FOUNDER FILES • CREATOR JOURNEY

I Went Looking for an Old Candle Website and Found 26 Years of Myself

Okay.

I need to tell you what happened tonight because I am still sitting here kind of stunned.

This entire rabbit hole started because of wax melts.

Of course it did.

I recently signed up as a Scentsy consultant, mostly because I already buy enough wax and fragrance stuff to qualify as my own customer base, so why not get my own rewards back 😂 Somewhere in that conversation, I mentioned something I hadn't thought about in a very long time:

Before Devinah, I had a candle business called All Waxed Out.

And recently, more than twenty years later, I managed to get AllWaxedOut.com back.

That little fact sent me to the Wayback Machine.

I figured I'd look up the old website, laugh at my early-2000s web design choices, maybe find a screenshot or two, and move on with my life.

That is NOT what happened.

I went looking for one old candle website.

Instead, I found a preserved version of myself from my early twenties staring back at me through the internet.

Wait... Before All Waxed Out, There Was Creative Gels

This was the part that completely knocked me sideways.

Before All Waxed Out, there was Creative Gels.

I started Creative Gels around 2000, right in the middle of the gel candle craze, and launched CreativeGels.com in 2001.

I remembered the business.

But I had forgotten so much about the actual website.

Then there it was.

Still sitting on the internet.

The Wayback Machine has captures of CreativeGels.com beginning in January 2002, and right there on the old website is the little copyright line:

And LOOK AT HER. 😭

The teal navigation.

The little gel candle.

The "Welcome to Creative Gels" graphic.

The mailing list.

The Tell A Friend box.

The tiny credit card logos.

The footer links.

I was sitting here staring at this thing like I'd just discovered an archaeological site.

Except the archaeological site was apparently me.

And Then I Started Reading It

That's when this stopped being funny for a minute.

Because I started reading what twenty-something-year-old DeAndra had written.

Creative Gels wasn't just selling candles.

The website talked about making products by hand. Using quality supplies. Every candle being unique. Custom creations. Products being made to order. Candle safety. Customer service. Wholesale orders. Policies. A mailing list. Online shopping.

I was explaining the product.

I was educating customers.

I was photographing things.

I was building the website.

I was writing the copy.

I was making the products.

I was figuring out ecommerce.

I was answering customers.

I was doing all the things.

In freaking 2001.

That realization hit differently.

This wasn't:

"Oh yeah, I used to make candles."

This was:

Oh.

I've been building things like this almost my entire adult life.

Then Came All Waxed Out

Eventually, I got tired of gel candles.

Like... really tired of gel candles. 😂

I wanted to get back to regular paraffin wax and make the big, heavily scented pillar candles I loved.

And that is basically how All Waxed Out got its name.

I was done with gel.

I was going back to solid wax.

I was, quite literally...

all waxed out.

Apparently my love of slightly smart-ass business names has also survived the last twenty-something years.

The Wayback Machine first captured AllWaxedOut.com on August 16, 2003.

And then I found the February 8, 2004 version.

OH. MY. GOD.

Black background.

Bright aqua text.

Purple links.

Those little silver navigation buttons.

And enough early-2000s internet energy to power a small city.

I LOVE IT.

By 2004, All Waxed Out was selling heavily scented handmade paraffin pillar candles, votives, wax chunks, Aqua Melts and these gigantic multi-wick pillars.

There were wholesale orders.

There was candle education.

There were burn instructions.

There was a guestbook.

There was a newsletter.

There was even a monthly guestbook giveaway for a dozen votives.

Because apparently I was already trying to figure out customer retention and community engagement before anybody started calling it "customer retention and community engagement." 😂

And That's When It Hit Me

I kept scrolling between Creative Gels and All Waxed Out.

Back and forth.

Reading things I'd written.

Looking at layouts I'd built.

Seeing old addresses and phone numbers and products I'd completely forgotten.

And suddenly the timeline in my head changed.

I usually think about my business life through Devinah.

Devinah is the business that became my full-time work — along with a truly ridiculous amount of overtime.

It's the one that grew with me.

It's the one I named after a future daughter.

It's the one that grew enough to bring Roger home to work beside me.

And it's the one many of you know me from.

It's the business that became our life.

But Devinah wasn't the beginning.

Not even close.

Creative Gels started around 2000.

It is now 2026.

Twenty-six years.

I've been making things.

Selling things.

Naming things.

Photographing things.

Writing about things.

Building websites.

Learning ingredients.

Talking to customers.

Creating brands.

Starting over.

Changing directions.

Getting bored with one thing and apparently building an entirely new business because that's a reasonable response.

For roughly 26 years.

The Part That Made Me Cry

And then there was my mom.

That's the part I wasn't prepared for.

I was so excited finding all of this.

Like genuinely, ridiculously excited.

I wanted to show somebody.

I wanted to point at the screen and say, "LOOK! Look what I found!"

And the thought that came into my head immediately was:

That one got me.

Because she knew that version of me.

She knew Creative Gels.

She knew All Waxed Out.

She knew the girl who was figuring all of this out before there was Devinah Cosmetics, before social media became what it is now, before I had any idea where all of this would eventually lead.

And I wish I could sit beside her with these screenshots and say:

Mom. Look. It's still there.

Somebody saved it.

Look how long I've been doing this.

I think she would have gotten such a kick out of it.

And I think she would have remembered things I've forgotten.

That's probably the strangest thing about finding an old website.

You think you're recovering pixels.

Then suddenly you're recovering people.

Rooms.

Conversations.

Versions of yourself.

Whole pieces of your life that you didn't realize had gotten blurry around the edges.

Creative Gels → All Waxed Out → Devinah

Looking at them now, the line between these businesses feels so obvious.

Creative Gels taught me to make something unusual and figure out how to sell it on the internet.

All Waxed Out let me change direction when I wasn't excited about what I was making anymore.

And eventually, years later, Devinah became the place where all of those instincts came together.

The product is different.

The internet is definitely different.

Thank God the web design is different. 😂

But the person behind it?

She's surprisingly familiar.

She still wants to make things people haven't seen everywhere else.

She still obsesses over ingredients and formulas.

She still wants customers to understand how to use what she makes.

She still loves naming things.

She still builds websites.

She still writes too much copy.

She still gets wildly excited about packaging.

She still thinks, "I wonder if I could make that?"

And then proceeds to rearrange her entire life finding out.

And Somehow, AllWaxedOut.com Came Home

There's one more piece of this that feels almost too perfect.

More than twenty years after that old black-and-aqua website existed...

I own AllWaxedOut.com again.

I didn't have these screenshots when I reacquired it.

I didn't know this rabbit hole was waiting for me.

I just knew the name belonged to a piece of my history and I wanted it back.

Now I'm really glad I listened to that feeling.

I don't know exactly what All Waxed Out will become in this chapter of my life.

Maybe something.

Maybe just a little corner where my wax obsession gets to live again.

But there's something beautifully weird about a domain from my early twenties finding its way back to me in my very late forties.

Like closing a loop I didn't even know was still open.

From DeAndra's Diary

I started tonight looking for a website.

I found a girl instead.

She was in her early twenties, making candles, learning HTML, figuring out ecommerce, writing newsletters, answering customers and probably sitting at her computer way too late at night.

Which is hilarious because...

Hi.

Apparently nothing has changed. 😂

But I think I needed to see her.

Building Devinah has been such a huge part of my life that sometimes it's easy to think of everything before it as just the stuff that happened before the "real" business.

It wasn't.

Creative Gels was real.

All Waxed Out was real.

Every weird little experiment was real.

Every website I built badly before I learned to build one better mattered.

Every customer taught me something.

Every product taught me something.

Every time I got bored, changed direction, failed, learned, rebuilt or started over was quietly teaching me how to become the person who would eventually build Devinah.

Twenty-six years later, I'm still here.

Still making.

Still building.

Still learning.

Still disappearing down internet rabbit holes at ridiculous hours.

And tonight I'm really, really grateful the internet remembered something I had started to forget.

And Mom...

I really wish you could see this.

♡ From one chapter to the next,
DeAndra