Meet Jonathan & Michelle Davino

We recently connected with Jonathan & Michelle Davino and have shared our conversation below.

Jonathan & Michelle, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?

We both developed our work ethic individually from seeing how hard our parents worked when we were children. I (Jonathan) started working at 12 years old along side my dad mowing yards and raking leaves around the neighborhood. He used this as a way to teach me responsibility, people skills, and how to earn money at a very young age. I’ve never stopped working since and feel like I’ve lived multiple lives with the different careers I’ve held – from the USAF as a Dental Lab technician, a job in the Oil & Gas industry as a Mapper for well locations, all while moonlighting as a waiter in the restaurant industry. Now I operate my own photography business, shooting for celebrities and on film sets along with this new joint venture with my wife – Huston House Candles

Michelle’s parents always made her keep a job throughout high school to earn her own spending money. She started working various after school jobs at 15 years old and as she entered her 20’s she realized how important it was to be an independent woman and make her own money. That’s when she decided to go to Makeup school and shortly after joined the Local 706 Hair Stylist & Makeup Union. Her hard work in the film industry paid off and she is now an Emmy winning Makeup Artist.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

Michelle and I are both very creative people, and our business Huston House Candles was born from that creativity. During the 2023 WGA Writers Strike we were coming up with creative ways to stay busy as our industry was shut down for 5 months. We started painting, we took pottery classes, and then we found the art of making candles. We fell in love with it. For us, it was therapeutic, creative, calming, a great way to spend time together while making something that smelled great.

Now, two years later, we are excited to bring Huston House Candles to the market. We take great care in creating luxurious, layered, and elevated scents that set our brand apart from most others. Each scent we create is inspired by our lives in some way – our travels, our childhood memories, or a vibe we want to create. An example of this would be our La Fortuna candle. It was inspired by our travels to Costa Rica, where we got engaged in the La Fortuna hot springs. It’s a very special, unique, and amazing scent that you won’t find anywhere else and it smells just like a hot spring in the middle of lush Costa Rican rain forest.

We make our candles in small batches of 12-20 per scent at a time. Each candle is hand poured, labeled, and photographed by us in our home studio in Los Angeles. Our candles are 100% soy, made with clean burning non-toxic fragrances, and 100% cotton wicks free of lead and Zinc. So, it’s a burn you can feel good about 🙂

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

For us, it’s our well rounded creativity abilities, more specifically in photography and design. Secondly, our people skills as we both love to be social, so definitely come find us at our next market!

Our advice would be: Don’t be scared to start, it doesn’t have to be perfect, and welcome constructive criticism. The last thing you want to do is sit on a great idea but never start because you want it to be perfect. Also, YouTube videos are a great place to learn new skills.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

Our number one challenge is that most people want to smell before they buy a luxury candle and we are mostly an online candle business. We are currently working on our discovery sets for 2026, which will consist of six 4oz candles so our customers can experience an assortment of scents and decide which ones they love before ordering our larger candles. We also sell at local markets here in LA, and post our future market dates and details in our bio section on our Instagram page.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hustonhousecandles.com
• Instagram: @hustonhousecandles

Image Credits

Jonathan Davino