From Rubble to Light: The Story of How Innara Was Born

I'm writing this with my ankle in a cast, propped up and going nowhere fast. There's something about being forced to be still that makes you look back — really look — at the road you've walked. And when I trace it all the way to the beginning, I'm still a little stunned by how it started.

It started with rubble.

2016. Dubai. A very quiet kind of falling apart.

I didn't know I was depressed. That's the thing about depression that nobody warns you about — it doesn't always announce itself with drama. Sometimes it just quietly empties you out. I wasn't crying every day. I wasn't unable to function. I was just... flat. Dim. Like a candle burning on the very last of its wax.

The only thing that got me out of bed were my pets Taz and Boonie. Every evening, that one obligation. Walk the dogs. Come home. That was the day.

Bonnie 2016

Around me, the city was doing what the city does — building. Everywhere I looked, construction sites. Scaffolding. Lots of rubble and aggregate heaped on roadsides like waiting be taken . And maybe that's why I noticed them — because I felt a little like that too. Left over.

I had spent years in events. My whole career had been cerebral — conceptualising, producing, creating experiences for other people. I was good at it. But it lives entirely in your head, that kind of work. And my head, in 2016, was not a place I wanted to spend more time.

My hands were desperate for something to do.

The hammer, the rubble, and the takeaway containers.

I started collecting rubble on my walks. I can't fully explain the impulse — it just felt right, the weight of it in my hands. I'd bring pieces home. I had no plan. I had an old hammer and a lot of quiet hours, and I started pulverising the construction waste into aggregate. There was something deeply satisfying about that. About making something smaller in order to eventually make something larger.

I used takeaway plastic containers as moulds. Mixed the crushed rubble with a little cement. Poured it. Waited. And slowly, rough and imperfect and entirely handmade, planters began to appear.

I should tell you: I have no green fingers. Every plant I've ever owned has given up on me. So the planters sat there, beautiful and empty, and I thought — what can I put in them that won't die?

just before the plants died on me

Old IKEA candles. I melted them down and poured the wax straight into my wabi-sabi jars.

And then I lit them.

I sat and watched them burn for a long time. There's something about a flame — the way it moves, the way it fills a room with warmth without asking anything from you. I felt, for the first time in a long time, a version of peace.

my first batch of candles

3am and the slow making of something real.

It didn't stay simple for long. The wax seeped through the concrete. The structure wasn't right. I'd lie awake at 3am — not anxiously, but curiously — researching. Wax types. Pour temperatures. Fragrance chemistry. Wick sizing. Concrete ratios. I taught myself, trial by trial, what worked and what didn't.

There's a particular kind of joy in that — in being a complete beginner with no ego about it. I wasn't trying to build a brand. I was trying to build something that worked. Something honest. Something that came from my hands and went out into the world and gave someone else that same small moment of warmth.

Slowly, the seepage stopped. The structure held. The scents became something I was proud of. The wax was vegan soy. The fragrances, phthalate-free. The concrete, sourced from what the construction industry was already throwing away.

What had begun as a way to survive the day was quietly becoming something else entirely.

Innara. إنارة. Illumination.

When it came time to name it, the word arrived almost on its own. Innara — إنارة — from Arabic, from the Quran. It means illumination. The bringing of light.

I sat with that for a while. Because it felt almost too fitting. From the darkest point I had known, in the quiet of those early mornings with a hammer and a pile of rubble and a dog who needed walking — light had come. Not suddenly. Not dramatically. Slowly, the way a candle fills a room. Burn by burn.

I don't say that lightly. I believe, and have always believed, that there was something larger than my own effort at work here. The way the right material appeared. The way the name found me. The way people responded. The 3am sessions that never felt like work. Some things you don't fully take credit for — you just say thank you and keep going.

What Innara is now.

We make home fragrances — candles, reed diffusers, room sprays — from recycled construction waste, vegan soy wax, and phthalate-free scents. We run workshops where we teach people to make things with their hands, because I know firsthand what that can do for a person. We work with businesses on private label products. We are based in Dubai, made in the UAE, and built on the belief that beauty and responsibility are not opposites.

Every product that leaves us carries a little of that first afternoon in it — the dust on my hands, the imperfect mould, the flame I lit and couldn't stop watching.

A note from a fractured ankle.

I'm writing this today because a fractured ankle gave me no choice but to sit still and think. And what I thought was: how did we get here?

I still don't have a complete answer. A little grit. A lot of 3am nights. An old hammer. A dog. And something I can only call grace.

If you're reading this in a quiet, difficult moment of your own — I want you to know that Innara was born in one of those. The rubble around you is not wasted. Sometimes it's exactly what you need to build from.

Light comes.

Guddi

Innara is a sustainable home fragrance brand based in Dubai, UAE. Our products are made from recycled construction waste, vegan soy wax, and phthalate-free fragrances. Shop our collection at innara.ae or find us on Instagram @innaradxb.