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Quietly ambitious, always building
Grace Munro earned her Business Administration degree at StFX University while simultaneously learning what it actually takes to run a business from the inside. She pours candles while listening to podcasts. She catches up on reality TV while batches set. The production side of C'est La Vie has become, over time, genuinely one of her favourite ways to spend free time, not because it is efficient, but because it is hers.
She now holds down a full weekday career and runs C'est La Vie alongside it, because she decided early that choosing between the two was not a requirement. There is a particular satisfaction in working with your hands at the end of a day spent working with your head, and Grace has found that rhythm and kept it.
What she brings to every batch is the instinct that named this business: the belief that things do not always go to plan, and that is not a reason to wait. She started C'est La Vie because life is short and timing is never perfect, and she wanted to begin. That philosophy has not changed. It is baked into the name, which she chose carefully.
She is now opening C'est La Vie to retail: looking for stores that want to carry candles made with intention, priced honestly, backed by a founder who still answers her own messages. If you know a retailer who should be stocking these, she wants to hear from you.
Started small, kept going anyway
Scents with a story behind them
Family Over Everything is built around the Satsuma fragrance that many customers grew up encountering through The Body Shop: a scent so familiar it bypasses the nose and goes straight to memory. Grace chose it not because it was popular but because it meant something to her. The name and the fragrance arrived as a pair.
She made it because family is the reason she started this in the first place. The steadiness of home, the smell of something comforting nearby, the impulse to make something that gives other people that same feeling. The candle is personal before it is a product, and customers seem to sense that.
What Grace hears most at her market table is people going quiet for a moment after smelling it, then saying: I know this. Where do I know this from? That pause is the moment she makes candles for. Family Over Everything is also, she will admit freely, one of her own favourites.
Every scent has a name and a meaning
Grandpa's Fudge
Luke's Vanilla Eggnog
Strawberry Rhubarb
A Heartfelt Note
Every candle in the core collection started as something personal: a scent that lived in my memory, a name that arrived before the fragrance did, a feeling I wanted to make tangible. When you pick one up, I want you to feel that. Not just a nice smell in a nice jar, but something with a reason behind it.
I named this business C'est La Vie because I believe it. Plans change. Things fall apart. Sometimes the best thing you can make comes out of a semester with extra time and a quiet sense that you should be building something. I did not know this would become what it has. I just knew I wanted to start.
If Family Over Everything makes you think of your mum's bathroom cabinet, or a Saturday afternoon at the mall when you were fifteen, that is not an accident. I made it because that memory lives in me too. The candles I make are not trying to be neutral. They are trying to be specific. I hope at least one of them is specific in a way that matters to you.
Thank you for coming to the market table, for buying online, for telling someone else about C'est La Vie. For every person who has come back a second time: that still gets me. It always will.
— Grace, C'est La Vie Candles
