A life selling products made with love and sustainability: this is what 27-year-old Sunny Tolentino, a Senior Marketing Manager and founder of Sunny Label, has decided for her life’s journey. 

After being given a scented candle on her birthday, Tolentino realized just how much she loved the feeling of lighting one as she would unwind. It gave her the idea of starting a business. 

And after several rounds of trial and error, as well as rigorous research and feedback from her friends, she finally mustered up the confidence to launch her first batch of scented soy candles. This was when Sunny Label truly began.

Then, during the pandemic, as Tolentino missed the feelings given to her by traveling and being around nature, she started to paint the pots holding the candles with seascapes and landscapes, giving all of them a more unique, handmade feel – one that gives off warmth that allows people to appreciate even the most mundane of things.

She has since expanded her line from just scented candles to kombucha, diffusers, home sprays, and more recently, preserved flower earrings that seek to capture nature’s beauty and make it last. 

With her products, Tolentino wants, more than anything, to help people live slowly.

A love-filled production

Tolentino said that with every item she sells, she personally selects all her suppliers, focusing on sourcing locally and supporting small, family-owned businesses to give back to the community. She opts for environment-friendly products as well. 

For her candles, for example, she gets all the pots from a local potter. The paints she uses for them are chalk paints hand-blended by a PWD and family-owned business. 

She also makes sure to use pure soy wax, non-toxic paints, lead-free wooden wicks, and phthalate-free oils to ensure that none of her candles are harmful to both her clients and the environment.

Preserving beauty

For her Valentine’s release in 2020, she put out dried flower wreaths as a means of introducing a new approach to gifting flowers and a way of preserving beauty. 

She explained that flower bouquets often wilt in a few days, while plastic roses usually get tossed out, which is why she wanted to bring together the nice parts of both options. Thus, she created wreaths using dried flowers, whose beauty and colors would remain even after years have passed.

She has since branched out to making preserved flower accessories. 

For these, she uses flowers grown in her own garden. The sunflower seeds she uses come from a permaculture farm in Bukidnon, and she gets her cosmos seeds from her lola.

“I also don’t just buy flowers–I adopt the whole plant to ensure future harvests and keep the soil healthy,” she said.

“That’s why my preorder for orchid earrings and yellow roses takes 3 to 4 months because they follow nature’s rhythm and the plant’s bloom cycle,” she added.

She feels that her items, like these flower accessories, are so appreciated because the love and attention to detail put into them can not only be seen but felt.

Getting inspiration

Tolentino’s days are usually spent practicing yoga, making candles, reading, creating flower wreaths, painting on small papers, water-propagating plants, taking pictures of pets, brewing kombucha, growing plants, preserving flowers, and sewing clothes.

Amid all these, she still manages to create new concepts for Sunny Label. She said that whenever an idea comes to mind, she writes about it in her notebook, gathers inspiration, lets it marinate in her head, and then finally figures out how to make her ideas come to life.

And she’s glad that people come to support her products. 

“I feel very fortunate that my products always seem to find their way to kindred spirits who resonate with them. The brand started growing from friends, and friends of friends, who are as passionate as I am about the things I create. I feel like that’s been my process ever since,” she said. 

Loosely quoting her favorite book, The Alchemist, Tolentino said that when you’re passionate about something, the universe conspires to help you achieve it.

Practicing ikigai 

With her business, Tolentino hopes to bring alive the practice of ikigai, a Japanese term that translates to one’s “reason for being.” 

“In a nutshell, Ikigai is why you wake up in the morning,” she said. 

“[It’s] what keeps you going, and what you live for. Since then, it’s been my lifelong journey to find mine, and live by it,” she added.

After doing a lot of inner work to figure out what really matters to her, Tolentino found herself going back to her passion for creating things that helped her to find beauty in the mundane. 

That’s why Sunny Label is focused on slowness and personal curation for what Tolentino sees as a “sunny life.” 

“For me, that means sharing what I’m passionate about, helping them take good care of themselves, and encouraging them to be mindful when creating and consuming,” she said.