Los Angeles, California (farm in Merced, CA; family roots in Michoacán, Mexico) · Est. 2019 · Founded by Jessica Gonzalez
Jessica Gonzalez grew up the youngest of five on her family's farm in California's Central Valley, where beekeeping was a tradition carried over from her family's roots in Michoacán, Mexico. She left for a career in tech, came home in 2016 to help care for her mother, and never really left -- instead becoming her father's apprentice among the hives. Happy Organics is what grew from that homecoming: hand-poured, fruit and vegetable shaped beeswax candles made by hand in Los Angeles from wax harvested on the family's own ten-acre farm.
Jessica Gonzalez was a computer science major building a career in agriculture tech when life pulled her back to where she started. In 2016 she returned to her family's farm in California's Central Valley to help care for her ailing mother -- and found herself in the fields alongside her father, learning the rhythms of the family's beekeeping practice that had traveled with them from Michoacán, Mexico across generations.
The farm houses 34 hives, collecting pollen from gardens of lavender, rosemary, wildflowers, borage, sunflowers, citrus, pomegranate, and fig. Jessica learned to tend them. Then she learned to work with the wax. In her downtown Los Angeles studio, she began hand-pouring 100% pure beeswax into shapes drawn directly from the farm's harvest -- strawberries, asparagus, lemons, tomatoes, cherries -- each one hand-painted and made entirely by a small team of five candle makers. Nothing is mass produced. Everything carries the weight of where it came from.
Happy Organics has earned an exclusive partnership with the MoMA Design Store, which commissioned a hand-painted beeswax apple available nowhere else. On a registry, a Happy Organics candle is the rare object that is almost too beautiful to burn -- and almost impossible not to.
