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Candle-Making: Burn Tests

We love sharing moments of the candle making process as it’s something we’ve learned so much about in the past five years as part of running Keap. Whether we’re making 50 candles or 500 candles, we learned to always prioritize consistency in quality.

A critical part of this is what we term “Burn Tests”.

Because the raw materials we use in our candles (coconut wax and ingredients in our fragrance) come from nature, there can be some natural variation in the materials when they arrive. This leads to properties of our candles burn varying from batch to batch.

Every time we receive a new wax or a new batch of fragrance, we pour candles solely for Burn Testing. Burn Testing gives us the chance to see how a candle burns, to observe and note this for future reference, and to make sure it meets our quality standards.



We track a variety of characteristics, like how well the wick burns and the size of the melt pool of the wax. From there we determine whether we need to adjust the type of wick used. By creating standard ways we observe our candles we can spot noticeable differences that might occur from batch to batch.

It’s fun to look back at our early days, the lessons learned, and to see how they’ve becom the current Burn Testing procedures we use. It’s exciting to think how we can continue to improve these moving forward!


Warmly,
— Stephen

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