Joya Drums Up New Collaboration With Grateful Dead
Joya is cranking up the volume with its latest collaboration.
The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based candle brand has joined forces with the band Grateful Dead on a limited-edition variety of candle scents. The three fragrances are available in votives or in sculpture form, fashioned after the band’s dancing bears graphics. Prices range from $12 for a matchbook to $225 for a full set of three dancing bears, available on Joya’s website.
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The brand has mastered the unorthodox beauty team-up, having collaborated with Brooklyn pizzeria Lucali and the Minions for past launches. This collaboration’s opportunities were manifold, from pushing product development to building on personal passions, said Frederick Bouchardy, founder of Joya.
“I’m really into iconography, patterns that connect, and the Grateful Dead have such a passionate fan base,” he said. “Fragrance is a little different, especially in a world where we’re selling a lot of things digitally, and we’re moving away from in-person experiences where you think that experiencing a sample would be really important. That’s why our company goes above and beyond to create things that other companies can’t, and to tell stories in our own way.”
Bouchardy reinterpreted the bears — one of the Grateful Dead’s logos — as art school students. Each is scented based on college-age diet mainstays like cotton candy, lemon drops and sour strawberries. “It’s this funny idea, art school kids and college kids in general eat junk food, and they use that power to stimulate ideas and energy,” he said. “That’s what the scents are literally based on.
“We’re paying homage to the art school kids who have worked at Joya Studio,” Bouchardy continued, noting that he discovered the Grateful Dead during his college days, and that he wanted to tap into consumers’ nostalgia with the products.
“The idea of having these childhood nostalgic scents, everybody knows what they taste like,” he said. “We wanted people to contextualize it and make it something where people could really imagine the scents.”
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