Our Story...

Hello. I'm Tom, and together with my wife Stephanie, we have taken what started out as a part time hobby for myself, and grown it into what we hope to be another successful chapter in our lives. We have always enjoyed using candles in our home on a daily basis. I look forward to walking into a room and getting that first smell of a burning candle scent. Instantly triggering fond memories of people, places, and good times related to that scent. It's not often a day passes without us having a candle lit or the wax warmer on. And on many an occassion, both. I have been a union millwright working in the industrial trades for over 25 years. I'm what you could say is a little on the rough side. So you can imagine the looks I get when I tell people I make candles and proceed to get in passionate detail about everything involved. Stephanie has been a paralegal her entire career. She obviously is the book smart one between us. She has MS and these past few years it has been progressing, causing more and more physical limitations, so she gets all the non physical stuff dropped in her lap. She manages to somehow take my scribbles, highly disorganized note taking and on the fly ideas, and gets them organized and on paper. Back in early 2015 I started looking for new hobbies and activities to occupy my free time. We had always enjoyed being outdoors camping and fishing when we had free time. Going out and spending time with friends and family was another regular activity we did often. But now that the MS was showing itself more and more, those things were becoming more and more difficult to do. So spending a considerable more time at home I needed something to do that would keep me occupied. Being we like candles so much I thought I'd give it a try. I origionally just wanted something to do for a weekend or two a month, and if it saved us a few bucks in the process from buying candles even better. Stephanie and my bank account will attest that the exact opposite happpened. After a few months and having made dozens upon dozens of failed candles I was ready to throw in the towel. Why was something that appeared to be so simple, turning out to be so difficult? Even buying the candle kits at the craft store only helped to produce a mediocre candle at best. And it costs three times more than I could of purchased a candle for. Not being someone who accepts failure easily, I decided it's time to hit the books, or in this case, the internet. It was quick to see that there is a lot of science and testing involved to come up with that perfect recipe of wax, wick and fragrance oil. So for the next two years I spent many a late night up scouring the internet, joining candle forums and asking questions trying to understand it all. On a time-line it was four years. In reality it was only about 16 months. That thing called Covid came along and threw the world into chaos. And during that 8 months at home with no work I did everything except pursuing candle making. We got a lot of stuff done around the house that had been getting neglected due to my work schedule the previous 15 years. Once life started to return back to somewhat normal, I once again turned to the internet for answers. During this time I was also ordering small amounts of different waxes, wicks and fragrance oils in order to experiment and test out my new found knowledge. I was making them in pickle jars, empty jars from previous bought candles, and even had friends saving their candle jars for me to use. Eventually it started making sense and before long I was able to make candles more often than not that were of good quality. Now it was time to choose one of the many waxes available, to work with exclusively and work on perfecting it into a candle. I ended up choosing to go with pure soy for numerous reasons. Being in the union, buying union made products, or at the very least made in the USA products, whenever possible is important to me. So choosing soy was the obvious choice for me. The manufacturer of the brand wax I use gets all its product from USA grown and harvested crops only. It is also a very sustainable and easily renewed source of wax. Pure soy wax is one of the cleanest burning waxes available. On the down side it is also one of the more difficult waxes to work with and proves itself to be very discouraging at times. Luckily, I enjoy being challenged and like the occassional brain stumper. Trying to keep along the lines of cleaner and natural I chose all cotton braided wicks and cotton wicks with a paper core. Both of which, with a little research, I was able to find made in the USA with USA materials. The majority of fragrance oils used are classified as "clean scent" or "safe scent". This means they contain none of the cancer causing ingredients outlined in California Prop-65 and are phthalate free. (Please don't ask me to pronounce that, I was sleeping in English class the day they taught how to say that letter combination correctly. Come to think of it, I slept through most of my English classes.) All these fragrance oils are blended and sold by independantly owned companies here in the USA as well. I made my first order of 45lbs of wax, a few dozen wicks and a some oils and started testing. Keeping lots of notes and studying the results of each combination, making minor changes in wick size or oil to wax ratio, I was able to finally get that pefect candle. All this time Stephanie just stayed out of my way and let me do my thing. Occassionally she'd tell me "You do know that we can afford to just buy candles when we want? Ones that actually work." I think she just let me be becuse it gave me something other than trying to explain my Covid/zombie theories to her. And then have to go into all the details of what we need to do in preparation of the zombie apocalypse and how to survive. So I continued testing, keeping notes and making changes until I started getting consistant repeatable results. I was determined to make good candles. After being able to make consistant above average performing candles, it was easy to see how generic the big box store brands and even some of the more popular name brand candles really were. I kept ordering more supplies and making more candles. Having to start testing over with every different scent and every different size jar. A few hundred pounds of wax and hundreds of dollars worth of fragrance oil later, I was able to make about 8 scent in two different sizes. I started sharing them with friends and co-workers in order for them to enjoy. It wasn't long before they were asking to purchase more. Now I'm pouring larger quanities and adding new requested scents and scents that I want to try. Things kind of grew from there to where we felt starting an online store made sense. And here we are today in October of 2022 launching our online store. I continue to be the sole maker of all our candles. She still helps manage things behind the scenes. She's also great at pointing out things I could do better. And even though I pretend to ignore her, I usually let it simmer for a while, end up somewhat agreeing with her and end up making some of the changes she suggested. She's also the one responsible for me being able to use words with more than five letters, not having to have half my stuff censored with #@!, and tries really hard to keep me from getting too far off tangent on some of my ideas. Other than not believing the zombie apocalypse can and will happen, she still might be worth me trying to save when it does...most days. Without the encouragement and support of so many friends and family I doubt I would have considered progressing to this point. It's definately alot more work, but its not really work because I truely do enjoy creating all these different candles. Knowing how certain scents can trigger specific times throught my life and bring specific memories back to light for a brief time, it makes me feel good knowing that hopefully whoever uses my candles can enjoy their own pleasnt triggers because of something I made with my own two hands. And finally before I wrap this up I'd like to not only thank Stephanie for the support and encouragement to pursue this next step, but I would also like to give some credit to Sam, Sara and Katie. All of whom have helped tremendously in their own way to help make this possible. As always, if you have any questions feel free to use the Contact button above to get hold of us. I'll be happy to help and answer any questions you may have.