Keeping the flame alive

BENNINGTON — John and Amber Fisher are confident Ardent Flame, which they own, is the largest candle producer in Vermont. For now, the manufacturing operations take place in a converted bedroom in their home.

"Our whole house smells like what is being poured that day," said Amber Fisher, sitting at the dining room table inside 213 Gage St. on a recent afternoon when candles were not being produced. "Luckily, it's a very pleasant scent."

The Fishers bought Ardent Flame in January. They were friends with the company's founder, Connor Reed, and had peppered him with questions about candle-making ever since he launched the business in 2019. He also ran it out of a Bennington house.

On the last night of 2022, Reed and the Fishers had gathered with other friends to participate in a game night. When Reed mentioned he was interested in leaving the candle industry and starting a new e-commerce business, the Fishers huddled and discussed buying Ardent Flame.

"We were looking for something to do," Amber Fisher said. She had been running the escrow and listing departments for the real estate brokerage owned by her parents.

"I'm very creative. John is, also. So, it needed to be something that I was going to be using my creative brain for, and my hands for."

Ardent Flame became theirs on Jan. 4.

The COVID-19 pandemic was good for many online sellers, and Ardent Flame under Reed sold its candles exclusively through e-commerce.

Caramel coffee bean, the first scent offered for sale, remains the top seller, according to the Fishers. All the candles weigh 8 ounces and come in glass jars.

In addition to continuing online sales – fulfillment is handled by Amazon.com – the Fishers began offering Ardent Flame products through brick-and-mortar retailers. There are 13 stores, including in Burlington and Albany, N.Y., which now stock the candles and the owners hope to grow this number before the end of the year.

“This is a Vermont-made product,” John Fisher said. “People want that when they go to Vermont – they want something handmade and they want some quality to take home with them and have that connection.”

The owners said the candle company’s revenues had exceeded their expectations since they took over the business.

“We’ve increased in sales every single month since the same month of last year,” Amber Fisher said. “And that’s just on the online sales.”

Amber Fisher devotes all her working hours to Ardent Flame. She pours every candle. Her husband handles the marketing, including leading the outreach efforts designed to increase their company’s retail footprint. He also helps with packaging the candles and attends assorted festival events around the region. The Fishers tow their displays and inventory in a black trailer that’s liveried with Ardent’s name and website, ardentflamecandles.com.

“Even before we bought this, we always loved candles,” Amber Fisher said. “I love scents, too.”

The scale is small but the manufacturing is real. Raw materials in the form of boxes of wax flakes and bottles of fragrance oils are brought into 213 Gage St. The flakes are liquefied using a Digiboil, a repurposed home beer brewing vessel that resembles the tall metal cylinders from which the staff of Red Cross canteens drew coffee for thirsty G.I.'s in World War Two.

"We blend two oils together for each scent that we offer," said Amber Fisher, standing inside her pouring studio. Fragrance oils are stored in white plastic jugs on shelves at the far end of the room. These had been turned towards the wall, to hide their names from a visitor's eyes. The Fishers also refused to divulge how much oil is added to each candle.

"That's our secret sauce," John Fisher said.

When he sold Ardent Flame to the Fishers, Reed included his formulations for the 11 scents in the company's candle stable. This intellectual property, John Fisher said, is the company's most important asset.

Four new scents - perfected after much experimentation and trial and error - have been added since Ardent Flame changed hands. They are oak campfire, maple sugar shack, sweet orange blossom and strawberry coconut cake.

The newest scent, winter balsam, will be introduced later this month.

Waxes, which are made from soy, are sourced from Golden Wax, out of Kentucky. They arrive as flakes which look like thin slices of cheddar cheese. The Fishers said they purchased only U.S.-made materials and finished goods to use in making and packaging their candles.

The waxes, the oils, the boxes, the labels and the jars are all made in the United States.

"That’s really important to us, too,” Amber Fisher said. “We're creating a job for somebody here."

It takes about four hours to get the wax ready for pouring. Amber Fisher does nine candles at a time, in 108-candle batches having the same scent.

When the wax is suitably pliable, Amber Fisher adds the closely held amount of fragrance oil and then dispenses the concoction into the candle jars. A pancake pourer is used for extruding the scented wax.

Wicks are inserted into the wax and held in place by an ice cream stick which spans the jar and is removed after the wax hardens.

There is no automated manufacturing inside 213 Gage St. There are some tools, like the pancake pourer and the Digiboil, but manual steps are necessary for pouring and labeling and packaging the candles.

"It's all done by hand," Amber Fisher said.

“We hand-pour these,” John Fisher said, “and that is something we will never change.”