Tallowmere’s candles used to be numbered. Number 14 was everyone’s favourite, and nobody could remember it.
We wrote two hundred names and kept the ones you could say out loud in a shop without feeling silly. Fig leaf & cedar stayed. Midnight Reverie did not.
Two hundred names, twenty candles
The list started on a long sheet of paper on the studio wall. Anyone passing could add a name or cross one out. Within a week it had two hundred, and most of them were terrible, which is how a good list should look.
We kept the names that said what a candle smells like, in words people already use. Smoke, salt, fig, bread, rain on stone. Nothing that needed a perfume counter to explain it.
The out-loud test
Read the name to someone across a table. If they ask you to repeat it, or they smirk, cut it. It works for candles, apps and studios alike.
If you’d whisper it in a shop, it isn’t a name yet.
What the label had to do
Once the names worked, the label could get out of their way. The scent sits large, the batch number small, and the colour of the band tells you the family before you read a word.
Within a month, two of the shops that stocked them had moved the jars up to eye level. Nobody asked them to.
