Former Cult Beauty Buyer Stacia Prince Set To Launch Luxury Candle Brand Control & Chaos

After 13-plus years as international buying director for Cult Beauty, Stacia Prince is switching gears with Control & Chaos, a luxury candle brand she co-founded with her brother Spencer Sheridan and longtime family friend Darren Gayer. 

Set to launch on its website on Aug. 28 before landing in retail exclusively at Space NK on Oct. 10, Control & Chaos is starting with six scented candles: Gridlock + Seaspray, Whine + Grind, Paranoia + Peppercorn, Dropped + Mopped, Tryst + Forgiveness and Bed + Breeze. The candles will be priced at 55 pounds or approximately $70.

Transitioning from buyer to brand founder wasn’t something Prince thought was in the cards when she left Cult Beauty in late 2021 after The Hut Group acquired the prestige beauty e-tailer. “It really was the furthest thing from my mind,” she says. “What I’m good at is having an eye as far as what’s going to work and what isn’t, but I would never say that I was clever enough to be a product developer.”

At the behest of her brother, a property developer eager to go into business with Prince, she turned her eye toward the beauty market again for her next venture. A fan of luxury candles, she determined the candle category could benefit from her expertise and knew she wanted to approach it differently from existing brands that often use provocative product names to draw attention.

She says, “I thought I want to do something that is aesthetically exquisite, that smells really good and has humor that isn’t reliant on profanities or genitalia.”

Control & Chaos’s name is a nod to the dynamic between Prince (control) and her husband Mark (chaos). Control & Chaos is a family- and family friend-run business at its core. Pooling together funds to develop the brand, Prince, Sheridan and Gayer, an interior designer, stand on equal ground as Control & Chaos’s co-founders. Prince is loath to call the trio a C-suite, though.

“We all bring something to the business, which is, for me, so joyful because we three have very distinct personalities, very different backgrounds and very different skill sets,” she says. “So, it’s just amazing that as a family business we really all sort of complement each other.”

The family involvement doesn’t stop at co-founding. Control & Chaos’s distribution and fulfillment will be handled by Three Crowns Logistics, a third-party logistics provider with offices in the United Kingdom and the United States that Prince co-founded with her son, Pierce Prince. Prince’s niece, Bronte Bean, and Gayer’s daughter, Sadie Gayer, will handle social media strategy for Control & Chaos. Key roles will be slowly added to the brand’s team as it scales. 

Prince says, “It just takes me back to the days when I joined Cult Beauty where Jess [DeLuca], the original founder, said to me, ‘Come in and have a very small part of the business but give us what you can.’ I just love that approach to work, bringing in really key really brilliant people and making them truly a part of something.”

To attract consumers, Control & Chaos has bold scents that evoke specific experiences and moments in time. Whine + Grind’s top notes of baby powder and coffee harken back to Prince’s sleepless nights as a new mother. Paranoia + Peppercorn’s top notes of patchouli and black pepper are a throwback to 1970s-era hedonism. Prince predicts that rose-scented Tryst + Forgiveness and musk-heavy Bed + Breeze will become Control & Chaos’s top sellers due to the scents’ perennial popularity with customers.

She says, “I’m thrilled with how the fragrances came out, but it was quite an unusual concept because we weren’t going with the fragrance first and creating a brand around it. We had the idea for the brand first and then the fragrances had to work.” 

Packaging was a major consideration for nailing Control & Chaos’s luxury positioning. Prince hired a fashion illustrator Joanna Layla to produce original artwork that would envelop the candles’ outer boxes in neutral tones of grays and creams with pops of green, pink and blue. Each candle’s color matches the dominant color of its outer packaging. 

“Control & Chaos is for people who are curious for newness and also appreciate aesthetics,” says Prince. “I love nothing more than gifting something or buying something for myself and thinking, ‘No one’s going to have heard of this.’”

While Prince has Control & Chaos’s product pipeline built out for two years, she’s open to adjusting it as feedback rolls in from retailers and customers. Diffusers and fragrance may be potential areas of expansion for the brand down the line.

Not surprisingly given Prince’s background, retail was baked into Control & Chaos’s distribution strategy from the start. She says, “If you find the right retailer, it just complements what you are doing. Of course, we make no bones about it. If you get with a strong retailer, they’ve got a great customer base that you just do not have.” 

Following its debut at Space NK, Control & Chaos is aiming to launch in the U.S. and Australia prior to the holiday season. It’s currently in discussion with retailers in the countries. Long term, the brand hopes to secure three to four key retailers in the UK, U.S. and Australia. Prince is open to speaking with Cult Beauty in the future, but emphasizes Control & Chaos’s retail strategy will remain narrow and niche.

In lieu of paid marketing campaigns, the brand will utilize organic tactics initially to reach its audience. Influencers who are Prince’s friends have agreed to spread the word. Giveaways with beauty brands that have big followings are part of the plan, too. 

Prince is content for Control & Chaos to grow slowly and keep it within her family for as long as possible. She says, “We feel very strongly about that, but we just don’t know what’s going to happen with this brand. So far, anyone who’s seen it has really appreciated that it is something with a slightly different voice to what’s out there. We truly do not want to grow at a rate that we are not comfortable with.”