The Seed: A Scent in Shangri-La Forest

The idea of AURAWELL, for me, started from a trip with my friend (and now business partner) Megenta in Shangri-La, in a pine forest after a rain.

We were there for the mushrooms, supposedly. We had these little baskets, eyes glued to the damp ground.

But for me and Megenta, it became this quiet, two-hour mindful walk.

The air and everything smelled like wet pine needles and fresh grass. I remember stopping by this fallen log, covered in the thickest, brightest green moss I’d ever seen. I got real close, the way you did as a kid, and just inhaled.

It was like breathing in the color green itself—cold, clean, ancient. That smell, it wasn’t just in my nose; it filled up a quiet place in my body.

The Quiet Question: Finding Our Own Voice

So the idea for AURAWELL really started simmering after our Shangri-La trip. We came back to Shanghai and later started running our advertising agency, the daily work of helping other brands find their voice. But something had shifted.

A quiet little question kept popping up in the middle of a client brief or a strategy session: What’s our own voice?

Converging Paths: Travel, Memory, and Readiness

The trips didn’t stop. I did a temple stay in Kyoto, waking up to the scent of aged wood and zen gardens, a silence so thick it felt like part of the air.

In Bangkok, the humid night markets, all sizzling woks and jasmine garlands, hit me with a wave of nostalgia—it felt just like the chaotic, vibrant streets of my 90s Canton childhood.

And through more nights of meditation, a clarity was forming. It wasn't about quitting one thing to start another. It was about letting the agency work and this personal searching slowly bleed into one another.

Helping other brands build their worlds only made Megenta and me more sure we were finally ready to build our own.

The Method: Reinterpreting Ancient Wisdom

We decided to start with the most foundational things: incense and candles. We knew we weren’t perfumers, so we didn’t play at being ones. Instead, we became obsessive translators and curators.

We’d dive into Ming dynasty incense classics, not for historical reenactment, but to decode a philosophy—how did they think about sandalwood for focus, or clove for warmth?

We’d bring these ancient "briefs" to professional studios, testing formulas with them, asking over and over:

"Does this feel like that temple hush? Does it ground you like forest soil?"

Two Lenses: Spirituality Meets Psychology

My own path kept weaving in deeper retreats, like that ocean dance in Bali where the goal was to forget being human and just become part of the tide. I was chasing that state of pure, peaceful being.

Meanwhile, Megenta—always so perceptive—was focused on the psychological map of our peers.

She’d talk about the modern “symptoms”: that constant sensory overload, the low hum of social anxiety, the feeling of dissociation.

Our conversations became our product roadmap. We weren’t just making “Zen Temple.” We were looking to create a blend for “Sensory Overload,” to craft a scent that could be an anchor against the digital noise.

The Alchemy: A Smoldering Convergence

That’s how AURAWELL really took shape. It wasn’t a dramatic leap, but a slow convergence. My reflective hunches from temples and ocean waves met Megenta’s sharp eye for our generation’s quiet anxieties.

And together, we worked with skilled hands far better than ours to turn that convergence into a simple, smoldering thing you can hold. It’s the smell of a quiet mind we found out in the world, translated for the mind that needs it right here, right now.

Every incense stick, every candle, and every spray in our collection is a fragment of that journey. They are tools we used to find ourselves, and now, we pass them to you.

Slow down. Light the incense. Breathe.