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Candle making
All Containers›Shop by use case›Candle making›Growing the operation›The contractShop all candles →
Growing the operation

The contract

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

Four clauses carry the weight. The rest is ordinary commercial terms.

Who owns the specification

Say it plainly: the specification is yours, it is confidential, and it will not be poured for anyone else.

Ask also for the scaled process back, including any adjustments they made during scale-up. Without it you cannot move to another filler without re-developing.

Who is named on the label

Manufacturer, packer or distributor. It decides who is publicly responsible and it is expensive to change once labels are printed.

Settle it before artwork rather than at proof stage.

Acceptance and a bad run

Written criteria against your specification: fill weight tolerance, surface, color against a reference, wick position, and burn behavior on a sample.

Then who pays when a run fails them, materials, vessels, labor, disposal, and who decides.

Candles fail in ways that appear late: a batch can look perfect and tunnel. Agree what happens if a fault is found after delivery, because that is the realistic case.

Testing and records

Who burn tests, on what sample rate, and who holds the records.

You need copies. They are your evidence about your own product, and a departing relationship is a bad time to ask for them for the first time.

And require notice of any change to materials or process. A filler substituting a wax lot or a wick supplier without telling you has changed your product.

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.