Latinx store Oeste finds its new home in downtown Montebello

A large floral centerpiece by Mexican-born artist Juan Renteria, also known as el Creativo, illuminates a new store in Montebello called Oeste.  

The store features work by Latinx creators. It recently celebrated its grand opening in its new location on Saturday, July 20. 

Naomi Castillo, the owner of Oeste, is of Guatemalan and Salvadoran descent. She grew up loving art and had dreamed of having her own store since she was a little girl. 

Many of the store owner's friends and supporters came to celebrate Oeste’s new home in downtown Montebello, located on the busy street of Whittier Boulevard in the same center next to BLVD MRKT. 

After studying art in college, Castillo studied abroad in France and double majored in French art history. She later found her passion for design, architecture, interior design, fashion and  decorative arts. After studying abroad, she studied the history of decorative arts and design through a master’s program at Parsons School of Design in New York. 

Castillo then worked as a freelancer and as a studio manager for a floral designer that turned  into editorial photography. She later worked for an interior and architecture firm and helped open a retail space in New York. 

“I came on to help them open up that store, which was great, because it kind of circled back to my childhood dream of having my own store. I got to do it, but for someone else and get paid to do it along the way,” Castillo said. 

It was at that moment she knew she wanted to fulfill her dream of opening her store.

Before moving back to her hometown of Los Angeles, Castillo lived through the pandemic in New York. While living there, she wanted to come up with a signature scent in the form of a candle that would become the staple item of her future store. She got to work and researched how to make candles. 

“One thing led to another, I had I think of four scents, and I was trying to narrow down what is the signature scent,” Castillo said. “I started giving them to friends and family and they love them. They offered to buy them and I thought, ‘Oh really? Okay, sure.’ And then it just kind of snowballed from there.”

Although Castillo loves all of her candles, her favorite, and the Oeste signature scent, is the first one she made. She named it Aurora. It was inspired by the landscape and culture of her father’s country, Guatemala. It represents the wet earth from the rainforests and smoke from the volcanoes. 

Aurora also has a touch of cardamom that was inspired by the stories told by her dad about him eating cardamom candies as a kid. 

Castillo had a website to sell her candles when she left New York in 2021. She wanted her business to be named after a Spanish word and came up with Oeste to celebrate her Central American/Latinx heritage.  

“I kept thinking, ‘What does home really mean to me?’ I was in New York, I was freezing my buns off. It was winter. I just missed the sunshine and my family in carne asada cookouts and all the things that make L.A. L.A. I missed the West… Oeste means West. But for me, it means home,” Castillo said. 

She sold her candles at pop-ups before opening her store and continues that tradition to this day.

Oeste features a core collection of nine candles and three holiday-themed scents. They’re hand-poured aromatic candles that use sustainable and eco-friendly materials. The beauty of being a small business is producing the type of candles she envisions. Castillo hopes to keep this ethos if Oeste becomes something bigger. 

“I care a lot about sustainability and eco-responsibility and I try to do my part. If there are recycled glass vessels that we can use versus pumping out more product into the world, we're going to do that. If we can use a wax that is cleaner, versus paraffin, that's a toxic byproduct of the fossil fuel industry, we're gonna do that. Even if it costs more money, it is what it is. But I am not going to put a product out into the world that I don't believe in,” she said. 

Castillo noticed business was slow during the summer because her customers were more outdoors and on vacation. She wanted them to have the aromatic experience of an Oeste candle, but in a non-flame form, and created aromatic mists for those who can't commit to lighting a candle.

The mists make the candle scents portable and can be used anywhere, but are not meant to be used on the body. A product will be made for personal use in the future 

One of Castillo’s customers loved the Templo candle set so much that she would dip her finger in the candle wax to spread it on her wrists. While Castillo was flattered, she didn’t want her customer to continue doing that. 

With her customers in mind, she started experimenting with making oil-based perfumes and created perfume oil rollers, a spin-off of the mists that her customers can wear on their bodies. 

The mists and rollers were all possible because Castillo listened to the feedback from her customers to create products for them. “What a gift that these people are already fans. The least I could do is listen and try to take their lead on what it is that they want,” she said. 

Since Oeste celebrates Castillo’s culture and heritage, she knew it was important to share her space with others from Latin American heritage to celebrate the beauty of Latinx design and craftsmanship and sell their products. 

“The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them” written by Karla Tatiana Vasquez, known as SalviSoul, is one of the products sold in Oeste, debuting this year in April. It’s the first Salvadoran cuisine cookbook published in the mainstream American publishing world. 

Castillo has been a fan of Vasquez’s work for years and wanted to collaborate with her to celebrate the cookbook’s launch and honor the Salvadoran community by creating a candle together named Alegría. 

“[Karla] wanted something really fresh and pretty in celebration of spring because a book was published in the springtime. She’s Salvi, I'm Salvi, and I wanted to hype her and this amazing project. She wanted to hype me and my candles up and we were able to do it together,” Castilo said.

Oeste has a candle club, a monthly subscription that features a different candle of the month, and hosts workshops, including a candle-making workshop, with other Latinx creators. The shop is a space to create a community with others. 

“I tried to really keep [the workshops] with fellow Latinx creatives from the community because oftentimes, we don't have a lot of spaces or platforms to do our thing, especially within our same community. I have the space, the least I can do is share it with people who want to use it,” Castillo said. 

She enjoys seeing people who work outside of the creative industry with a nine-to-five job visit Oeste for workshops so they can have a chance to have fun and turn off their minds. 

Two of Castillo’s biggest supporters are her mother and father. She’s thankful for the support in the community, including her neighbors from Café Santo and Cuatro Central. 

Oeste is located at 510 W Whittier Blvd LA, CA 90640, and is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Monday to Thursday by appointment only. You can shop online anytime at www.oeste.co and follow the shop through their account oeste.studio on Instagram.