pretty much right away by a lot of stores that I really liked. And I got representation almost right away within six months and it kind of just blew up from there. At that point I had [my son] Julien and I had kind of figured that I would have to put the work on hold to raise him and then Covid happened and then all of a sudden I was like, boom.
In 2019, my goal was to get into ten stores and I was in three I think that summer. And then Elsi got me into 30 stores. And then Nordstrom came. And then SSENSE came. We kept steadily growing over the next four and a half, five years.
I am fully aware that that did not happen for a lot of other businesses. I just happened to be in one of the businesses that did well during Covid. Whereas Zac's work fully dried up. So I was supporting our family for a while there. I'm very grateful that it went the way that it did.
— Marissa Boswell
How do you level up your business while staying true to who you are?
I think that a lot of it has to do with working with buyers that respect you. I have said no to a lot of brands that I didn't feel like were aligned or that I felt like we had to sacrifice or compromise in a way. Having buyers that understand that you're an independent brand, they're going to work with you, they're not going to set you on really unattainable terms. They're going to try to be as fast as possible with payment. They don't think you have some massive marketing department, so they're going to do a lot of marketing on your behalf.Also, having a sales rep has been worth the money over the years because I'm not equipped to have those conversations. And then from a production standpoint, it's asking yourself: what are the long term consequences, positive and negative of doing X, Y, and Z? Is it going to make my life easier? Is it going to make it so that if I get to go pick up my kid earlier, yes, then it's worth doing. It's going to hurt for a couple weeks because I'm not paying myself. Maybe we're scrambling to pay whatever other bill but it’s going to pan out in the long run. It’s not having tunnel vision, that's definitely the hardest part. What will you do next if you close or conclude your current thing?
I think I'd prefer to be in-house at a brand I really align with doing some kind of creative direction/creative direction "light." I also am super interested in continuing to do school in whatever form.
The only thing I know for sure is that I don't know anything. The shit I don’t know is staggering and I want to know so much. Every day is a school day. And that's been really humbling to understand that because when I was in my early twenties I was really cocky, like I know so much that you can't tell me anything. And now I'm allowing myself the grace. You can know things but then also you can learn new things that same day and then you can change your mind about something, you can change course, you can change direction. 
How have you felt and dealt with your child growing?
I was always really worried that I was putting money ahead of my kid when we first sent him to daycare. But I also felt like it was important for him as a little boy to see a mom who works outside of the house or just in general has stuff going on and has goals, who is building something, that was really important to me. But then you get news like the school shooting in Uvalde. I remember sitting in my studio and I just closed my computer and sobbed. I left work and I went early that day for pick up and I saw a lot of other parents doing the same. But it feels so, it's just so hard. I don't know. Is it okay to try? What makes it okay to? What advice would you give to someone who wanted to try something new?
It’s always okay to try. I think outside of it hurting somebody else, obviously, but I think it's always okay to try, trying as a forever. Doesn't mean you're going to do it forever. You're just trying it on, you're going to see if you like it.
I think everything cool in my life that's ever happened is because I tried. I only have friends that are like, I started doing this weird new thing. And I feel very lucky to be surrounded by them and to ask why wouldn't I, why not? And it's like, yeah, you can make a million excuses, but if you do something, something will happen. Even if you go to a class and you don't learn, maybe you meet somebody there who's really cool, you don't make money doing something, but you are able to learn a really valuable lesson. What would that have cost you otherwise? So yeah, I think it's always good. You have to try. Trying is non negotiable.
— Marissa Boswell
