Two fragrance-trade hands and a home kitchen.

Voluspa began in a home kitchen in Costa Mesa, California, in 1999. Its founders, Troy and Traci Arntsen, met through work in 1998, the Orange County Register reported in a profile carried by the Philadelphia Inquirer in March 2008: she worked for an aromatherapy company, and he for an importer of essential oils used in perfume. About a year later they began making and hand-pouring candles at home. The kitchen paid a price — “We destroyed the microwave and stove in the process,” the 2008 profile quotes them as saying — and getting the product right took roughly a year of experiments.

The Orange County Business Journal (OCBJ), in a September 2026 profile, adds that Troy Arntsen had worked as an industrial engineer at Cypress Semiconductor before moving into essential oils, joining a friend’s essential-oil company as a partner and travelling to India before the couple chose candles.

The first homemade candles were sold to local businesses under another name, Flame & Wax, according to the 2008 profile. OCBJ says the early stock went to boutiques around Orange County, that an early order came from the fashion house St. John Knits, then based in Irvine, and that an order from Saks Fifth Avenue followed. The 2008 profile calls Saks the first major client and says Traci Arntsen hand-sewed hundreds of velvet gift totes in three days to fill it; the 2015 interview in The Daily Front Row recalls early orders shipped in jewelled boxes and silk bags, made in the living room and sent out from the garage.

The name has been explained in two ways. In 2008 the company described it as meaning “Scandinavian goddess of wisdom,” a word Traci Arntsen found in a library. In 2026 Troy Arntsen told OCBJ that it comes from a poem in Norse mythology and means “beauty created from chaos.”

Glass, tin and a house fragrance library.

Voluspa’s look is built on its containers. The company sells candles in decorative glass and in tins, along with diffusers, room sprays and perfumes, OCBJ reported in 2026. In 2015 Traci Arntsen told The Daily Front Row that “all Voluspa candle glass is designed in-house and influences the final packaging design,” and that design ideas are paired with fragrance projects as they arise. The 2008 profile credited her with both fragrance creation and package design, and Troy Arntsen with developing the wax formula.

The wax is the company’s own. OCBJ says the candles are made from a coconut wax blend, a proprietary mix the company developed about seven years into the business. The 2008 profile describes hand-pouring from large pitchers, with wicks set by hand.

Fragrance is developed in-house too. The 2008 profile said Traci Arntsen had by then created more than 200 scents from a library of over 1,000 ingredients; in 2015 she described starting from a concept, having a lab build each ingredient, and combining ten to thirty of them in a single fragrance, with three to ten fragrances in a typical collection. OCBJ names Brittany Bell as the company’s director of fragrance and education.

The brand’s scents are sold in named collections. The company’s website lists Baltic Amber, Goji Tarocco Orange, French Cade Lavender and Mediterranean Lemon among its candles. In the 2015 interview Traci Arntsen said the launch of a collection called The Basic “established Voluspa as a year-round product.”

Collaborations have arrived only recently. Troy Arntsen told OCBJ that a range made with Universal Pictures for Wicked, in 2024, was the company’s first brand collaboration. A scent was later infused into a sunscreen by the skincare brand Coola, and on 17 September 2026 Voluspa launched a collection with the guitar maker Fender: three scents in a new glass container whose label takes the shape of a guitar pick, OCBJ reported.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make scented candles and home fragrance: Yankee Candle, NEOM, Homesick, Paddywax, Voluspa, NEST New York and LAFCO. Candle brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from founder-led companies that still pour under their original name to labels that now belong to much larger consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a supermarket aisle to a department-store counter.

A candle brand’s identity is usually carried less by the wax than by the vessel, the label and the name given to each scent, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the room where it started. A glass jar, a tin or a coloured tumbler often does the work a logo does elsewhere, and the names of the fragrances — places, seasons, memories — become part of the identity in their own right.

That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its candles are actually poured and its vessels 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 packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still poured in Orange County, the company says.

Voluspa has stayed in Orange County as it grew. After the home kitchen it leased a space of 800 square feet, later 1,900, OCBJ reported; it then worked from a warehouse in Lake Forest, described in the 2008 profile, before moving to Irvine in 2011. OCBJ says the company now designs, manufactures and distributes its fragrance products at an 84,800-square-foot facility in Irvine.

Voluspa says manufacturing locally is a choice. “We really have an obsession with our quality, and that’s why we’ve always manufactured here,” Troy Arntsen told OCBJ in 2026, adding that costs are lower elsewhere in the country. We give that as the company’s account.

For most of its history the brand sold through other shops — Fred Segal in Los Angeles in the early years, according to the 2008 profile, and later retailers including Nordstrom, named in the 2015 interview, and Bloomingdale’s and Anthropologie, named by OCBJ. OCBJ lists its own Orange County stores at Fashion Island, opened in 2019, Brea Mall and Irvine Spectrum Center. The same report names Troy Arntsen as president and says Traci Arntsen is no longer with the company; it does not describe any outside owner.

For a design guide, Voluspa shows how a candle brand can make the vessel its identity and has its glass designed in-house. Compare Paddywax, another American candle maker, and Lafco. For this guide we use umber, cream and antique gold with a decorative serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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