13. Dispatches - A Mid-Year Reflection

Since our last Dispatches in early April, where we shared some honest thoughts and feelings about where things are going and how we've had to adjust and adapt as a small independent studio and shop, we've had our nose to the grindstone.

It’s kind of felt like we’ve had to rip everything down to the studs and rebuild, all without making it look like that. We’ve just kept rolling behind the scenes. Searching for suppliers. Crunching numbers. Rethinking what it means to be an independent artisan studio, especially with tariffs in place, shifting material costs and supply partners we can’t work with anymore.

We started the year looking for new vendors and sourcing options. We’ve said it before: there’s no real industry in Canada for the materials we use to make our candles. There are distributors, sure, but not producers. And most of the options we’ve found just don’t make sense financially. We know what it costs to produce our pieces. We know what we can realistically charge. And when wholesale quotes come back higher than retail pricing at major stores, it doesn’t add up.

We’ve had to make some difficult calls. We’ve cut off all purchasing from south of the border. That means over 25 vendors and long-term suppliers are now out of our production pipeline - including the sources for many of our most beloved fragrance notes. We've thrived working with fragrance houses that have offered us weird, wonderful and niche notes and accords - but we just can't justify working with them anymore. That’s not easy as a creative or a business owner. But the ethics and the numbers both pushed us in that direction.

Fragrance has been the hardest hit. We work with hundreds of fragrance notes and accords. And nothing we do comes out of a pre-mixed jug. Everything we’ve built has been handcrafted and custom-formulated. So when you take away access to a big part of that fragrance library, it throws a wrench in everything.

There've been moments this year where it felt like we were freefalling - working and building momentum, only to end up stuck with a pile of work we didn’t want to do, but had to. It’s that tension between being artisans and running a business that actually pays the bills. The new categories we’ve introduced, the pantry goods, the tools, the gifting pieces, those have helped keep us going while we restructure the candle side.

Our Signature Range (the black label box candles) pieces are going through a transformation of sorts. For close to 10 years, we’ve hand-poured, hand-formulated, hand-blended, hand-wrapped, hand-boxed and hand-labelled every single one of those pieces. They’ve become part of people’s routines, travelled from home to home, place to place. And we’re proud of that.

But we can’t keep producing them in the same way. Moving forward, our Signature Range will shift to a 7.5oz jar format sourced from a Canadian partner. It allows us to keep pouring while making choices that reflect our values and the realities of where we’re at.

We’ll be phasing out the 8oz pieces gradually. As we sell through existing stock, you’ll start seeing the new jars roll out in the shoppe and online. The goal is to have the full signature collection in its new format by late summer or early autumn (our jars just arrived so it's go time).

We’ve also decided not to move forward with a traditional autumn candle launch. The past few years have shown us that demand for autumn isn’t what it once was - especially when compared to our holiday pieces. The risk's just too big for us to create a full collection this season. So we’re focusing our energy on what works. A capsule for autumn. A full return for holiday. The rest can wait.

If it’s felt a little quiet around here, that’s why. We’re working through it. One decision at a time.

We’re still here. Still building. Still pouring.

Cheers,
Dan