Daily Inspiration: Meet Danielle Gaito

Today we’d like to introduce you to Danielle Gaito.

Hi Danielle, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
HANDS was born out of a desire to make beautiful things. I (Danielle) met my best friend and business partner, Giffen Clark Ott, in 2014 in San Rafael, California. In 2015, we were living in San Francisco and decided to open a specialty store, which focused on selling high – end fashion, unique antiques, hand-made furniture, and –eventually –beeswax candles that we made and designed ourselves. Giffen and I also renovated the shop completely by ourselves, installing an arched hallway (that we learned how to do via Youtube tutorials) and gilding the skylight, all by hand. We used our store as a meeting place for our creative friends, as well as an opportunity to sell goods we and those friends made: we were the first place in the Bay Area to carry fashion labels and other brands on the vanguard, such as Eckhaus Latta, Marieyat, Kelli Cain, and Vejas, and were constantly seeking out new, exciting makers with whom to collaborate. In our time running the shop, Giffen and I also collaborated with Max Lamb and his partner Gemma Ward on candles through the beautiful (and, sadly, now also closed) shop, Workshop Residence (https://theworkshopresidence.com/collections/artists). We also worked closely with the incredibly talented Evan Kinori to hand-laminate and ebonize hangers for his showroom. We have continued working with Evan and are proud to hand-make all of the hangers in his absolutely breathtaking shop in SF (https://evankinori.com/). Additionally, we had many opportunities for exciting custom candles for weddings, private events for major tech companies (we cannot list them, sadly, due to NDAs, but they are some of the leading brands in smart-phones and …. search engines, to name a few)!
In (stylistically) sleepy San Francisco, we started playing around with making beeswax candles. Giffen was trained as an architect and engineer, so we would play around in CAD programs, designing fun shapes that we wanted to see in glowing beeswax. We began selling our pyramid candles in our store, and they became a best-seller almost immediately. After about 3 years as shopkeepers, we decided to close the store and focus our energies more fully into product creation. In 2020, at the height of lockdown, we launched HANDS as a direct to consumer endeavor with the help of a friend in Los Angeles. Within a year, Giffen had moved to idyllic upstate New York, and I had begun splitting my time between LA and the Bay. By 2022 I was in LA full-time, moving the main hub of HANDS’s operations to my small backyard studio in the west of Hollywood.
Since 2022, we have sold directly to customers through our website, while also creating custom candles for a skincare brand called LESSE, a fashion label called Puppets and Puppets, a home goods store affiliated with a wonderful design duo called Pierce and Ward, among others. We began selling our candles wholesale in select stores (including the online store SSENSE) that echo the aesthetic and ethos that our previous store espoused: nice things, made by hand(s). We’re constantly exploring and finding new and exciting ways to make beautiful things –in all honesty, we’re almost befuddled by how we ended up landing on candles, since they felt like a fun afterthought at our shop… but we love making them, and they’re our breadwinner, these days.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth isn’t a term I would use, hahaha. But, I think all creative endeavors are fraught with bumps and curves, of one kind or another; but, truly, I see it as all part of the dance. I started my career as a fashion stylist, and through that found the connections and skills to open a store –that I renovated with my own two hands! –which taught me a ton about high-finish construction and fabrication, and gave me a real hunger for what I call “space building”. Running the store with my business partner drove me to start thinking about and creating products, which directed my creativity towards making candles and furniture. So, the way I see it, the road is ever winding, but that’s the beauty of it: by finding out what I don’t want to do, I get clearer on what I *do* love doing; plus, nothing is ever really lost: I still produce and style (and sometimes photograph) shoots for my candle company, even now.

As for struggles, I think they’re the run-of-the-mill type that most creatives experience: bringing people into the fold who are more talk than action and finding out the hard way that whatever it is they said they would help with… isn’t getting done. That’s a big one, and probably speaks to my limitations as a manager, ha! It’s truly a cruelty that creatives in small businesses often have to manage themselves. I feel very fortunate to have a deeply fulfilling working relationship with my business partner –it’s something that keeps me very grounded. Also, since moving to Los Angeles and starting a romantic relationship with a wonderful art director and graphic designer named Garrett H. Brown, I’ve had the immense pleasure of being able to work with my boyfriend on my brand. Honestly, without the ability to work with these two incredible men, I don’t think I would enjoy what I do nearly as much. Some people may like to create in a vacuum, but I am not one of them!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My terrible joke is that I make everything BUT money. In truth, I am a maker: I use my mind and my hands and my networks to make cool stuff. Vague, but any other answer feels limited. I have worked as a fashion stylist, and when I had a store, I would coordinate and execute photo shoots for our online shop and social media. I still do this for my candle company, HANDS –and even calling HANDS a candle company feels limiting! Since 2020 we’ve been selling candles under the HANDS moniker, but the company also does custom furniture, limited home goods, handmade hangers, candelabras, design-build work for interiors, events, and experiences, and so much more.
As we say on our website: “Focusing on materiality over materialism, we create limited release custom works and thoughtfully produced products with a focus on the longevity of craft, ethical sourcing, localized manufacturing, and understated design.” I’d like to think that we’re known for using the highest-quality materials available to create beautiful things, spaces, and experiences that are all …just a little weird. We love the weird –but like, genuinely weird as happenstance, instead of “weird as centerpiece”, if that makes any sense. Incidental weirdness, perhaps?

What do you like and dislike about the city?
Oh man. I’m from the Bay Area originally, and I truly adore LA. Don’t understand the “rivalry” and honestly think it’s entirely one-sided. I love the vastness of LA, I love how it’s simultaneously so spread out, and still so dense. I love that in any part of the LA – area, you can pop your head into a few spots and find some of the best food, coolest art, and strangest niche of “I didn’t even know that existed” that you’ll ever experience. I think this love is also dialectically what I find hardest about LA –it feels like a city with a high barrier for entry. What I mean by that is that it can take a really long time to find the things, places, and people that one fits into, unless you know where to look. With the internet, it’s sometimes easier to find what you’re looking for, but I feel like it can *feel* really disorienting if you don’t know where to look. The sprawl is real, and the traffic is too, but if you’re committed to finding what you love and trying a lot of things, I don’t think there’s an American city that’s better. I truly believe that, and I think it’s what makes me so happy to be in Los Angeles.
I still visit family up north as often as I can, and I think the nature of the NorCal Bay Area is unbeatable –but going back to SF, or Oakland (where I lived several years before moving to LA) just feels tiny in comparison. There’s a lot I still love up there, but there’s simply *more to love* in LA. And as a voracious creative, that’s like a drug.

Oh, and it’s too expensive here, ha. But that’s coastal California, baby!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://handswebsite.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/handshandshandshandshands

Image Credits
Photo credit:

Drew Escriva, Anastasiia Sapon, Ulysses Ortega, Giffen Clark Ott, and Danielle Gaito.