At First, There Was Light: Candle Manufacturing • Alene Candles / Rodney Harl
Infrastructure Wins
Candles are one of the oldest technologies in human history. They lit our homes, guided our nights, and shaped civilization – until the light bulb nearly made them obsolete. So how does a 3,000-year-old industry reinvent itself and grow in a world flooded with artificial light?
In Episode 52 of UnNatural Selection, Nic speaks with Rodney Harl, Chairman of Alene Candles, about innovation, safety, supply chains, and the surprising science behind a product millions of people light in their homes every day.
Rodney shares how candles evolved from survival technology into lifestyle and identity products – and why modern candle manufacturing looks more like a biotech lab than a craft workshop. From chemical formulation and safety testing to rapid supply chains and global competition, this episode reveals how even the oldest industries must constantly reinvent themselves to stay relevant.
If you think candle making is simple, this conversation will change your mind.
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speaker-1 (01:56)
Rod, welcome to UnNatural Selection.
speaker-0 (01:58)
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
speaker-1 (02:01)
I'm excited to hear about this as well. When we were ⁓ introduced, I was really ⁓ curious because this is an industry that's been around for thousands of years. If we chase it all the way back to the original lineage, right past campfires, it was the original source of light ⁓ giving us a way of navigating the society at nighttime all the way through being able to read when the sun is down. And it's gone through tremendous
metamorphosis over millennia. I mean, usually I interview people and it's like, you know, your company's grown for 50 years. That's amazing. Here we're talking about an industry that's been around since like the beginning of civilization. so I would just love to, and not that you can speak to all the strategic decisions made a thousand years ago, but I think it'd be really interesting to just learn more about the industry, especially as it's more from kind of like the sole source of light.
to now more of a home goods and fragrance kind of industry. And then really from there, try to unpack like what innovation looks like in your industry and what competition looks like. But before we jump into all of that, I really like to start with a signature question that gives you the guests the opportunity to share with us what ⁓ motivates you. So with that Rod, could you please let us know what need or impact drives your work?
speaker-0 (03:21)
Yeah, thank you for asking. And it's an interesting question. ⁓ For me, if I were to say, taking a broader view, even outside of candles, it's, and this goes back to my parents, ⁓ to whom much is given, much is expected, right? And that's driven ⁓ my approach to life and the fact that, you know, I think many of us live very...
favored lives, but not everyone does. And part of the responsibility that we have, and frankly, even sitting here on this podcast right now is that ⁓ we need to, it's our responsibility to have an impact on the world. And some of the things that we've done here with them, through the vehicle of a candle business, I think support that.
speaker-1 (04:10)
That's great. And for those of us that aren't very familiar with the industry itself, you know, how candles are made. Can you give us a quick overview of what Alene Candles does and how the broader candle and Fragrance industry actually works?
speaker-0 (04:25)
Sure, absolutely. you know, sometimes we joke that, in fact, when a partner and I bought the company, gosh, 17 years ago now, we would say, as we were raising money to do the acquisition, we joked that we bought a company in an industry that's been in decline for 350 years. Ever since that light bulb thing, it kind of has really suffered.
speaker-1 (04:53)
Yeah, the major disruption.
speaker-0 (04:55)
It happens in every industry. ⁓ So how the industry works now, we're actually a contract manufacturer for other brands. So companies will approach us and say, I want to make my brand or instantiate my brand into a candle product or other home fragrance product that we can also help them with. ⁓ They will often work with a separate company that makes the fragrance.
And there are some very large multinational companies, some in the United States, some overseas, ⁓ that really understand trends and ⁓ the chemistry, the technical formulation and help, and I'd say the romance around fragrance. They'll work with the fragrance houses to ⁓ come up with a palette of what they want to offer. We then.
take the ball and turn that fragrance into a product that burns and burns safely. I tell our employees or something the gentleman we bought the company from used to say is, we may make tens of millions of candles a year, but every one of those is intended to be set on fire in someone's house. So we, you can't say, well, 99.9 % of our candles are safe, but we won't worry about that last little bit.
Every one of those is going to up in a house that feels like us, looks like us, and we want that to be safe. So a big part of the work we've done since owning the company ⁓ has been to really focus on safety and consistency of product. ⁓ And indeed, we're still at a scale of tens of millions of candles a year. And I can say with confidence, even as we've grown,
that we're making today, the safest product that we've ever been. And I think some things we've done have rubbed off on others in the industry, which I think is good for all of us.
speaker-1 (06:58)
Yeah. I've got two questions in my mind. I don't know which one to go to first, but I'll actually segue straight from this one because you're talking about this right now. But afterwards, I want to go back to how you got into this industry because you have a technical, you have a business background. I'm like, wait, how'd you end up in candles? But before we get there, ⁓ you're talking about like the evolution of the company. You're making millions of candles a year. And then you've spearheaded a lot of the work on safety. Right.
and probably production at scale. So in an industry that's been around for thousands of years, you know, and maybe in the modern form, 350 years, you know, or longer since you, you know, that you referenced, what does innovation, how do you define innovation in this industry that's been around for so long? Like, what does it mean? And I know there are many factors, there's from products and production to marketing and partnerships and so on. you know, where you stand, what does innovation
What's the definition of innovation when it comes to candle making?
speaker-0 (08:01)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ I touch on a couple areas. Certainly, when people think of innovation, your mind's often drawn to product and technical aspects. our approach has been, ⁓ and coupling that with the safety concern, our own story is we ended up being very fortunate to work with some brands that were growing.
quite quickly ⁓ over a number of years. And in doing that, we were taxing the supply chain for all the raw materials. you'll see different ingredient profiles hinted at in the storage. You'll see this is a soy candle. This is a paraffin candle. Maybe there are synthetic blends. ⁓ There's certainly innovation in that formulation. What goes into the chemistry that then gets mixed with the fragrance and
and put with a wick and burned at home. We've done in that scaling process, we've done a lot of work to really understand what causes a candle to burn, you can say well or burn not, right? So many people have had the experience where they burn a candle at home and it may generate soot, right? It may be, or you blow it out and it generates.
smoke afterwards, we can actually control some of that behavior between the chemistry of the formulation and the wick itself, right? Making sure you've got a wick that's matched correctly. We were running into cases in the early teens where ⁓ magnified with a particular customer, ⁓ we found that candles we would design in the first half of the year, and I should predicate this by saying,
most candles are sold in the second half of the year, where it's fall and holiday. Really 40 % of candles are sold in fourth quarter. So for holiday, it's a giftable item. Plus you can imagine middle of the summer, you're not really excited to be burning candles in fall. So our calendar though is opposite that. So we'll actually work very...
very hard in April, May timeframe, March, April, May timeframe to develop the candles that are going to be sold for holiday. And that lets the fragrance house get raw materials and scale and so forth. But we want to make sure that we're ready for that. So when we get fragrance samples in April, the fragrance house may have sourced materials from all over the world that could be seasonal. So a fragrance that contains
30 to 50 components or so, as well as diluents behind it. Those 30 to 50 components, the vanilla bean in April may have been harvested in India. But by the time September, October roll around, that vanilla bean for seasonal reasons may have been found under a rock in Madagascar, right? And may have a different supply chain and may have been shipped in a plastic container versus a metal container.
So what we were discovering in the early teens was ⁓ for some fragrances, we would create a candle that burned perfectly in April based on that profile. But by the time we got to the production fragrance, if you will, in volume in September, that chemistry had changed. And either the flame height that was a nice three quarters of an inch in the springtime, ⁓
it wasn't performing like that. The candle may actually go out, right, or burn very low and just have a little nub of a flame. Or we might find the opposite that actually burned high, which you don't want either because you start to run safety issues. So this was causing a real problem for us and for our brand partners. But I sat down with our head of R &D and I said to him, I said, Tom, what do we need to do
⁓ of all the chemistry we know about on the planet, what do we need to do to fix this? Are there analytical tools we can bring in? And so we identified a fairly inexpensive ⁓ spectral photometry approach to screen ⁓ simply raw materials, right? More carefully than had gone in. We've been using a different tool that only measure organics before. We started to see a little different view and that enabled us to
⁓ postulate what was going on chemically and we could start to control it. And we went to the suppliers and said, hey, this is what we're finding. Can you narrow your production specs? And indeed they said, sure. Well, maybe it a little, wasn't quite so agreeable, but their specs were this wide. Maybe they were, I'm holding my hands ⁓ some distance apart. And they said, sure, we almost always produce down here in this range. We just have a wider spec.
So we said, great, we're going to normalize to your tighter ranges. And ultimately they agreed. And I feel like here years later, with some of the additional knowledge that we shared upstream in the supply chain, that the fragrance houses are producing, I'll say cleaner for candles, right? So the chemistry was fine before as a fragrance, but if you're going to burn something, the chemistry changes in that combustion environment.
I think we're seeing better products everywhere, not just in our own portfolio.
speaker-1 (13:51)
That's fascinating. And my background is healthcare, life sciences, biotech. And as you're talking here, I'm picturing like chemistry labs. You know, it sounds like a lot of what you did initially was really standardizing and optimizing like logistics and operations, QAQC. ⁓ But then I also now, and my questions come from a genuine place of just intellectual curiosity, but also just naivete.
When I think about candle making, I never thought biotech, with labs full of chemists and ⁓ other scientists really trying to tweak every single performance of the product, but it makes little sense because you mentioned there soot, you mentioned smoke, and these are things that I take for granted, or I think when I'm using it, for example, when I turn my candle at home, I always make sure it's nowhere near like...
a wall or a ceiling because I don't want to see like the black soot kind of like build on it. But now I know like you guys are already planning for that. Like let's minimize that so we don't have soot, you know, building. interestingly with smoke, personally, I like a little bit of smoke because when I shut off the candle, there's like that nostalgia, which is like now you smell a little bit of like the campfire, the smoke. So like I would never want the smoke to go away. But also you don't want to like the alarms start going off in your house.
speaker-0 (15:11)
Absolutely. ⁓ it's funny you say about ⁓ scientists and chemists and so forth. When I give tours or people give tours to even potential customers, ⁓ it does feel like you're walking through ⁓ a biotech lab.
right, with people on machines and benches and ⁓ doing, frankly, excellent work. ⁓ But I think that's truly important, right? It's obviously not just for luck, but ⁓ we feel we're among the ⁓ most, have been and maintain the highest level of investment from a technical standpoint. And I think that's been a fantastic resource. People do come to us with.
problems with candles that we didn't necessarily make. And we're able to help diagnose that because at the end of the day, this is a safety issue. It's an industry issue. And it won't people to have that confidence. ⁓ indeed, as you said, ⁓ soot and other dimensions, we do our best to actually provide assurance around the temperature of the outside of the candle. So if you have a candle and it's
⁓ hot on the outside, right? Because it's got fire inside. We monitor during our testing that temperature of the surface so that ⁓ we know about the limits depending on the material of construction of that container. ⁓ How hot can it get? So your nerves will allow you to let go of it ⁓ and not sustain damage. It'll hurt, but you're not going to have evasin fingertip. ⁓
So there's a lot that goes into the testing that we do and making sure, again, we're putting our name behind the product, but it's not on the product. And that's part of the service that we offer to our brand customers.
speaker-1 (17:06)
Yeah, it sounds like it. as we said in the beginning, industry candle started as a survival technology for light, timekeeping and so on back in the day. And today it's much more about mood, wellness, even identity. I mean, it's like, you know, there is there is no shortage of surfaces at my house that have candles, whether they're on or not. Like they just became part of the identity. It's like people, that's how they decorate their homes.
And ⁓ so the industry has gone through tremendous transformation. And even when you walk in, like if I walk into like a TJ Maxx and I go to the candle section, the sizes and shapes and colors and scents, it's extraordinary just the diversity in this field, right? ⁓ So it's, know, as the centuries change from utility to emotion, does that also affect how you...
design products and factories to cope with like the evolving nature of the product itself.
speaker-0 (18:11)
⁓ Well, at the end of the day, if we make a candle and it doesn't sell, it doesn't matter how great a quality is if it sits on the shelf. certainly candles need to be on trend and as we say as a manufacturer, on trend on time. ⁓ We were talking about innovation. So another dimension to support that that we've targeted over the years, not just
quality upstream in the supply chain, but really alignment with our supply chain partners to drive speed. imagine if in a traditional supply chain, you're making decisions 90 to 120 days in advance of having a candle on a shelf. If you're needing to...
that here in, ⁓ we're speaking in February 2026, if you had to decide what candle I'm going to have being sold for Thanksgiving, if I had to decide today, right, or even what's going to be in the back to school market, it's going to be tough, right? We don't know what trends, don't know what the consumer is, and frankly, you're going to get to that day anyway. You may not know until candles are on the shelf. So what we've been able to do, ⁓
with certain supply chains is to really align. So we can get a buy order and in about three weeks have product ship shipping out to our customers. And that's taken years of alignment between each of the players along ⁓ the stream. Plus it requires some trust ⁓ that if we block manufacturing space, right? Cause we try to, we don't like to have an...
factory that's not running. So, and if a brand then says, okay, I put test product out into stores, ⁓ I know that the green one's selling better than the red one or the pumpkin spice is selling better than the evergreen with whatever label combination I have. Now we can start to say, let's order for the next round, let's order four times as much of the pumpkin spice. And then we're able to come back say, okay.
three weeks, I can have that behind you. The consumer doesn't see any drop off in volume, but the distortion of supply enables that brand to ⁓ be much more successful against their business objectives.
speaker-1 (20:42)
That's interesting. You know, one of the the premise behind this podcast really started from just a personal curiosity about how other industries innovate. Drastically different from mine. Life sciences and health care. I was just curious about areas that I knew nothing about and how they innovate. And then are there like learnings from each one that map into other ones? And as you're talking, the reason why I bring this up is as you're talking, it draws my mind. I interviewed last year an executive, top executive from Reebok.
And ⁓ I'm like seeing parallels because you mentioned there like, you designing a candle today for Thanksgiving, you know, market trends change. You can't necessarily foretell like what kind of candle will be selling during Thanksgiving. And similar there, the way that they've had to operationalize things, like you don't know what kind of sneaker people are going to be wearing in January of 2027. So you've got to keep things, you've got to keep production going, but keep them flexible enough so you can respond to market shifts.
And so I see some trends between what you're doing and maybe even some learnings the other way, right? Because what sneakers have done is also make it so that you could personalize and make your own sneakers online. Like, you know, a couple buttons here and it's like, oh, I designed my own personal unique sneaker. Is there a similar kind of a shift in candles to say like, oh, I want to create my own scent?
speaker-0 (21:57)
Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I think there are technologies that are getting in that direction. There are devices being marketed now where you can say, I'm in the mood for X tonight.
the nature of the chemistry is pretty complicated. As I said, the fragrances in which we deal may have 30 to 50 components. I'm sure if R &D people hear they'd kick me out of the table and say, no, it's really closer to 80. ⁓ But the more sophisticated fragrances generally have more components and more complexity to it. So today you can ⁓ create a fragrance experience with a fairly limited palette, I would say.
And often they're finished fragrances, but some things turn on and off. You may overlay two fragrances or like say layer two fragrances together. And that lets you have a level of customization. Something unique about a candle is every, and this gets back to safety testing, right? Cause candles do burn. So are intended to burn. we, for every combination of a container,
So container size and material, every combination container, the formulation, the fragrance. And we also, in our business, we take into account color. Every combination of those four things gets tested for its own wick, right? And we do a significant testing to have confidence that if that goes to market, that we're presenting a safe product to the consumer. If the consumer were to start, you
doing their own chemistry and changing that fragrance, it does change the burn characteristic and it throws for a candle product. If they add too much cinnamon oil, for example, ⁓ that happens to burn hot. And so that can lead to some other issues.
speaker-1 (24:01)
So you'd have to constrain the different chemicals there you can only use so much of this and and even in Combination probably starts getting really wacky too,
speaker-0 (24:09)
Yeah, we actually worked on a project years ago where the consumer had the option of buying, envision a long, skinny, kind of a tube, and they could buy little disks. So envision small hockey pucks, right? With holes in them. And they can stack them up and make a neat color combination. And as they burn, they get different fragrances as that went down. Super challenging from a safety ⁓ standpoint.
because we wanted to pick a WIC that could work with all of these different combinations. And the product ended up not going to market, but it ⁓ was a fantastic challenge for us. And ⁓ it really put our people to the test and caused us to learn some things about safety in that process.
speaker-1 (24:55)
Yeah. And then, so what do you, do you see any trends right now with all these different things kind of changing technology and so on fragrances and where is the industry kind of going to right now? Like from your perspective, what direction or what evolution do you see for the industry?
speaker-0 (25:15)
Well, we do see other home fragrance products coming to market, plug-in diffusers. So you take a bulb and screw it up into usually a plastic chassis and that plugs in. There are products where you can draw from two different vials. There are a few companies that do this, two different vials and it can create a mixture of fragrance. That's interesting. We also see an evolution in
We call continuous action or flameless. So, um, uh, re diffusers as, as guys, you know, we think of them as things you see in a bathroom, uh, at a restaurant. Uh, so sticks in a jar. uh, uh, all of these are just a way to bring fragrance to different spaces. Um, we've had some interest, uh, in working with brands, um, one of our brand partners on, uh, you know, small space. So.
You can get a car freshener, of course you can get the tree that you get at the car wash.
speaker-1 (26:20)
That thing's been around for like 40 years.
speaker-0 (26:22)
They're on a long time. But there are other ways to bring fragrance into different environments. they all had, you you can envision you need different rates of throw, we'd say, you know, expelling fragrance from a device. Because if you're in a car and you have, you know, a powerful candle amount of fragrance coming in, you know, you're going to be falling out of your car, gasping at some point, because this is a very, very intense, it would just be very intense.
But I think the ⁓ focus, a lot of our conversation on safety, but really bringing delight to the consumer is what this is all about. ⁓ Our role happens to be a little more utilitarian, but I've got a candle burning on my desk now, ⁓ seeing that product with a ⁓ consistent burn performance consuming the wax, right? Not a lot of hold up on the sides. ⁓ And then of course that puts itself out before it gets.
all the way to the bottom so every one of those surfaces in your house doesn't ⁓ get damaged. Those are all things that are somewhat table stakes and just need to be present no matter what fragrance you're ⁓ using.
speaker-1 (27:34)
I'm laughing because I've been yelled at by my wife because I I tend to be the The paranoid one about safety, know like safety first. That's just me. I'm dad. That's my mantra and And when I see candles and I don't see a person in the room I'm like, what are you doing? Like there's an open flame in a room where you where are you? I'm downstairs like well that shouldn't happen and then I get yelled at cuz it's like well they design them now so that they don't like burn straight through your furniture and I I'm old school right I think ⁓
speaker-0 (28:03)
⁓
You're a responsible candle owner. And I would be completely remiss if I didn't say, ⁓ in all cases, never leave a burning candle unattended. ⁓ Always, as you say, burn in a safe place. And something that's not ⁓ emphasized nearly often enough, but I think is one of the most significant factors in candle quality, is make sure that you trim your wick. And before you light it,
Take a, fact, it doesn't need to be complicated. Take a tissue and reach in on that unlit candle and take tissue, pinch off the top. And it almost always leaves about a quarter inch, which is the target. And that's what we do our testing to, right? Make sure that that is, ⁓ that that's there and that there's no, ⁓ you know, as a scientist, you'll appreciate this as a consistent starting point and there's no extra debris in the candle. You don't want to give any other flame source in there.
⁓ or have a wick with a bunch of debris on top of it.
speaker-1 (29:07)
That makes total sense. So, I mean, if we're talking about safety before we move on, ⁓ a couple of things. Number one is I know that over time, the fragrance is one of the things that you guys have been focusing on a lot for safety. You mentioned the, you know, those pine hangers from the cars, right?
I can't help but think about how the toxins in that, because those things were manufactured and created like 50 years ago. Everybody had them, but who knows what chemicals were in them, right? ⁓ And as the industry's evolved, a lot of attention has been on the fragrances coming out ⁓ of candles and the safety around that. And you've talked a lot about safety, so presumably you guys are doing a lot of the work in that. So can you comment on that? And also with respect to...
imports from international places, right? So there's one thing for you guys to set standards on your safety, but then what does that mean with respect to competition when you're competing with potentially cheaper products come from who knows where, but also on their very different like safety standards?
speaker-0 (30:05)
Yeah, no, that's an excellent point because indeed, for the most part, we are a global business environment. I preface this by saying there are good products and product makers everywhere in the world. We have had cases...
in the United States where ⁓ we know some ⁓ brands and retailers that have had ⁓ recall experiences, which obviously you don't want to have ⁓ for any reason business-wise is certainly not safety. And in some cases, those have been overseas. We do ⁓ practice transparency with our customers. So we want to be a trusted business partner in all respects. ⁓ And part of that is
making sure that they know the testing we're doing, knowing what is important, what needs to be done. So for example, if you have a glass container, when this glass is manufactured, the expectation is that they do some heat annealing, right? So that this is, if a flame gets up close to it or it gets hot, it's less likely to break from a thermal shock, right? Obviously, if you take a hot candle, you plunge it in an ice bath, you're,
you're at risk ⁓ of that breaking. ⁓ some of that testing can be done, has to be done upstream. ⁓ If you're buying that from a glass manufacturer that isn't reputable or hasn't done that testing or can't provide certificate of having done that, then you're at risk. ⁓ And we will counsel, often our customers will buy that glass. If we buy the glass, we absolutely are on top of that and require that.
But ⁓ like anything, I think being a smart consumer ⁓ and knowing a little bit about the provenance of what you're buying, whether it's food or ⁓ makeup or skincare or a candle, ⁓ the industry does a good job of policing itself. But if you see a product that ⁓ looks questionable or looks low quality, or if you're burning it yourself and you
We've seen pictures of candles where the consumers throw in their match into it afterwards and it leaves that there. That's poor practice. just as I had heard a comparison once, if you're a consumer using a frying pan, the expectation is the frying pan gets hot. You need to treat it like it's hot. A candle does have open flame and you need to treat it as if it has open
speaker-1 (32:54)
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it's still fire. And so, you obviously you employ tons of scientists and engineers, you know, as we've spoken about here. And from the outside, you know, it seems like something that's very straightforward and simple, but obviously there's a lot of complexity. In my world, it's the same way, right? We talk about genomic numerous screening. It's like, we should just do it. But when you unpack the details about what it takes to actually do it, it's like very complex, very challenging questions that are still unanswered.
So from your perspective, what's a candle problem that seems trivial to consumers but is technically complex at scale?
speaker-0 (33:34)
Excellent. Well, I'd probably go back to, it's technically a difficulty at scale. Well, I hesitate to use the same sort of twice, but I'm going to draw on the consistency of product across fragrances. So the consumer will go and she'll smell a small pine fragrance or she'll smell maybe it's a mint fragrance.
⁓ And that will burn very differently than the clove heavy fragrance. And she doesn't really know. She just wants a candle, a candle that performs. But the idea of a really deep clovey fragrance, boy, those burn hot. There's the chemicals that make that, that your nose sense that as clove or cinnamon. Those are really hot, not to perform. ⁓
a hot performance once it gets into that, into the environment of a flame. So there are at times, ⁓ many brands, sizable brands will have a couple of candle filters that work for them just for supply chain reasons. And there are times where we'll find out that we're being shipped a fragrance that another supplier couldn't make work or couldn't get to work. And that's a feather in our cap. I also know...
Well, it's good for business, but it's also absolutely a technical challenge. ⁓ our goal is that the consumer has no awareness of what happens upstream, but invariably will bring people through our factory and our labs. they say, wow, I had to a person, I had no idea that this much was involved in making a candle.
speaker-1 (35:26)
I mean, it sounds like it, right? I mean, as you're talking and even in the very beginning of the interview, you talked about getting raw materials from, you know, from India and other places around the world. So I would imagine even like geopolitics plays a role into your business, right? You're a major manufacturer. You're getting products that you have supply chains coming from all over the world. And so any geopolitical shifts or tariffs or any of these different macroeconomic kind of factors.
probably like throw you for a loop pretty often, right?
speaker-0 (36:00)
Yeah,
no, I mean, we have an excellent supply chain group that monitors that. I'm glad I'm not one of them ⁓ because indeed the world changes ⁓ frequently. ⁓ sometimes it's in hours, at least it is now. There are products you just can't buy in the United States, hand blown glass, faceted glass.
You have to go to a region where that skill is because those skills are no longer, the craftsmanship is no longer here. ⁓ But there are also less temporal factors. So, a macro trend is sustainability, right? And so we see that, we talked about innovation. We have some brand partners who are interested in creating a recyclable.
candle. And so it's not that the container is recyclable per se, but that you can actually buy a refill. ⁓ so you consume one candle all the way out. There's a means to remove whatever residue and you pop, easy to say, but you pop another ⁓ billet of candle material in. ⁓ That's a fantastic innovation. Unless you save the glass, it may be a beautiful piece of glass and reuse that.
A number of years ago, concerns were raised about how palm oil was being sourced in regions where that's grown. So palm oil comes from palm trees, from the palm tree groves, grown in equatorial regions. Well, there are places on the planet where the oversight years ago was not fantastic for that. And the equivalent of, you know,
You and I are about the same age, but if you remember talking about ⁓ deforestation, right? ⁓ Chopping down the rainforest was big when we were young. ⁓ I'm not an expert on what was actually happening, but ⁓ that raises a concern, and so palm oil gets a bad name, and people don't want to consume it. Well, there are now very responsible
supply chains and growers of palm or suppliers of palm. And we can see that certification come through. ⁓ And frankly, the sanitizing agent in enabling that supply chain to become much cleaner has been transparency. So I can think of one supplier that actually has a website that does reports and audits on the growers. And you can see the amount coming from.
each one and when the last audit was and are they being sustainable both on from a natural resources standpoint but also human standpoint? Which I think, you and I might share with you some thoughts on this as well as a manufacturer, whether you're producing palm oil in Indonesia or Malaysia or you are a manufacturer in the United States, know, taking care of the people along the way is and making sure it's a
sustainable cooperative relationship for both you and them. I think, you when you talk about trends, that's certainly a trend in manufacturing is something that we've embraced for a number of years, before it was popular to really take care of your people. think that's incredibly important as well.
speaker-1 (39:39)
For sure, you know, and actually as you talk about people ⁓ in my career obviously and speaking generally for everybody, know companies and the products that you you know create and the innovation that you do all of it stems from the at the core teams and people and culture and you know, I'm curious like what's what's the culture like? I mean as we've talked about this I can't help again from a very naive perspective
I think you're somewhere in between and I can't say which end either like at the far end of like a very formalized and rigid like biochemistry environment like a pharmaceutical company but all the way to the other extreme of potentially like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, know people that just love their product. They're passionate about it. They know everything about it down to the chemistry, but it's like something that they live for the chocolate, right? And so and I'm like, man, where do you guys live because you're very hardcore in the science, but this is also a very emotional field.
So what's your culture look like? What kind of culture do you try to build into your organization? ⁓
speaker-0 (40:42)
Fantastic. I love that. I ⁓ love the Willy Wonka comparison, ⁓ which I appreciate more than the Lucy and the Chocolate Factory. As a manufacturer, you need to be fairly right angled when it comes to quality, not just safety and R &D, but all the way through the manufacturing process.
that is uncompromising, ⁓ not just for the product that you make, but also frankly, to be competitive in the United States, you can't have sloppy operations, right? You've got to be pretty disciplined. ⁓ We're a small business and you talked to some fast, I mean, you have fantastic guests and I absolutely applaud you for that. And I wouldn't surprise me that we're the smallest business that you've talked with or may ever talk with. ⁓
But in the things we do so that our employees, with great intentionality, so our employees feel like we're a small business. But on the theme of innovation, ⁓ we did something a number of years ago that had not been done in manufacturing. And that's brain mindfulness techniques. And we would use a term called conscious leader.
ship ⁓ that a friend of mine in California ⁓ helped create. ⁓ She did a great deal of writing on and then brought a number of principles forward. ⁓ But we were amongst the first, I think we were probably the first to bring these mindfulness principles to the factory floor. And by that, mean ⁓ enabling us to ⁓ have a common dialogue, common language amongst office and churn. So for example,
One of our principles is teaching radical responsibility or set another way. People need to show up. And as long as we have, whether you're an hourly worker on the floor or you're a middle manager or you're somebody on the executive side, ⁓ how you portray and the values you create, you show every day are based on how you show up.
If I show up and I'm like, it's not my fault or I'm grousing or whatever, that's, know, that doesn't start with us. ⁓ that doesn't work. You can come in and say, I'm having a bad day. I'm or I'm coming in a bad place today. I need some support. Okay. Great. ⁓ we, we, can work with that. we also teach people how to speak with candor, but in a heart forward way so they can speak their truth. Right. I'm observing.
this that's speaking inarguably, saying you're doing the wrong thing or you said this and what? No, that's not, you know, that's may or may not be true, but you can say, observed you saying this or I, ⁓ I believe something else. and when you teach people on the floor to have some of these commonality of languages that, ⁓ commonalities in their choice of language, ⁓
that maybe people like you and I, we picked this up in other circles, but for somebody who's making $25 an hour, that may be new. And as we found as we started teaching people this, this goes all the way back to 2016 when we had some significant cultural challenges, especially in our New Hampshire plant. We had some bad hires and people.
if there was a way to manage or weaponizing people's jobs and threatening so forth. So we parted ways with that individual as we figured out what was going on, but we needed some radical medicine. ⁓ And that radical medicine was getting people into this this format. But what we discovered is as we taught people how to pause, how to slow down their mind so they may feel triggered, but they can.
take a breath and wait for their frontal lobe to catch up. ⁓ And we give techniques for even, as I said, even our hourly people to understand what's going on. We find the temperature of the factory lowers ⁓ and that people are able to solve problems more readily. You're Yeah. That was excellent. Kate Kendall humor is always gets me.
speaker-1 (45:07)
Figuratively speaking.
speaker-0 (45:17)
But there was a study done by a guy named James Fowler. He's a professor at UC San Diego. I referenced this in a talk I gave a couple of years ago. Yeah, it's been a couple of years now. He took data from the Framingham Heart Study, which is up in our direction from EMS. It dates back to 1949. It was a longitudinal study, 5,000 people.
You know, I actually don't know much about the cardiac side of what the data were that they collected, but what, uh, what Fowler did is he took using current data analysis tools. He took that body of data and looked at it differently. Turns out not only, no doubt they collected data on cardiac events, but they also collected a tremendous amount of demographic information and network information. So of the 5,000 people.
They knew not only who you were, who your family members were, but they could figure out who your neighbors were, who you went to church with, who you socialized with, on and on and on and on. And Dr. Fowler and his team were able to network map that out. And they discovered certain behaviors, I shouldn't say certain behaviors, really the behaviors that they could track impacted not just one degree around you.
but three degrees around you. So if you smoke or you're unhappy or you're depressed, not only are you more likely to have your kid be depressed, but so is your kid's best friend's mom. So playing a little loose with the math, if you have 10 close contacts, then on order of a thousand people get impacted by your behavior. Now, what I believe is, and I could tell you more stories of employee impact.
When we teach mindfulness techniques that people, ⁓ help people manage life, make better decisions, more frequently engage their executive function. ⁓ and as I said, you know, lowers the temperature in the factory, but it will people using the same techniques will lower their temperature at home in that conflict. ⁓ what we find, what we believe is what I believe is.
In these small towns, if you're a manufacturer in these small towns, you may be the one or one of a couple employers that have a huge impact on the lives of the people in your community because they all have this shared experience. Well, if you make that shared experience different, higher quality, leading to better decisions, leading to better outcomes and behaviors, then for our employee base, which may be in our case, we employ
400 plus people. We're now impacting, you know, up to a thousand people subject to overlap, a thousand people for each one of those employees. ⁓ And I think that's a fantastic, you know, I started, said earlier to whom much is given, much is, much is expected. You know, our ability to, and I would be very excited to see other manufacturers adopt this as well. Our ability to help.
subtly shape the behaviors of our people in these communities, I think can have a fantastic outcome for the much greater society.
speaker-1 (48:48)
Yeah, that's extraordinary. As you were talking, I was thinking about drops in a a pond and the, you know, the the ripples that spread out beyond that. And, you know, if you if you choose correctly and you manage it properly, the effects that you can have through an entire society could be tremendous, definitely at the local level, but even beyond that. So this actually is a great segue to the last question. I'm going to join two different questions just for the sake of time. One was I kind of alluded to in the beginning, how do you get into this field? You know, it seems like
⁓ An interesting field for sure, but it doesn't necessarily track with your background, know, technically engineering and then business ⁓ and then as a in addition to that if you could fast forward into the future way past, you know the the effects that you're doing right now but at a point where you could look back in your career and reflect and everything that you've achieved in the full impact that you were capable of what changes to the industry to the company lean or in the communities that you touch would give you the deepest sense of fulfillment
speaker-0 (49:47)
Well, thank you. So how I got into this, almost by accident. In my career, if I did have a resume, it would look a little more like a random walk between, I actually started off in the pharmaceutical industry as a process engineer, and then I went to MBA school and did a tech startup, which taught me small operations.
and managing an adventure environment, if you will. ⁓ And then did some other technical work and found myself in candles. But each one of those things really does apply, right? From the science and engineering early on, is how, myself with a tech team, we've been able to, I can speak that language. ⁓ Obviously the business education has been helpful, but also managing small.
in small environment and how do you think about risk? ⁓ Taking this off for business and how we scale with candles here. So, like I say, it was a happy coincidence. My partner and I did a fundless sponsor search. We looked at thousands of opportunities, asked for 180 ⁓ books, talked with 50 intermediaries, had calls with about 20 sellers, wrote eight letters of intent. Two of them were really
businesses we really wanted and closed on one candle business in southern New Hampshire. ⁓ So that's how we got into it and it was a good fit for my partner who ⁓ had worked on the ⁓ sales or the channel side of ⁓ supplying retail for most of his career. ⁓ So he knows everybody in the gift and home industry which fits perfectly and to me it's a widget.
right? And it happens to be a field goal widget, right? It wouldn't be as much fun if we're making carburetors or, you know, some other other product opportunities. But the the looking back legacy or the impact, you know, some of the impact I think we've already had, we've already talked a lot about safety, right? And that was work we did safety and consistency and quality. That's work we did really born out of a problem.
It was a really painful problem. had candles that were being returned and we were paying money to buy those back. We didn't understand why they weren't working and we discovered that bean story. There are different takes on that. But I think also this comment about impacting communities and employee lives. I'd offer an anecdote about
A couple of powerful anecdotes that we've seen internally, but ⁓ one to share here ⁓ about the role of manufacturing in the United States and the impact it can have. have an ⁓ in New Hampshire who told me a story of his background. He remembers ⁓ being in first grade, being at court and standing next to his ⁓ mother or father in court and the judge saying to his father,
I'll see if I can get through the story without choking up. Judge said to his father, sir, you're going to need to decide between ⁓ being a parent and heroin. And the father said, well, he looked down at his son and said, well, if it's matter of being a parent to this one, then I choose heroin.
So that individual, ⁓ later on, he was in ⁓ junior high, and he remembers being driven to baseball practice by his then stepfather, and he would, or to a game, and he'd be picked up from the game, and he might've had, ⁓ you might've ⁓ had four bats, three of them were base hits, multiple base hits.
And he had a, you know, if he had a strikeout on the fourth and his stepfather would only want to talk about the strikeout. Um, he was actually, he was a wrestler in high school and had in his weight class was hitting. In fact, three years in a row, he said he came in second in state. you can imagine what was said over the dinner table after that third, uh, second place finish. his stepfather said, well, gosh, you sure would have been great if one of these years you could come in first.
So that's teen and found himself sleeping in high school dugouts in the summer and breaking into houses in the garages in the winter to keep warm. And ⁓ eventually he fell in with a tough crowd, sat in dealing drugs, right? He's a pretty industrious kid. ⁓ And the drug dealers would give him drugs. He'd go away for the day, whatever, come back with cash and say, ⁓ good job. It turns out the drug dealers were the first
people in authority, the first individuals, the first adults in authority that looked him in the eye and said, good job.
speaker-1 (55:09)
No kidding. Wow.
speaker-0 (55:11)
And so you think about that this really informed the work we did and we've done internally because every employee deserves to be seen and heard and listened to and valued. And if we do nothing else as management in my little, this little candle company, but to teach our supervisors and our managers to look people in the eye and treat them with respect and have them be seen. ⁓
we do nothing else than that, we will have had a tremendous impact. Because indeed, some of our people, this may be the only job they hold, it was a job that is now not only giving them a career, but it's where they do feel like they have a place they were being seen. And so I offer this up because manufacturing in the United States is in a unique situation. We're, gosh, I don't know the number now, 9%, 14%, whatever the workforce.
Uh, it'd been an important part of the economy, but that nine or 14 % that we touch is, you know, these aren't Google employees, right? These are people who, um, may have been on a very different path, uh, and for us to give these people a chance and, um, treat them with respect. Not only is that human, but it is a, uh, a benefit for everyone. As I said in the Fowler story, you know,
us giving this young man an opportunity. He's now been with us probably 18 years now, ⁓ and he's moved up and he has positions and he's making a fine wage. ⁓ But there are other versions of the story that don't turn out that way. And I think we're in a position to help shape many of those stories.
speaker-1 (56:58)
Well, that's extraordinary. Definitely like a human story behind this and in many ways giving people a second chance at life, you know, that society hasn't been able to do and you guys are doing so in a very localized way. all this, Rod, it's been extraordinary. I we're past our time, so I apologize for that, but it's been great getting to know you. You're field better. Thank you so much for your time. And I hope that we can have this conversation again in the future over a drink and maybe some candles.
speaker-0 (57:22)
I would love that, Thank you so much. It's been a complete pleasure.
