Meet Lynette Reed
I am an American painter living in Italy but have also been in the gift industry as a creative director/owner/product developer for 30 years. I am the founder of Illume Candles and I have developed candle programs for dozens of retailers and helped hundreds of brands either get their start in candle/home fragrance collections or introduce new collections to an existing lineup.
When the pandemic began, I was living part-time in Italy. It was a terrifying time, and to cope, I turned to art and began painting for the first time in over 20 years. I had a painting accepted into the London Art Biennale in 2021 and now have representation with three galleries in Europe/the UK. I have a solo show in Milan this October and another in Antwerp in 2023.
Last year, Illume Candles, which I founded in 1994 but sold in 2000, contacted me to collaborate on a special "Founders Collection" featuring my paintings on 9 SKUs that were just released with great success. Because of this, I started looking at other ways to license my art and took Bonnie's free course before the Immersion course.
With what I learned in just that short week, I put together a presentation, and I showed a client I work with through my candle consulting. They called a meeting of all the principals, and I began putting collections together, I really had no clue what I was doing, so I took the Immersion Course and simultaneously worked on the presentation and the course.
Over the last several months, I have had to put all that I learned in Immersion to the test. My client works with many factories, some in India and some in Asia so figuring out all of the different things I was being asked for could only have been done because of completing Immersion.
Some of my pillow designs are being branded with my name and face and will be a very big deal for me. It is a mass market company, which is not a place I am used to working in. However, I have also now sold six designs to an extremely high-end Italian furnishings company, have been contracted by a very high-end American bedding company and have three designs under consideration at Nina Ricci Paris for the next collection. So this thrills me as I know I can cross across into sectors that I love and also bring some of my style to mass. The large mass-market products will hit stores in March of 2025.
