The Botanical Candle Co

THE BOTANICAL CANDLE COMPANY

Words Claire Bowman Photography Katharine Davies

It is mid-morning in the candle workshop of the Botanical Candle Company and the air is redolent of vine tomato, sage and basil. Row upon row of creamy white Greenhouse candles in amber jars are gently curing, having been poured the day before. A sweet-smelling hive of activity, the workshop team is working at full tilt, meticulously applying labels to lids and jars with evocative names such as Half Light, Quiescence and Laundry Day, tying moss-green linen ribbons to Candle Crackers, and adding cotton and linen wicks to scented tea lights. Meanwhile, across the road, the dispatch team prepares orders in the light-filled studio above the shop. If there is a buzzier place to be on a rainy October morning, I’d like to know about it. >

‘The eight weeks leading up to Christmas is our peak trading season, with close to 1,800 candles poured a week,’ says co-founder Amalia Pothecary, who started the Botanical Candle Company with her partner James Osborn in 2015. Alongside goodie-crammed candle crackers and advent calendars, the company has just released their seasonal Winter Light candle collection, ‘the cornerstone of our business’ says Amalia. The collection includes Half Light, with notes of clementine and clove (‘so nostalgic, it smells like childhood’); First Light, which smells of eucalyptus and myrtle (‘beautifully peppery and green, just like hanging a fresh wreath on your door’); and Last Light, which is made from essential oils of cinnamon and rosemary (‘all the sweetness and spice of Christmas’).

As well as their strikingly stylish black-fronted shop on The Commons in the heart of Shaftesbury, the company has a thriving mail-order business and supplies 200 stockists up and down the country, from Durslade Farm Shop in Bruton to as far afield as Norway and Australia. Ethically and sustainably produced with plastic-free packaging, the hand-poured soy wax candles are free of beeswax, palm oil and paraffin – the ingredient that alerted Amalia to the idea of making her own candles in the first place. ‘It intrigued me that my favourite candle could give off such a horrible black smoke. I remember jumping onto Google to find out just why that was, and the more I looked into it, the more I thought, ‘Why would a luxury candle be made of such a cheap, destructive material like paraffin?’ It’s like burning petrol in your home with all the health implications that go with it.’

Being a ‘tactile, hands-on person who loves making things’, Amalia ordered a few kilos of soy wax flakes made in North America from vegetable soybeans and decided to start making candles as presents at her kitchen table – a ‘side hustle’, as she calls it, to the couple’s fulltime jobs working together at a local hamper company. Buoyed by the enthusiastic response from friends and family, they started to look into ways they could improve on the technique and grow their fledgling business.

‘It took a lot of practice and we really went into the science of doing it properly, with the right wicks and equipment, but when we started getting it right we took them to Frome Independent Market and started selling on Etsy,’ says James, who is the business yin to Amalia’s creative yang. ‘We’re opposite brains,’ he explains. ‘For 20 years I worked in logistics and stock management.’

Presented in beautiful vintage vessels such as French enamel canisters and tins, jelly moulds and marmalade jars, the candles were an instant hit with locals, many of whom would get up early to secure the pick of the litter. In 2017, finding it ever harder to stay engaged with the day job – and with one eye on the mortgage they had taken a few years earlier – Amalia decided to ask a financial adviser friend if he could look at the books and see if they could make enough money to make a go of it. His response was just the encouragement they needed. ‘Hey, this is very promising. If you ever need any >

investment, let me know,’ remembers Amalia. ‘Suddenly I realised that maybe the business did have legs after all.’

Five years, expanded premises and tens of thousands of amber jars later, the Botanical Candle Company now counts actor Daisy Edgar-Jones and Nigella Lawson among its customers. It now sells not only candles but beautiful homeware too, from Charlotte Miller brushstroke match pots, and Farm Soap Co. natural soaps from Abbotsbury to hand-blown glassware from La Soufflerie in Paris. Passionate Francophiles, ‘we should have been born French,’ laughs Amalia, the couple have recently returned from a brocante trip to Amiens in Picardy, where they filled their estate car with eclectic vintage finds, including huge rustic wine bottles that James plans to convert into lamps.

With close to 74,000 followers on Instagram, drawn to their daily glimpses of life behind the scenes in the candle workshop and dispatch studio, it is no wonder that customers are prepared to travel from far and wide just to breathe in the shop’s heady atmosphere and essential oils, and return home with a candle or three. ‘We recently had a lovely couple fly all the way from Brazil just to see us. As soon as they arrived in London they caught the train down to Gillingham and came to see the team, including our eight-year-old rescue collie, Paddy. The team is my biggest source of pride,’ says Amalia. ‘Paddy, in fact, has become a bit of a superstar in his own right. We have people coming into the shop just to say hello and bring him a dog biscuit.’

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the market town of Shaftesbury is picture-postcard pretty, with Gold Hill and its steep, cobbled streets, thatched cottages and panoramic views of the bucolic Dorset countryside. Or that the Botanical Candle Company is in good company for browsing shoppers, with a handful of similarly stylish independent shops on the high street and the Grosvenor Hotel across the road. Since lockdown, Amalia says, she has noticed an increasing number of new faces popping up across the town. ‘James and I both grew up around here and went to school locally so after a while you get to know everyone. You can spot the people from out of town, walking around, browsing, taking it all in. It makes you feel quite proud.’

‘The black shop front could possibly look a bit dark and intimidating if you don’t know us,’ says Amalia, but this is far from the reality of their affable and inclusive approach to business. The couple are already planning the Christmas window display to include a selection of inexpensive gifts displayed on antique children’s easels. ‘We just think that keeping our feet on the ground is really important, not just for the team but for our customers,’ says Amalia. ‘We want people to be able to step into our shop and discover something that won’t cost a fortune to bring happiness and that cosy glow that everyone’s craving right now.’ Something tells me they won’t be disappointed.