A Mississippi candle maker and a scent called Volcano.

Capri Blue is a candle and home-fragrance brand that grew up in Starkville, Mississippi. For most of its history it belonged to DPM Fragrance, a Starkville company that also made Aspen Bay Candles. In a March 2015 question-and-answer feature with the Mississippi stationery company Thimble Press, DPM said it had “proudly called Starkville its home for the last 20 years,” and that Starkville was where many of its craftsmen were raised. It described a team that would “design, delicately pour, and proudly package” every candle, and a company store in the heart of downtown Starkville. Capri Blue’s own website today says only that it has worked in fragrance and design “for over 20 years.”

The trade magazine Happi named Tom Reed as the founder of DPM when it reported on the company’s merger in August 2016. Happi also reported that DPM was known for developing and hand-pouring candles for several other luxury brands, alongside its own Capri Blue and Aspen Bay lines. In the 2015 interview DPM said its designers looked for ideas by travelling, by visiting antique markets and by following fashion and design trends, and that it aimed to sell products crafted in the USA. Happi named two DPM fragrances as its signatures: Volcano and Aloha Orchid, both, it said, found in Anthropologie and other specialty shops.

The brand is known above all for one scent, Volcano. Capri Blue’s website calls it “a cult favorite” with notes of “sugared citrus.” In June 2021 PureWow reported that Volcano had been sold in Anthropologie stores since 2001 and that the retailer was marking twenty years of carrying it; the article said shoppers had come to call it “the Anthro scent.” PureWow quoted the official description — tropical fruits, sugared oranges, lemons and limes, with “lightly exotic mountain greens” — and Anthropologie’s merchandising manager Catherine Moellering, who put the appeal down to “a beautiful vessel, a really great scent” and the scent becoming part of the shops themselves.

From DPM to Curio.

The vessel matters as much as the scent. Capri Blue’s website describes the Volcano signature candle as “finished in our iconic blue glass jar with a sleek silver lid,” praises the jar’s “striking cobalt blue hue,” and calls the Signature Blue Jar “the iconic vessel that started it all.” In 2018 the investor Castanea Partners wrote that the brand is “celebrated by its cult following for the brand’s trendy packaging and iconic fragrance, Volcano,” that it draws on contemporary fashion trends for new collections, and that its vessels and fragrances are “a fan-favorite at Anthropologie.” Castanea listed its other channels as its own website, Nordstrom, Amazon and specialty shops.

In 2016 DPM merged with Thymes, the Minneapolis fragrance company, to create CURiO. Castanea dates the merger to January 2016; Happi reported it on 17 August 2016, saying the combined company would sell under three core brands — Aspen Bay Candles, Capri Blue and Thymes — and that terms were not disclosed. Thymes had received investment from Castanea Partners, RCP, Stanfield Capital and Northstar in December 2014, Happi said. Thymes’ chief executive Anne Sempowski Ward continued as CEO of the new company, and Tom Reed joined its board. Happi described Thymes as a gift-market company with more than 30 years of history, known for fragrances such as Goldleaf and Frasier Fir; the merger paired its bath, body and seasonal lines with DPM’s strength in candles, Ward said.

Ownership has changed once more since. In December 2021, according to the investment bank Baird, which advised on the deal, CURiO — then a portfolio company of Castanea and Stanfield — was acquired by York Capital, terms undisclosed; Baird described it as headquartered in Minneapolis and selling under the Capri Blue and Thymes brands. In June 2023 Curio Brands bought the New York candle brand Otherland, Retail Dive reported, with Ward quoted as chief executive and Capri Blue and Thymes named as the rest of the portfolio.

Candles and home fragrance.

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.

A colour in the name, a scent on the shelf.

Curio kept a manufacturing base in Starkville after the merger. In February 2023 the Columbus, Mississippi, television station WCBI reported that Curio Brands would close its manufacturing plant on Lynn Lane in Starkville, with production stopping immediately and 27 salaried and hourly employees laid off; the company said it would place more focus on its Highway 12 location in the town.

The range has grown well beyond candles. Capri Blue’s website now sells reed diffusers, room sprays, bath and body products, and dish soap, surface cleaners and laundry care, and its Volcano range spans candles, diffusers, home care and beauty; it also sells refills for Pura’s plug-in diffusers. A newer Artisan line takes Italian names, among them Caffè Capri, Luce d’Amalfi and Terrazza. The site’s banner still invites shoppers to “discover our iconic Volcano scent.”

For a design guide, Capri Blue shows how one colour and one scent can carry a brand from a Mississippi workshop into national retail and across product categories. Compare Thymes, its sister brand at Curio, and Voluspa, a California candle brand founded in 1999. For this guide we use cobalt, silver and a citrus orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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