For about two years, everything I made meant something.
Every scent was named after a feeling I'd had on a bad night. Every label had a reason. People would pick up a jar at my table and I'd tell them the story behind it, and half the time one of us would get a little misty, and that was real and I'd do it again.
But somewhere in there I noticed I'd stopped making anything just because it was fun.
And then it was October.
Halloween fixed something in me
October is the one month where everyone agrees to be a little weird. Your neighbor puts a twelve-foot skeleton on the lawn. Grown adults dress as hot dogs. Nobody's trying to be aspirational. It's the least serious month of the year and it arrived right when I needed permission to be unserious.
So I made spooky candles. Not because they were on-brand, not because of a content calendar. Because I wanted to.
Spooky Season. Free Fallin' with apple cider. Pumpkin Sage. Sweater Weather. Apple Noir. Nothing in that lineup is about resilience. They're about it being dark at 5:30 and that being kind of great, actually.
And people bought them. A lot of them. Turns out my customers also wanted a month off from being brave.
The Salem collection
I made a Salem line for an event I did there, and it was genuinely one of the most fun things I've built.
October Nights in Salem. Witches Brew. Salem, Massachusetts — Est. 1692. And my personal favorite, Salem 1692: They Missed One, which has made more people laugh out loud at my table than anything else I've ever printed on a label.
They come in two scents — Free Fallin' (apple cider) and Pumpkin Sage — because those are the two that smell like standing outside in October in Massachusetts, which is the entire idea.
It's a special edition. When the run's gone, it's gone, and I'm not reprinting it in March. Salem in October is a specific thing and the candle should be too.
Shop the Salem Special Edition →
There's a witch joke in here somewhere
I'll say the obvious thing. A woman who got loud about what happened to her, in a department that would have preferred she stayed quiet, selling candles that say "they missed one" — yeah. I know. I picked it for a reason.
1692 was a town deciding certain women were a problem and handling it accordingly. I'm not going to overwork the metaphor. But when I put that label on a jar I definitely thought about a few specific people, and I felt great.
What October taught me about my own business
Here's the thing I actually want to say.
If your whole brand is your hardest moment, you have built yourself a job where you have to be in your hardest moment every single day. I did that for a while. I'd tell the story at every event, and some days it was fine, and some days I'd get in my car afterward completely wrung out.
My story isn't going anywhere. It's why the company exists. But I also want to make a candle called Fantasy Football Widow with "he said he'd be done after one game" on it, because that's funny and my customers are funny and we're allowed to have a good time.
Surviving and being silly are not opposites. Most of the strongest people I know are hilarious. That's usually how they made it.
What's in the shop right now
- The Fall Collection — Spooky Season, Free Fallin', Apple Noir, Sweater Weather, By the Fire, and the rest
- The Salem Special Edition — four labels, two scents, limited run
- Sunday Scaries — "because Monday is coming," and everyone who reads it makes the same face
- Fantasy Football Widow — self-explanatory
And no, there's no Halloween sale — I don't run them. What you see is what it costs, same as at my table.
Light something that smells like October. Put the skeleton on the lawn. It's allowed to just be fun.