How did your career in beauty and wellness begin?
It started on the creative side. I trained as an artist, then spent more than a decade building brand worlds for beauty and fashion clients. Beauty has been booming over the past decade, so a lot of my clients have been beauty brands. Wellness came later, and more personally, through my own routines and a longing for something beyond looking good. AN ORI is where the two finally met.
Tell us about your newly launched herbal inhaler brand, AN ORI! What inspired the creation of the brand?
AN ORI makes an herbal inhaler designed as an easy, daily sensory reset. It’s turned from solid wood and filled by hand with botanicals and essential oils. All you need to do is hold it close to your nose and breathe in. The cooling arrives on the first breath.
Loving a product is one thing, but starting a brand is a different story. For me, it came from wanting to share something I love with more people, and from wanting to build a brand around radically wholesome living. That’s why I wanted our first piece to be analog and very human.
The name says the rest: AN means peace in Vietnamese, and ORI means light in Hebrew and head in Yoruba, which I read as intuition. Together, it’s about trusting your intuition, your own inner light.
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What’s your favorite part about the New York sustainable entrepreneur community?
I’d call it the independent community more than the sustainable one, and my favorite part is how supportive it is. Since we launched, people have welcomed us and made introductions without being asked. It feels like everyone wants each other to win, which is a lovely thing to be part of.
We love the simple and well-designed physical shape and details of the AN ORI inhaler. Can you share how you decided on the form of the piece and how you chose the material?I wanted it to feel like an object first and an inhaler second, something you’d leave out on your desk instead of hiding in a drawer. The shape came from the hand. It’s rounded so it sits in your palm like a smooth stone you’d pick up on the beach. Wood was the only material that felt right: it’s warm to the touch, it’s natural, and it isn’t plastic, which most inhalers are. Each one is carved and filled by hand. Even the screw thread is wood, which took a lot of development to get right.
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What is the background and reasoning behind the specific essential oils and botanicals inside AN ORI? I wanted the cooling you expect from an herbal inhaler, but with a scent closer to fine fragrance than to the medicine cabinet. So we sourced the best ingredients we could find, and none of them are the everyday version. The menthol is natural, not the synthetic kind most products use. The ginger root isn’t the kind you’d find at the grocery store. It’s a variety that only grows in certain parts of Southeast Asia. And the wild mountain chrysanthemum grows on a single mountain in northern Vietnam and blooms once a year. It softens everything, so the blend never smells medicinal. Lemon eucalyptus and star anise round it out.
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