About Us
Your yard, your way.
At Patio Essentials, we're here to create innovative, stylish outdoor decor by providing quality products for everyone and every style.
If you've ever been into a home and garden store and looked around at the citronella candle section, you'll know that there aren't always a lot of options. It's our mission to change that by creating unique designs in a variety of styles, sizes and price points so that everyone can find products that speak to them. But not just for citronella candles. We also make practical and stylish garden and table top torches, lanterns and our newest innovation, our AquaFlame citronella color-changing fountain.
One way we make that happen is through our unique relationship with our factory in China. We’ve invested in equipment to automate lines at the factory, making the factory safer and more efficient and the products of higher quality. One of our co-owners is in China, running the factory, which lets us work closely with the team there to quality check our products and easily create samples for new products so we can make sure that we’re always coming up with on trend new offerings.
A bit of history...
The Patio Essentials brand was born in 2014, but our story starts back in 2006 when two of our co-owners, Jack Murphy (president) and Hu Hai aka Rocky (candle factory owner), met while working for Ace Hardware International. Shortly after, Rocky left Ace to open his factory and a few years after that Jack started a trading company in Shanghai that focused on connecting factories in China with companies in the US and Canada. He and Rocky crossed professional paths again as Jack worked to connect Rocky’s factory with US companies and they continued to build a business relationship.
In 2013, Jack, Rocky and our other two co-owners Rich and Rick started Shanghai Daisy, LLC. and only sold our citronella products to customers who could purchase full containers worth from China. Then, in 2014, they established Patio Essentials and started up our domestic program with a warehouse in Scott City, MO. We started off with around 40 citronella products and four team members in the US.
Today, our domestic and import programs for retailers are bigger than ever, we work with some great companies such as Ace, Lowe’s and Walmart to bring our products to local retailers, we have over 100 products in our Patio Essentials line and we have a growing team of 10 in the US.
We might be making a practical item, but we want to make practical items that you actually want to buy. They’re not just there to help keep the bugs away, they’re on display.