Looops

Looops is an Austrian home-fragrance brand based in Elixhausen, a municipality just north of the city of Salzburg. It makes scented candles, fragrance sticks, room and pillow sprays, essential oils and aroma diffusers, and it describes itself as a manufactory: a small workshop where the scents are blended in-house and the candles are poured by hand. The company is organised around a single idea it repeats across its materials, that a scent should bring something of nature indoors and change how a room, and the person in it, feels.

Much of the company's identity rests on its ingredient rules and packaging choices. According to Looops, every fragrance is made only from 100 percent pure essential oils and plant waxes, and plastic is avoided wherever an alternative exists [2]. The brand remains active, with collaborations released in autumn and winter 2025 and an operating online shop.

The legal entity behind the brand is LOOOPS GmbH, registered at Staufenstraße 1 in Elixhausen, with Julia Schliefsteiner and Markus Niederfriniger listed as managing directors [4]. The company belongs to the crafts section of the Salzburg chamber of commerce, a detail that fits the way it presents its work as handicraft rather than industrial production.

The brand's own pages say little about how it began. Regional press and trade coverage fill in part of that gap: a SalzburgerLand tourism magazine feature and a 2024 interview on the website of the FACHPACK packaging trade fair both date the company's founding to 2014 and name Schliefsteiner and Niederfriniger as its founders [9][11]. The SalzburgerLand article places the start at the end of that year.

The landscape around Salzburg runs through the brand's description of itself. Looops says its roots lie "among mountains, meadows and forest clearings", and that these landscapes still shape its scents and serve as its benchmark for quality. The tourism-board feature makes a similar link, describing scents inspired by the region, such as pine, juniper, spruce, bergamot and lemon.

For much of its early life the business was known chiefly as a candle maker. A 2020 feature on the German family and lifestyle blog trips4kids described a range of classic and small scented candles, fragrance sprays and wax melts, all made from plant wax mixed with essential oils and sold through selected specialist shops and the company's own online store [13]. A regional newspaper profile from November 2021 in MeinBezirk, the online edition of the Bezirksblätter weekly papers, followed the same thread: candles, sprays and wax melts, poured by hand, with paraffin and synthetic fragrance left out entirely [10].

In 2023 Looops carried out a rebranding in which packaging played a central role, according to the FACHPACK interview. The same overhaul introduced a refill option for the candles, supplied in compostable cups made from bagasse, the fibrous residue left after sugarcane is pressed [11]. In that 2024 interview the company described a team of eight people in the manufactory and put its number of business partners in Austria, Germany and Switzerland at around 300, among them concept stores and hotels. It also said that it carries out every step itself, from the idea through production to shipping, mostly by hand.

The online side of the business grew in the same period. A case study published by the e-commerce agency Shopwise states that the online shop had until then relied mainly on brand awareness built through offline retail, and that no paid channels for winning new customers were in place before the agency's work [12]. The agency reports that the brand's search-advertising account grew from nothing to a mid five-figure conversion value per month within three months; these figures come from the agency itself and have not been independently confirmed.

In autumn 2025 Looops worked with the Vienna design studio Sheyn on a time-limited collaboration. Sheyn designed two vessel shapes, named Koyl and Vellen, to hold the brand's large candles and fragrance sticks; the vessels were 3D-printed from a corn-starch material [6]. The brand framed the project as a meeting of forms designed in Vienna and scents composed in Salzburg.

A second collaboration followed for the winter season. For its Limited Winteredition 2025, the company worked with the American illustrator Christopher DeLorenzo, whose clients have included Klarna, Airbnb and The New York Times. His drawings appear on candles and other products in the edition, whose central piece is a large candle called Stille, scented with frankincense and cedar [7].

Looops organises its self-description around five principles, each written as a short sentence addressed to the customer: nature, effect, craftsmanship, responsibility and "the essentials". In practice these translate into a few consistent commitments.

The first is reduction. The company says each composition is cut down to a few clear essences and that everything unnecessary is left out. It presents natural variation as a feature rather than a flaw: depending on growing region, weather and harvest, it notes, the shade and scent of a product can shift from batch to batch.

The second is mood. Rather than sorting its range by fragrance family, Looops groups its scents into five "directions" named for the feeling they are meant to support: Balance, Energie (energy), Entspannung (relaxation), Erdung (grounding) and Frohsinn (cheerfulness). Each direction holds three or four named scents, such as Bergluft ("mountain air") under Balance, Gebirgsbach ("mountain stream") under Energie and Waldruhe ("forest calm") under Erdung. A four-question scent finder on the brand's website steers buyers toward one of them.

The brand ties this structure to aromatherapy. It states that only pure, natural scents have a genuine aromatherapeutic effect, and gives examples: peppermint to invigorate, lavender to calm, rosemary to strengthen and cinnamon to warm [2]. These are presented as the company's own descriptions of what the oils do; it does not describe them as clinically tested.

The third commitment is visual restraint. Looops says its products should be clear "in scent and in design", with clean lines, calm colours and natural materials. Its online magazine extends the same tone into lifestyle writing, with pieces on slowing down, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, how a room shapes the way a scent is perceived, and what essential oils are.

Looops makes home fragrance only. Its range covers large, small and multi-wick scented candles, fragrance sticks (Duftstäbchen), room sprays, pillow sprays and single essential oils, alongside two electric aroma diffusers, Aeris and Quint, and refills and gift sets. The company does not sell skincare, body care or personal perfume.

Each product carries a scent name and a short pair of notes. The Bergluft line, for example, combines stone pine and juniper and is offered as a small candle and as fragrance sticks. The Aeris diffuser is sold paired with Heimkehr ("homecoming"), a rosemary and clove blend, while the Abendgold essential oil combines orange and vanilla. Seasonal ranges sit alongside the core collection, including autumn scents and the illustrated winter edition.

On ingredients, the company names two of its sources directly: stone pine oil from South Tyrol and lemon oil from southern Italy. The paper sticks used for its fragrance sticks come from Germany and carry FSC certification for the paper. The SalzburgerLand feature adds that the wax is plant-based and obtained from fast-growing plants, and that cotton wicks are used, though the plant species behind the wax are not named. No third-party certifications for the brand as a whole are documented.

Material choices form a large part of how Looops describes itself. The company says it avoids plastic "right down to the smallest details", relying instead on glass, wood and paper. Its refill cups are made from sugarcane fibre, the inside of the room-spray caps is cork rather than plastic, and even its shipping tape uses a potato-starch adhesive so that it can go into paper recycling with the box.

The brand also says it keeps its suppliers as close to home as practical and runs production on electricity from hydropower and photovoltaics [3]. The refill system introduced in 2023 means a used candle glass can be filled again rather than replaced. These statements come from the company itself; no external audit of them is documented.

Looops has drawn coverage mainly from regional and trade outlets rather than national fashion or beauty media. The MeinBezirk profile of 2021, written by Emanuel Hasenauer, presented the business as a local candle manufactory and highlighted its paraffin-free production. The SalzburgerLand magazine feature, by Angelika Pehab, presented the brand as a way of capturing the scent of the region in a jar and quoted Niederfriniger on doing "really everything by hand". The 2024 FACHPACK interview looked at the company from a packaging angle, focusing on the redesign and the move to compostable refill cups. No awards are documented.

Looops is active. Its two most recent documented projects, the Sheyn vessel collaboration and the Limited Winteredition with Christopher DeLorenzo, both date from the second half of 2025, and its website lists the winter edition as new alongside a functioning shop, a store finder, a business-to-business shop for trade partners and a corporate gifts service. The company continues to operate from its base in Elixhausen.