I always had ideas.
The spin bike in my apartment, convinced me someone should be offering at-home classes. The sports bra, wondering why nobody had figured out proper built-in support. The ideas were always there but what I didn't have, or didn't believe I had, was the permission to actually do something about them.
Those ideas eventually became other people's successes, and I sat with that particular feeling for longer than I'd like to admit.
The long way round.
I grew up on the East Coast, studied finance and international business because it was the sensible thing to do, graduated, and followed the path that looked like success from the outside. A desk job, a city, a salary, a ladder to climb. I climbed it for twenty years across more cities and countries than most people move in a lifetime. I learned a great deal and I was good at it, but I never once felt like it was mine.
In between the spreadsheets and the strategy decks, life was quietly becoming extraordinary. I met my husband, a Brit, in Pennsylvania of all places, while we were both on work trips. It still feels like a fairytale when I think about the odds of the two of us meeting at all. We've lived in England, Switzerland, and now Pennsylvania. A kind of full loop moment, in the best way and who knows where next.
The detour that became the destination.
I left my corporate career in Switzerland and chose to build something else instead. A life with intention built from a passion.
With the career behind me and the next chapter still unwritten, I did what any logical person would do - a wedding planning course, a nutrition certification, and some deeply character-building sewing classes that are a story for another time. I was looking for the thing, the thing I was actually supposed to be doing. It didn't arrive all at once the way you hope it might. There were detours. There always are.
A shed in England and a conversation that stuck.
We had a housemate for a time in Switzerland, a colleague and friend of my husband's who commuted weekly from the UK. Back home he made candles in his shed, quietly, methodically, with the kind of pride that comes from making something with your hands that you actually believe in. He talked about it the way people talk about something they've finally found, and something in those conversations just stayed with me.
At the time I started building something else - a clothing line for women who move through the world the way I do. That project takes time. Design, sourcing, production, the list goes on. I needed something I could actually start now, something I could control from beginning to end, something that kept me in motion while the bigger vision took shape.
And so I took an alternate route.
And from that, a name.
Why candles.
Candles felt right in a way that surprised me. Something I could test in my own kitchen, refine with my own hands, and take from idea to finished product without a factory in another country making decisions I couldn't oversee. But the more I worked on them the more I realised they weren't a placeholder. They had become their own thing entirely, with their own reason to exist.
I've moved countries three times and I know what it feels like to leave somewhere you've just learned to love, to arrive somewhere unfamiliar and slowly make it yours, to come home changed and not quite the same person who left. And I know what scent does to memory. There are smells that stop me completely, that pull me back to a specific moment, a specific place, a specific version of myself, a feeling I thought I'd let go of. Not nostalgia exactly, more like proof that something happened, that it mattered, that I was fully present in it. I wanted to capture that quality. Not a specific memory, but the mechanism itself, the way scent holds what the mind eventually releases.
Some loops can only be understood once you're already inside them. Mine became Alt Route.
- Carly, Founder Alt Route ยท Easton, PA
To learn more about what we believe, visit About Alt Route