For 16 years, Declaration & Co. has been a familiar part of St. Augustine’s retail landscape: a place for gifts, candles, paper goods, clothing, seasonal displays, and the kind of carefully chosen details that made a quick stop feel like an occasion. So when the longtime local retailer announced it was closing its brick-and-mortar store, plenty of customers understandably wondered what had happened. The answer is not a downturn. It is growth.
Behind the storefront, Lara and Stephen Kocerka have spent years building a wholesale business that now supplies products to hundreds of retailers across the country. Their candles, fragrance products, and giftable goods have found an audience well beyond St. Augustine, and the couple has reached a point where stepping away from the daily demands of a physical shop makes room for the part of the business with the greatest momentum.
“It’s been a long time in the making for us,” Lara says. “We’re saying goodbye to a big chunk of what we do sell in the store, but if you strip it all down, it’s because I’m ready to say goodbye to them.”
That honesty is part of what makes the transition feel less like a closing and more like a thoughtful recalibration. The Kocerkas are not walking away from Declaration & Co.; they are reshaping it around the work they have come to know best.
Lara opened the original store in 2007, at age 24, after graduating with a degree in fashion merchandising. A job opportunity in New York disappeared amid a hiring freeze, and after moving to Florida, she began considering a small retail space. There was no elaborate business plan or long-range vision at the time. She expected it might be a temporary answer while she and Stephen figured out their next steps.
“I thought I would maybe do it for six months,” she says. “There was no business plan. There was no long-term plan.”
Instead, the store became a lasting part of her life and St. Augustine’s shopping culture. Along the way, the business moved, grew, expanded its offerings, opened another location in Jacksonville for a time, and developed a loyal local following. It also gave the Kocerkas a real-time education in what independent retailers need from the brands they carry.
Stephen credits Lara’s creative instincts for giving Declaration & Co. its personality, while Lara credits Stephen with helping turn that creativity into a sustainable business. As they began looking more closely at margins, inventory, and their strongest-selling categories, creating original products became a natural next step.
The couple started with products they wanted for their own store. A Florida Sunshine candle, for example, began simply because Lara wanted one on the shelves. Candles became a larger focus after the pair struggled to find suppliers that consistently offered the quality, price point, and reliability they needed.
“If you want something done right, you just have to do it yourself,” Lara says.
They began making candles themselves, then reached back out to former wholesale customers. The response was encouraging. Over time, Poured Goods emerged as a distinct candle brand, joined by Edit, a line of rollerball perfumes, and a streamlined wholesale version of Declaration & Co. centered on small gift items such as stickers and keychains.
Their advantage, they believe, is simple: They create products with the retailer in mind because they have been retailers themselves.
“We always built for the retailer,” Stephen says. “A lot of people build product for the end consumer, and we always built for the retailer.”
That perspective informs everything from price points to product assortment. Rather than overwhelming stores with too many choices, they have learned to focus on products that perform well and can be easily understood by both shop owners and customers. Their current bestseller, somewhat unexpectedly, is a butter-inspired candle designed with a label reminiscent of a butter wrapper.
“It’s become our number-one seller, which is hilarious,” Lara says.
The company’s wholesale growth has been driven largely through Faire, an online marketplace that connects independent brands with retailers. This year alone, their products have sold to more than 1,000 stores, with roughly 400 retailers reordering on a regular cadence. Their strongest markets include Michigan, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and coastal communities around the country.
The Kocerkas also operate a contract manufacturing side of the business, working with a select group of brands that want to develop their own candles. Some clients use existing vessels and add their own labels; others work with the team on fragrance, wicks, formulas, and the details of a product built from scratch.
That work has opened another avenue for growth, particularly as brands seek domestic manufacturing options and more responsive production timelines. The Kocerkas hope eventually to build a larger facility that would allow them to take on bigger projects and create more full-time opportunities for members of their team.
For now, though, the most meaningful part of the shift is personal.
Lara and Stephen have two children, Molina, who is 11, and Alex, who is 8. As their children grow, the couple wants a business structure that gives them more flexibility at home. Lara plans to manage Molina’s homeschooling for middle school while continuing to lead the creative work behind the brands.
“My success has been measured upon my flexibility to be with my family,” Lara says. “That’s what’s most important to us at this point in our lives.”
The decision also brings the couple back into closer collaboration. In recent years, Stephen has largely run Poured Goods while Lara focused on the retail store and Declaration & Co.’s creative direction. Their day-to-day responsibilities were separate, even as the businesses remained connected.
Now, they are looking forward to building the next version together, with clearer roles and a deeper understanding of how the other thinks. Lara protects the design vision; Stephen considers operations, cost, labor, and scale. It has taken time to define those lanes, but both see that balance as essential. “You think about people and you think they think the same way as you do, and I don’t think that could be further from the truth,” Stephen says. “Once you understand that person’s thought DNA, then you can have conversations.”
St. Augustine will miss the familiar storefront and the traditions that came with it. But Declaration & Co. is still here, still creating, and still carrying a little bit of its hometown identity into shops far beyond Florida.
The building may no longer need retail frontage, but the business itself is making room for a wider reach, a more focused future, and the freedom to keep evolving.
