Wax, scent, and knowing when to stop.
This began on a kitchen stove in October 2022 and ended, thirteen months later, at a market stall under orange trees. In between: a room of its own, oils from as far as India, fragrances blended for specific people, a shop, a decision. It was never really about candles.
Ratio tests, June 2023. The tomato jar stayed.
October 2022
The first candles were poured into whatever jars the kitchen offered. Every pour got a Post-it: millilitres, grams, percentages. The notes recorded the failures too — one reads, simply, “too little wax.”
The first candles were poured into whatever jars the kitchen offered. Every pour got a Post-it: millilitres, grams, percentages. The notes recorded the failures too — one reads, simply, “too little wax.”
Four variables.
Wax, fragrance, wick, vessel — and then form. Spheres cast as small moons, one left white. The vocabulary of the work was written by hand on bottle caps: vetiver, cedar oak, ginger lime.
Form tests, August 2023
The working vocabulary
Perfumer’s alcohol, mid-blend
Label sheets, printed
Nine blends
Pink Powder
Sleep, Zoya for a friend who couldn’t sleep
Oudh Cloud
Brunch with Biker the one my daughter loved
La Playa
Find Me There
Girl Powder
Morning 24th
X-Masmas
Pink Powder
Sleep, Zoya for a friend who couldn’t sleep
Oudh Cloud
Brunch with Biker the one my daughter loved
La Playa
Find Me There
Girl Powder
Morning 24th
X-Masmas
Sleep, Zoya — chamomile, lavender, vanilla
Made for someone.
Every blend was original, mixed from oils sourced wherever they were best — some came from India. And each was made for a person before it was made for a shelf. Sleep, Zoya: chamomile and lavender for a friend who couldn’t sleep. Brunch with Biker: the one my daughter loved.
Learning to see.
The candles deserved better photographs than I could take. A workshop with photographer @budarinphoto changed how I saw light — which, for a product whose only job is light, changed everything.
More than candles.
The identity lived on paper before it lived on screen: kraft labels, one typeface, a note-length description of each scent. For the winter market, the black jars gave way to gold tins — a collection built for a single market day.
One morning in November 2023.
Under the orange trees of the l'Albarda gardens, the project met with real people. By then the shop ran on Shopify with Stripe took payment, Correos carried the boxes. The full loop, idea came to reality.
Learning to stop.
The candle market is crowded, and the numbers said so plainly. Scaling would have meant competing with factories on price. So I stopped building the business — deliberately, with the recipes written and the loop proven. The craft stayed: candles are gifts now, and sometimes someone asks for one. Knowing when to stop is also a design decision.
The practice keeps finding new rooms. Lately: designing fragrances for a marble collection — each stone with a scent of its own.
The candle market is crowded, and the numbers said so plainly. Scaling would have meant competing with factories on price. So I stopped building the business — deliberately, with the recipes written and the loop proven. The craft stayed: candles are gifts now, and sometimes someone asks for one. Knowing when to stop is also a design decision.
The practice keeps finding new rooms. Lately: designing fragrances for a marble collection — each stone with a scent of its own.
The practice keeps finding new rooms. Lately: designing fragrances for a marble collection — each stone with a scent of its own.
The candle market is crowded, and the numbers said so plainly. Scaling would have meant competing with factories on price. So I stopped building the business — deliberately, with the recipes written and the loop proven. The craft stayed: candles are gifts now, and sometimes someone asks for one. Knowing when to stop is also a design decision.
The practice keeps finding new rooms. Lately: designing fragrances for a marble collection — each stone with a scent of its own.