Curated Cozies

Beautiful yet practical lanterns inspired by nature, textiles, family traditions, and ancient texts.

By Nelia Raposo

When Dale Egan couldn’t find the perfect candle lantern for her daughter’s outdoor wedding centrepieces, she created it herself.

There’s an English proverb about how necessity is the mother of invention. In this case, a mother’s necessity created Lantern Cozies. Lantern Cozies are thin custom-designed wood covers that bend around a glass cylinder candle holder.

As an entrepreneur and Oakville resident whose unique artistic talent has been recognized by Martha Stewart and American TV personality Joelle Fletcher, Egan and her husband Jim operate this art-based business from home in what’s supposed to be their golden years. She jokes that they failed at retirement. “We’re project people. We’re just busy people and if we weren’t doing this, we would find something else to work on. It’s in our nature. We don’t sit down much,” she says.

Lantern Cozies are made with three types of wood: white oak, black walnut and maple, all of which are sourced in Canada. They sell on Etsy and in stores for between $70 to over $100. They’re interchangeable, meaning you can have several cozies with different designs and only one glass lantern. Depending on the season or your mood, you could have flowers dancing on your walls one evening or a shadow of a winter landscape the next. Custom designs are also available. Egan is working on keepsake Lantern Cozies for a wedding where she plans to combine a Jamaican hummingbird and a Portuguese rooster in honour of the bride and groom. “It’s meant to be like an affordable luxury. It’s meant to be something nice but not something you throw away. Something a little special,” Dale says.

After her own daughter’s garden party wedding was done, Egan decided to see if she could sell all the leftover Lantern Cozies she’d designed to a store on Main Street. To her surprise, the store owner accepted. “Initially I made Christmas ornaments, letterpress Christmas cards. I was so tickled with the idea that I could sell anything,” Egan says.

Then, COVID lockdowns happened in 2019. Egan decided to sell on Etsy since there was no other viable venue. “I was on Etsy for about three weeks and they contacted me to be part of a Creator Club with an influencer,” she says. During a phone conversation with Etsy reps, they told Egan “they’d never seen anything like them.”

She thought that the initial email request from Joelle Fletcher’s team was a scam. But it wasn’t, and online sales of Lantern Cozies took off. “Getting traction on Etsy is very hard. But we had that intro and then in combination with Black Friday in lockdown. It was quite busy,” she says.

Most recently, Martha Stewart added Lantern Cozies to her list of must-haves. When you visit the Lantern Cozies website, you’ll see Stewart’s face smiling back at you. “The way I see it, I could tell some guy changing the tires on my car that I sold my products on Etsy and he would have no clue what Etsy was. But if I told the same guy that my product had been curated by Martha Stewart he would be seriously impressed,” she wrote in her blog post about getting the business mogul’s seal of approval.

When Egan compared the first week of the Martha Stewart advertising campaign in March against the first week of the previous campaign with Joelle Fletcher, she saw that Martha sold 43 percent more lanterns.

For nearly three years now, online sales have been steady but last Christmas the Egans decided to try setting up a booth at a traditional craft market. She concedes most artisans work the other way by starting at craft shows and then moving the business online. They have also attended some trade shows.

This new way of selling her product came with a new set of challenges, including how to display and market the product. Egan opted for photos of the lit lanterns and had them enlarged. “My product is meant to have a candle in it, and you can’t have that at a craft show, so you’re showing your product but not in its best light patterns. But that’s fundamentally the problem, so I had photography. But people were really amazed because they’re very practical.”

Designs come to her in different ways, she may be inspired through her work for a local charity such as Lighthouse in Oakville or a special day on the calendar like Robbie Burns Day. Sometimes ideas run around in her mind for months like a squirrel trying to outrun a fox.

When asked what design she prefers the most, she picks the floral design. “I designed the flower one for my mother-in-law. She is an amazing gardener. She lived for her garden. I designed it as a tribute to her for Mother’s Day.”

For more info, visit: LanternCozies.com