About Autumn Laurel & Co.®

 

Some brands are built around a mood board. This one was built around a moment.

In a Colonial Williamsburg trade shop, surrounded by the smell of beeswax and woodsmoke and something older than memory, I understood what a candle could carry. Not just fragrance. Place. History. The particular feeling of being rooted somewhere real.

There is a season between the fullness of summer and the quiet of winter where everything becomes most itself. The light shifts. The air sharpens. Color burns at its brightest before it lets go.

That is the season this brand lives in.

I named it Autumn Laurel because autumn is not an ending. It is a return — to comfort, to place, to the things that matter when the noise falls away. It is the season of coming home. Of knowing who you are and where you belong. Of warmth earned, not assumed.

After seventeen years in Savannah, I came back to the Blue Ridge. Back to the mountains I was made from. Back to the land my family has worked and loved and argued over for eight centuries. I came back to start something that could only be started here, by someone who actually belongs here.

This is that thing.

I am Laura Raschke. I am a professor at Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business, a seventh-generation Virginian, and the founder and maker behind Autumn Laurel & Co. My lineage runs through colonial Virginia and deep into the Appalachian mountains — through the State of Franklin, through Robert King Carter, through eight centuries of documented Virginia history. I do not romanticize that lineage uncritically. But I do believe it belongs in the work.

Every candle I pour is made by hand in Christiansburg, Virginia, in small batches, with 100% apricot coconut wax. No shortcuts. No manufacturing partners. Every candle you receive was made by my hands in Christiansburg, Virginia.

The scents are rooted in real places — mountain trails, old-growth hollers, ridge-top overlooks, colonial hearths. They are made to carry memory and bring you home.

Find your memory and come home to Autumn Laurel.

Autumn Laurel & Co.® is a registered trademark.

Proud member of Round the Mountain Southwest Virginia Artisan Network · Rockbridge Area Chamber of Commerce · Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce · Handcrafted Soap and Cosmetics Guild · NEST Artisans · Visit Virginia's Blue Ridge

Shop the collection at https://autumnlaurel.com/collections/appalachian-candles