Your first year, month by month

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated October 2026

On this page5

Weeks one to four Months two and three Months four to six The rest of the year References

Sequenced around the two things that take time: the cure and the testing.

Weeks one to four

Choose one wax and one vessel. Buy three wick sizes and two fragrances.

Pour test candles at your chosen load, three wick sizes per fragrance.

Cure them for two weeks. That wait is the whole first month, and trying to shorten it invalidates everything after.

Months two and three

Burn test, properly, in four-hour cycles to the bottom, recording every cycle.

Settle the wick per fragrance. Expect at least one to need a second round.

Meanwhile settle the vessel, the lid and what the label has to carry, and confirm the label fits below the fill line.

Order a small quantity of labels, accepting a poor unit price.

Months four to six

First production runs, remembering the two-week cure before anything can be sold.

First sales somewhere with direct feedback: a market, a fair, a few local shops.

Three fragrances at most. You are finding out which sells, and a range of nine costs nine times the testing.

The rest of the year

Drop what does not sell. Commit to vessel and label volume only now.

Start testing the fall and winter fragrances by midsummer, because a fourth-quarter range has to be tested, cured and in stock before the quarter starts.

That last point is the one that catches first-year makers: the season everyone sells in is the season you cannot develop in.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for candles, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.

Written from the federal regulation, the CPSC material and the published scope of the ASTM candle standards. The standards themselves are copyrighted documents that must be bought; what is described here is their scope and requirements as published, not their text. Your own burn testing against your own vessel and wick is what establishes whether a candle you made is safe.