A teenage hobby, resumed in 1993.

Village Candle began in 1993 in the kitchen of Paul Aldrich in Topsham, Maine. The company’s own history, as archived on its website in December 2012, says Aldrich had first made candles as a teenager in the 1970s, melting his mother’s leftover canning paraffin and pouring it into milk cartons, and that he took the hobby up again in 1993, while unemployed, working at a two-burner stove at home and reading up on candle-making at the local library. Family and friends asked for candles and suggested fragrances; the business itself, the company says, started almost by accident, when Aldrich stopped at a candle shop in Pennsylvania on a family trip with a car full of candles, and the shop placed the first order — the first, the company says, of orders from many thousands of retail stores.

The independent record begins soon after. In March 1997 the business journal MaineBiz reported, in an article by John N. Cole, that Village Candle had started four years earlier in Aldrich’s Topsham kitchen and was then working from 60,000 square feet at the Fort Andross mill in Brunswick. The company’s history fills in the moves: out of the house in 1994, a first “official home” at Sparhawk Mill in Yarmouth, then Brunswick from 1996, and in 1998 a 73,000-square-foot space with a custom-built factory. It later returned to Topsham for more than a decade before consolidating all operations in one building in Wells, Maine.

Aldrich, who described himself as a “start-up addict,” credited a book by Marsha Sinetar, Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow, with the decision to make a business of the hobby, the company’s history says.

Handmade in Maine, two wicks and a marbled finish.

The brand built its look around place. The same 2012 company history calls “Handmade in Maine” Village Candle’s “proud logo,” tying the candles to the state’s reputation for craftsmanship, from shipbuilding onward, and closing with the line that the candles were “made with old Yankee pride.”

Two product details set the candles apart in the company’s own telling. It described a technique for producing “marbling” that gave each candle a particular character, and its website at the time carried a customer page answering the question “Why two wicks?”. The company also called its packaging distinctive.

When Stonewall Kitchen announced the purchase in February 2020, its release summarised the range: classic apothecary jars and votives as well as more contemporary pillars and bowls, in waxes from paraffin to soy. It named Balsam Fir, Creamy Vanilla and Pure Linen as favourite classic scents and Black Bamboo, Rain and Eucalyptus Mint among newer ones. Stonewall Kitchen’s current brand page for Village Candle says its scents are “born in Maine,” refers to a “fragrance collective” in Wells, and says the wicks are hand-trimmed and each candle quality-checked before it ships; those are the company’s own descriptions.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all candle and home-fragrance names: Capri Blue, Colonial Candle, Village Candle, Maison Berger Paris, Root Candles, Thymes and Bridgewater Candle Company. Candle and home-fragrance brands sit at many different points in the trade, from family workshops that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a small gift shop to a department store or its own website.

A candle brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a fragrance name, a jar, a label and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its candles and fragrances are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its labels and packaging have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a founder’s firm to a specialty-foods family.

Village Candle changed hands in 2020. On 3 February that year Stonewall Kitchen, the specialty-food company of York, Maine, announced that it had completed its fourth acquisition by buying the Village Candle brand of fragranced candles, gifts and accessories. Its chief executive, John Stiker, said Stonewall Kitchen had long sold a small line of its own candles and that the deal brought in “an incredible assortment of specialty candles made ‘just up the road’ here in Maine”; the release said the Maine team would continue as part of Stonewall Kitchen. Stiker also drew the parallel between the two businesses: both, he said, had been selling for more than 25 years to many of the same retailers across the country and directly to customers online, and both mixed long-standing favourites with newer, more inventive lines. Stonewall Kitchen had itself been founded in 1991, Audax said. Stonewall Kitchen itself was then owned by the investment firm Audax Private Equity, which had bought a controlling interest from Centre Partners in August 2019; when Audax announced the sale of Stonewall Kitchen to TA Associates in March 2022, it listed Village Candle among five add-on acquisitions made during its ownership.

The most recent change concerns where the candles are made. On 16 October 2025 the Maine television station WGME reported that Stonewall Kitchen would close its candle manufacturing facility in Wells and move production of Village Candle products to the locations of Alene Candles, a manufacturer based in Milford, New Hampshire, under a new partnership, with the Wells factory expected to close by June 2026. Stonewall Kitchen’s chief executive, Don Kerrigan, said the transition would let the company “access new technologies, scale production more efficiently, and invest more in design and innovation.” We found no later report confirming the date the Wells plant closed.

For a design guide, Village Candle shows how a regional craft brand can carry its sense of place on the label even as ownership and production move. Compare Yankee Candle, another New England candle brand, and Colonial Candle. For this guide we use balsam green, vanilla cream and ember with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Village Candle’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.