Blueme Brings Luxury Functional Candles To Manhattan With New Flagship Store

New York City has a swanky new scent destination.

Blueme has opened up a flagship shop in Manhattan’s NoLIta neighborhood last month following a successful Manhattan pop-up shop last year. While the pop-up space was too big for the luxury candle and diffuser brand—about 1,800 square feet versus the flagship’s 500—it left founder Mei Xu enamored with the downtown retail scene, which attracts shoppers from across the United States and the world. 

The flagship diversifies Blueme’s retail presence beyond the department stores, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s, where it’s currently sold, and provides insight into new audiences. Outside of the store, the brand’s customers are almost entirely women, but, in the store, 40% are men. 

Two-year-old Blueme offers candles in seven unisex Zen-inspired functional scents—Balance, Calm, Focus, Happiness, Nostalgia, Romance and Spiritual—formulated to foster emotional and physiological states. They’re available in three sizes priced from $75 to $175 and can be refilled with “recandles” priced from $40 to $90. Xu estimates she spent just under $1 million to launch Blueme, including design, development, inventory, marketing and website buildout. 

Xu is no bandwagon founder jumping into the hot home scent space. In 1994, the entrepreneur co-founded Pacific Trade International, parent company of the wildly popular brand Chesapeake Bay Candle. Chesapeake Bay Candle didn’t open standalone stores. After selling the brand to Yankee Candle parent company Newell Brands for $75 million in 2017 and stepping down as CEO in November 2018, Xu had to keep a low profile in home fragrance thanks to an ironclad 5-year non-compete agreement. With the agreement having run its course, she returned to the category in 2023 with Blueme.

Xu meticulously architected every facet of Blueme. She chose its name because blue is her favorite color, and it’s considered the most peaceful color across cultures. She says, “Even if people have never seen an ocean, they still prefer the color blue as the most serene color, so I thought the idea of Blueme was to give yourself a time to get peaceful and reflective.” She adds, “We have known in the industry for a long time that our sense of smell is the most under-appreciated, but the most fundamental [to] being alive.”

Sustainability was top of mind for Xu in the creation of Blueme. She says the millions of glass candle jars that are thrown away every year are “unthinkable” for her. The brand’s candles are housed in handmade one-of-a-kind reusable ceramic vessels. Xu describes the vessels as “full of flaws,” making them a tangible representation of the Zen philosophy that nature is imperfect, and, in that imperfection, beauty is discovered. She mentions that ceramic takes a third less time and energy to produce than glass.

“It doesn’t always make the biggest financial sense, but as a luxury brand, I do think we have a duty because it’s already so expensive,” says Xu. “We need to think of how we are impacting the carbon footprint of our product. Luckily, I don’t think people are throwing our vessels away.”

Along with Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s, Blueme’s distribution includes Amazon and its own website. Luxury department stores were the goal from the outset. When Xu brought lab samples to a July 2023 pre-launch meeting with Bloomingdale’s, the retailer committed to placing Blueme in the chain’s five highest performing doors—South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, Calif., Boca Raton, Fla., White Plains and Bergen County in New Jersey, and 59^th Street in New York City—without even seeing the final product. The brand sold out in two weeks after its November 2023 debut at the chain. 

Blueme is enjoying a number of business tailwinds. Fragrance has been on fire in the beauty industry and registered the fastest growth in dollars and units of any beauty category in 2024, according to market research firm Circana. The American luxury candle market is a fraction of the size of the fragrance market, reaching $166.3 million in the United States last year compared to luxury fragrance’s $7.9 billion in the U.S., per the information resource Dimension Market Research, but it’s projected to accelerate at a compound annual growth rate of 11.5% from 2025 to 2030 versus nearly 7% for luxury fragrance. 

There are no immediate plans to expand Blueme’s branded store network, but there are plans to expand its scent range and extend into bath and body. Functional benefits will continue to be integral to Blueme’s scents. Buoyed by the wellness boom, the buzzy functional fragrance category has attracted consumers, and companies from global giant Estée Lauder to indie darling Living Libations are invested in the space. 

Xu says, “I’m focused on functional fragrances, which are proven to trigger emotional and physiological benefits, instead of some fragrance called Eternity or very sexy fragrances.”