If you've ever been into a home and garden store and looked around at the citronella candle section, you'll know that there aren't always a lot of options. It's our mission to change that by creating unique designs in a variety of styles, sizes and price points so that everyone can find products that speak to them. One way we make that happen is through our unique relationship with our factory in China. We’ve invested in equipment to automate lines at the factory, making it safer and more efficient and the products of higher quality. One of our co-owners is in China, running the factory, which lets us work closely with the team there to quality check our products and easily create samples for new products to make sure that we’re always coming up with on trend new offerings. Patio Essentials was born in 2014, but our story starts in 2006 when two of our co-owners, Jack Murphy and Hu Hai aka Rocky, met while working for Ace Hardware International. Shortly after, Rocky left Ace to open his factory and a few years after that Jack started a trading company in Shanghai that focused on connecting factories in China with companies in the US and Canada. He and Rocky crossed professional paths again as Jack worked to connect Rocky’s factory with US companies and they continued to build a business relationship. In 2013, Jack, Rocky and our other two co-owners Rich and Rick started Shanghai Daisy, LLC., only selling our citronella products to customers who could purchase full container from China. In 2014, they established Patio Essentials and started our domestic program. We had about 40 citronella products and four team members in the US. Today, our domestic and import programs for retailers are bigger than ever, we work with some great companies such as Ace, Lowe’s and Walmart to bring our products to local retailers, we have over 100 products in our Patio Essentials line and we have a growing team of 11 in the US.