Today we’d like to introduce you to Julie Alonso.
Hi Julie, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Looking back, I feel that Luma wasn’t born the moment I decided to start a business. I believe it had been waiting for me long before that.
I was born in Cuba, where I grew up watching my mother create with her hands. She was an artisan, and much of my childhood was spent surrounded by materials, colors, textures, and pieces slowly coming to life. I often helped her without realizing that, years later, those moments would become part of my own story. Today, I feel as though I’m awakening a wisdom that has always lived within me as if I’m remembering something that belongs to my lineage, something that has been carried by the women in my family for generations.
Life took me from Cuba to Uruguay, and eventually to the United States. Each move became a transformation. Every new beginning asked me to let go of one version of myself so another could emerge. While building a career in technology, creating a life with my husband, and raising our children, there was always a quiet voice within me, gently guiding me toward something I needed to express.
Over time, I realized that creating wasn’t simply something I loved to do it was the way my soul always found its way back home.
That is how Luma came to life. Not just as a brand, but as an extension of who I am. It is a space where creativity, intention, energy, scent, and the belief that everyday objects can support personal transformation come together. Every piece I create carries an intention, a story, and the hope of reminding the person who receives it that magic is not something outside of us it lives in the way we choose to experience our everyday lives.
Today, I feel that I am honoring the women who came before me while creating something that I hope will also leave a meaningful legacy for those who come after. And perhaps that is what Luma truly represents: a return to our essence, our intuition, and the realization that so much of what we spend our lives searching for has been within us all along.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The path has not been linear, and it has been shaped by migration and by continuous processes of adaptation.
Over time, life has led us to build home more than once. We left Cuba, lived for a period in Uruguay where we gradually began putting down roots, and years later arrived in the United States to begin again. Each chapter brought deep learning, growth, and new versions of ourselves as a family. And so the journey has been: just when things begin to settle, life opens another beginning.
We are a homeschooling family, and parenting has been an experience lived from presence and awareness. Daily life is built through connection, shared learning, and a more intentional way of living, where the ordinary becomes a space for mutual discovery.
Within that constant movement, I found myself. I discovered that I am a woman who adapts with life, but always returns to her center. Not from perfection, but from the decision to keep growing, learning, and creating.
It was from that place that Luma was born. Not as an outcome, but as a response to what I myself needed: spaces of pause, calm, and reconnection in the midst of movement.
Over time, I came to understand something simple yet deeply transformative: if I needed to return to myself, it was not an isolated experience. We live in a fast-moving world where we often forget to listen to ourselves. Luma exists as a gentle reminder to return to the present and to live with greater awareness.
And what stays with me every day is the intention to keep evolving. Not through perfection, but through coherence, presence, and love for the life I continue to build. From that place, I continue creating. And from that place, I continue living.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I have built my professional path between two very different but deeply connected worlds: technology and creation.
For almost nine years, I have worked and trained in systems and quality assurance (QA) within the tech industry. During that time, I specialized in ensuring quality, precision, and user experience within digital systems. That stage gave me structure, analytical thinking, and attention to detail, but it also taught me to deeply understand how people experience what is being created for them.
At the same time, I have always had a very creative side. Over the years, that part of me began to take more space in my life until it became Luma, my creative project and personal brand. Through Luma, I create intentional sensory experiences through scents and rituals designed to invite people to reconnect with themselves in their daily lives.
Luma is deeply connected to the emotion that each person needs to hold or awaken in a specific moment. I work with the idea that scent is a direct gateway to memory and emotion: what you smell can bring you back to a feeling, a memory, or help you enter a different internal state.
Each creation begins with an emotional intention. I take the time to understand what a person is needing at a specific moment in their life and translate that into scent. Sometimes it is calm, other times clarity, expansion, grounding, or emotional release. It is a way of giving form to the invisible—turning what is felt internally into something that can be experienced through the sense of smell.
What I am most proud of is that I have not separated these two parts of myself, but instead learned to integrate them: the structure and precision I gained from technology, together with the intuition and sensitivity of creation.
What makes my work different is precisely that combination. I create from a place where it is not only about what is made, but about what is felt, the intention behind each piece, and the ability to create small moments of pause in such a fast-moving world.
Today, Luma represents that integration: a brand built from lived experience, intention, and the ongoing search for reconnection and presence.
And if there is something that defines me, it is this:
“I move with life, I return to myself, and from that place I create and through everything I create, I invite others to return to themselves.”
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
The most important lesson I have learned throughout my journey is that everything begins within me.
For a long time, I believed I had to choose between structure and creativity, logic and intuition, the professional and the sensitive. Over time, I came to understand that my greatest strength is not in separating these parts, but in integrating them and allowing them to coexist within me.
I have also learned that life is not always linear. There are moments of stability and moments of movement, and both are part of the same process of growth. I used to interpret change as something that took me out of my center; today I recognize it as a natural part of life.
But beyond all of that, the deepest lesson has been learning to return to myself. To live from awareness and presence, rather than from reactivity or from the feeling of being out of alignment. When I am in that place, everything shifts—the way I think, make decisions, and move through life.
From there, decisions are not always easy, but they are clearer, more honest, and more aligned with who I am.
And it is precisely from this understanding that Luma was born: as a daily reminder to return to the present moment, to live with greater awareness, and to create from a place of connection with myself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://lumashome.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lumas_home
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064659287850
Image Credits
Daniel Quintana
