Nicole Eckels turned a personal setback into an impromptu move to Australia; and then a home fragrance and candle empire spanning eleven countries.
On a wintry August afternoon, Nicole Eckels sits on a plush couch inside a sprawling Crown Towers villa, warmed by the fire radiating behind us. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Melbourne skyline and illuminate the brightly coloured boxes stacked on the coffee table adjacent to our feet.
Adorned with Glasshouse Fragrances logos, the jewel-tone packages resemble gifts you would expect to see underneath a Christmas tree. In just four months, this newest range of scented candles will do exactly that, waiting to be unwrapped and savoured by recipients across the globe.
Splitting her time between New York and Sydney, Eckels is in town to exhibit at the annual Australian Gift and Homewares Fair and to mark a major milestone: the 20th anniversary of the home fragrance company she built from scratch in NSW.
By the time the 2026 festive season rolls around, Eckels will be back in her birthplace, Westchester, on the East Coast of the U.S., celebrating with her family. In the interim, the vivacious, fast-talking founder and CEO will be in her adopted homeland, leading Glasshouse Fragrances from its headquarters in Sydney, which today employs 240 people and exports its wares to 11 countries.
“This candle was designed to replicate the scent of an actual lab in a fragrance house,” Eckels tells me, leaning forward to unwrap a box with multi-coloured beams of light emanating from its centre.
The 20th-anniversary soy-blend creation was born of a desire to share the distinct aroma that perfumers experience every time they step into a fragrance lab.
“You walk in, and it smells like everything – every fragrance imaginable, colliding at once. It’s a sensory universe all on its own; different people smell it and pull something entirely unique out of it,” says Eckels of the signature candle that will be released later this year.
This intricate blend of aromas is a craft Eckels has spent more than a decade dissecting and refining.
“It’s taken me 15 years to learn how every single fragrance molecule behaves, how to prevent wax degradation over time, and how to custom-engineer the right wicks so that a product manufactured years later still burns with absolute perfection,” she reflects.
Creating candles may not be rocket science, she tells me, but there is science behind scent.
Twenty years in, Eckels’ goal is to expand Glasshouse into the world’s largest home fragrance empire. To that end, she launched Circa in 2010 – to neutralise kitchen and food odours. Today, that range encompasses diffusers, hand soaps and lotions, and room and linen sprays.
From candles to kitchens to collections
We walk from the Crystal villa’s Christmas-adorned living room into a spacious, light-filled space tucked away at the back of the suite, styled in Circa’s crisp hues of lemon, lime and sanitary white.
At the rear of the room are two round tables dressed up for a dinner party, featuring Glasshouse’s new table runners, napkins, placemats, and tableware in a palette of pinecone, sage green, and persimmon.
We move into a beige marble bathroom dressed with an explosion of bright red roses, telling the story of the company’s upcoming Valentine-specific offering – a candle that smells like the occasion’s signature flora, encased in a crisp white rose-adorned ceramic.
From Saks, to setback, to Sydney
Settling back into the cosiness of the Christmas-styled lounge, I ask Eckels if she aspired to be in the world of home fragrance when she was a kid. Hardly, she says.
When she moved to Sydney in 2005, the entrepreneur stumbled on an untapped market and a big blue ocean of opportunity, she says. Heavily scented candles were a part of her taken-for-granted daily lifestyle in New York. Moving across the Pacific, the local options were tepid, she says.
“They didn’t have complex, expensive, rich, transportive fragrances,” Eckels explains. “It was blackberry, pumpkin, apple cinnamon. Sea breeze, which smelled like toilet or household cleaner. Lavender. All very flat.”
The aesthetics were just as uninspiring.
“Everything that was on offer was just very ugly,” she notes. “I used to buy the best of the bunch, and I then strategically hide them behind things.”
Realising the market was wide open, the former Saks Fifth Avenue Chanel clerk set out to create what she couldn’t find in her new hometown.
Knowing she had a challenge ahead of her to create a fragrance empire in a country that hadn’t yet excelled in the fragrance industry, Eckels says she looked for a “blank slate of a name” that meant nothing on its own, facilitating her brand to someday become the definition.
While at meetings in the CBD, she glanced up at the Glass House Building on Sydney’s King Street – now home to H&M’s flagship NSW store – and the company brand was born.
It turned out to be a timely bet. The global candle market was worth USD$7 billion in 2006, driven primarily by sales in the U.S. and Europe. Globally, it will reach USD$15.6 billion this year, according to Grand View Research, and grow at a clip of 7 per cent CAGR, to USD$25.4 billion within the next 7 years.
To meet the demand, Eckels is now opening an additional manufacturing centre in the U.S., marking a return to the place she immigrated from some 21 years ago.
The founder’s original trans-pacific move was driven by a career setback in San Francisco and a desire to save face.
“I had left New York, I moved out of my apartment. I had a going-away party,” she says.
The job she took with Equinox in California didn’t pan out, and rather than return home humiliated, the industrious executive and mother had her sights set far across the Pacific Ocean. She temporarily left her son in her mother’s care in the U.S. and went on an antipodean discovery mission.
“I came to Australia after that,” she says, her face lighting up. “So everything happens for a reason.”
As for why she believes she has been successful in creating an industry from scratch, Eckels says it is partly her unflinching grit.
“I’m from New York and my background is sales, so I am used to rejection,” she notes. “I don’t mind it – it’s just the way it is. It’s a numbers game.”
The science of excellence and benefit of inexperience
That tenacity set Eckels on a trajectory to build the Southern Hemisphere’s premiere home fragrance company, growing into a multi-million-dollar global enterprise stocked in Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s department stores.
Rather than relying on traditional industry players with rigid institutionalised knowledge – as would have been done in a country like France known for its expertise in fragrance – Eckels looked for partners in Australia who were open to reinventing the candle-process-wheel.
Circumventing experts who insisted certain things were impossible, she was able to design Glasshouse’s triple-scent manufacturing from the ground up, and on her own terms.
“Experienced people in our industry would have said, ‘You can’t do that. Or this is how it is done.’ That’s not good enough.”
Nicole Eckels
Her secret sauce, she says, is that Glasshouse products solve problems that are accepted as inevitable.
“I’m going, ‘Well, I want a candle that doesn’t turn my ceiling grey. So do that. I want something that doesn’t go black without constantly trimming it.'”
In 2009, Eckels built her own manufacturing facility in Rydalmere in Western Sydney, ensuring Glasshouse products met her exact specifications.
“Your gut is where your talent and vision live, and it’s a unique point of view,” Eckels says reflectively, noting that her instincts often told her to go about things differently from others. “That has served me in my life and in business, and l wish I had trusted it more from the start and believed in myself when others didn’t.”
Wendy McCarthy AC will join the Forbes Women Soiree on November 18 in Sydney.
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