Notes on a candle
Greetings from LHC HQ, where we are enormously grateful that The White Lotus discourse (i.e. the increasingly contentious debates that preceded every one of our internal Zoom calls) is over. Having rid ourselves of the infernal torment of Team Chelsea vs. Team I Hope They All Die, both our productivity and team morale have never been better.
Selections from LHC’s Slack
But enough about us and onto the #content that you’ve been craving…
Coins on the Mantle and Time in a Candle
Every holiday season since 2019, Lighthouse has gifted custom-made candles to friends of the company (as well as clients that we’re trying to get in good with). You might think that creating bespoke candles would be a simple endeavor, akin to ordering customized t-shirts online. We certainly thought that at the time. We were wrong. Very wrong.
LHC candles through the years (photo courtesy Nina Hazard)
And so in the interest of giving readers a look at the life of an amateur chandler*, we’re offering this oral history behind the creation of 2024’s signature creation, fantôme des bois.
Tallow-centric Discourse
Sam Slaughter (LHC Co-founder / Merch Lead): The candles have become a tradition for us, and it’s something I’ve gotten really passionate about. Some might say too passionate.
Jacquelyne Pierson (Project Manager): Last year, Heather [Freiser] helped manage the candle production, and after that experience she told Sam, “Nope – never doing that again.” So I guess I got roped into it.
Wax On, Wax Off
Slaughter: This time around we decided to work with a new candle maker. Last year our original collaborator was going through a very acrimonious, very public divorce, all documented on Instagram, and I think it affected her performance.
Pierson: As Sam explained it to me, “Yo! I know this girl. She lives in like East New York. I think she can do candles for us. Can you drive out there?” So Sam and I went to her apartment for a sniff test, where she laid out all of these different oils.
Pierson: So it turned out this new candle maker happened to be the ex-girlfriend of a friend of ours, so there… it felt like there was some ill will from the start.
Slaughter: In general, when you’re working with a with a candle maker, you expect some level of… I wouldn’t call it difficulty. But, you know, the kind of people that get into independent candle making are not team players. They’re artists. And I think what Jac experienced as acrimony was truly just artistic temperament. She really believes in her art.
Waxing Poetic
Slaughter: Scent-wise I was looking for something that felt like the combination of a pine forest in Southern France, with the desert just after rain. So we eventually angled from there into a palo santo and moss palate.
Pierson: There were about ten different scents that we were debating. Some were more floral, some woodsy, and some were vanilla. Apparently Sam does not like vanilla.
Taper Trail
Pierson: And then we had to source all the materials, the vessels and the wicks. Originally it was just going to be a simple matte black, but I pushed back on that. So there was some friction there. A lot of friction.
Slaughter: It was the choice of vessel that proved hardest. We’ve always gone with a very basic vessel in the past, but this year we opened up the process. And we quickly realized that the universe of vessels is incredibly vast, making any consensus nigh-on impossible.
You’ve got 20 different colors, 20 different sizes, 20 different shapes, matte or non-matte. That influenced the shape of the box that the candle would ship in, and then there were a ton of options there: specially printed tape, custom stamps…
Pierson: We finally settled on a white ceramic, but the candle maker had a problem with that, because the labels wouldn’t stick on to it. And then we had to consider that the shape and the size of the vessel affects the size and the type of the wick. Apparently the wick you get is also related to the fragrance volume. And frankly I didn’t have the bandwidth to solve all these problems.
Gaslighting Fixtures
Pierson: So Rich [Tong, Design Lead] creates the files for these beautiful labels, and the candle maker orders them for us and applies them to the vessels. And when she sends a picture of a candle, the label takes up the entire vessel, and the font is like four times as big as it should have been, because she entered the wrong dimensions when she got them printed.
Note the larger font size.
Slaughter: The labels didn’t look right, but honestly they looked OK. And we were running out of time.
Pierson: They looked terrible. They could not go out like that.
Slaughter: So then there was the debate around should we reprint the labels or consider it close enough? This is something only the most discerning client would notice, but, as you and I know, Lighthouse only works with the most discerning of clients. So we made it perfect for them.
Pierson: Unfortunately she had already put the label on all 100 of the candles, so that meant she had to peel all the old labels off, and carefully paste the new labels on. Our candle maker wasn’t happy about that. Understandably.
Burning Out
Slaughter: Shipping-wise the first hurdle was the South Williamsburg post office, which I believe, in actual fact, to be the worst post office in the whole of the United States. And then, because of our production delay, we were getting into the holiday shipping season where everything goes up in cost like 50%.
We went with Pegasus Express to send them out — I’ve got nothing but love for them. But the issue was getting 120 boxes of candles to their store. I’m trying to cram them all into my pickup truck like some insane Jenga — I had to drive over with my head out of the window because I couldn’t see otherwise.
And then the cost of shipping is deeply offensive, and I prefer we don’t talk about that. But the receipt was impressive.
The Afterglow
Slaughter: The feedback has been immaculate. A couple of different French speakers have really loved the French copy on the candles. I’m not even going to get into how much debate there was about the translation we would use, but it got very complicated.
One Wick Pony
Pierson: Next year we’re using Etsy and just being done with it. Etsy will make them, will ship them and we don’t have to do a thing.
Slaughter: I don’t know who told you it was going to be Etsy-based, but absolutely not, no chance. Who told you that? 
Things are happening
- LHC’s own Jesse is helping his daughter’s school raise money for Safe Passage, a Guatemalan-led NGO dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty. And did we mention it’s a danceathon? You can make a donation right here, and tell them Nora sent you.
- What if Letterboxd existed only for episodes of Columbo? Wonder no more! (Admittedly this is for a very select audience).
- Apparently em-dashes are considered a tell for ChatGPT generated text? The consensus here was unanimous — buffoonery.
An excerpt from famous chatbot-poet Emily Dickinson
Recent work
- Our LinkedIn newsletter for Rapid Ratings is a hit. The Risk & Resiliency Rundown helps keep companies alert to the latest risks in their global supply chain, subject matter that’s particularly relevant after “Liberation Day”. Subscribe here.
- Not only that, but one of our recent Rapid Ratings blog posts, “Stress testing the impact of tariffs, navigating volatility, and more”, scored a glowing recommendation from Forbes’ CEO Newsletter.