Community Highlights: Meet Spence Levy of Air Esscentials Inc

Today we’d like to introduce you to Spence Levy.

Hi Spence, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
The story begins with me walking up and down south beach with a scent machine asking hotels if I can scent the lobby’s for free for a week. Many said yes and I would set up my scent machine. The lobby would smell amazing for that week. I would come back after the week was over and ask them how they liked it. The response was great! Everyone wanted to keep the machine. As sales grew, the company grew. I insisted that our customer service had to be the best and that helped us grow. I moved the office out of my house and got real office space in the Grove. We quickly grew out of that space and have had to move several times since. Now we over 30 employees and four warehouses with an exciting new expansion in the upcoming year. We hold our own patents on our scent diffusion technology and strive to be the best in our Industry.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
In the beginning, I did a lot of educating people on the power of scent. We had to prove to people that spending a few extra dollars on the proper aroma would help their business. Over the years, lots of studies have come out supporting our claims. Now more people understand the power of scent and how to use it. We are still educating people on the quality and how to pick the proper aroma for specific environments.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Air Esscentials is a scent marketing and branding co. We started 15 years ago as a scent company that would make Hotels and stores smell great. Over the years, we added more products and services. We create custom fragrances for brands in order to enhance the guest or customer experience. As we grew we found that the customer service in our industry was not good. The company focused on customer service with top quality fragrance. We then quickly saw an opportunity to expand our services and products into the scent branding company. We private label room spray, candles, reed stick diffuses, scent printing and scented plastics. AE started designing and manufacturing its own scent diffuses that worked better than any on the market. The company grew very fast over the years. Then Covid hit! We had to do something to fight it. I could not just stand around and not do anything. I have thirty families counting on me. I just could not let everyone go. Our employees are our family and we had to come up with an idea to save them. We quickly converted one of our production lines to make disinfecting foggers. We found a completely safe disinfectant to use and cut a deal with the company to buy it in bulk. Then we packaged it with training materials and made what we call a virus first aid kit. The thought was that if we can get companies to be able to disinfect their own environments they would be safer. It turned into a big success and we sold these kits all over the country. We were able to hire more people and fight the virus.

Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
The Art of War is one of my favorite books.