South Hadley, 1969, and an abandoned mill in Holyoke.

Yankee Candle began in 1969 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, with Michael Kittredge II. The Daily Hampshire Gazette, reporting his death in July 2019, said he started the company “in his family home in 1969,” and English Wikipedia, citing CNN, gives the same town and year. The International Directory of Company Histories (volume 37, published in 2001) records the origin story the company has long told: at sixteen, Kittredge melted crayons and experimented with fragrances to make his first candle, and the candle-making that followed turned into a business.

The Directory also records the early moves. In 1973 the business went into a run-down, abandoned mill in Holyoke that had neither electricity nor running water. In 1983 its manufacturing and retail operations were relocated to South Deerfield, Massachusetts, which English Wikipedia still gives as the company’s headquarters. In the early 1990s production moved to a 300,000-square-foot plant in Whately, Massachusetts, and in 1993 the company opened what the Directory calls a “Bavarian Christmas Village” at South Deerfield, the store English Wikipedia describes as the brand’s flagship.

Kittredge did not keep the company. In 1998 the private-equity firm Forstmann Little recapitalised it, in a deal agreed in March that year, taking a 90 percent equity interest, according to the Directory, and in July 1999 Yankee Candle made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange. Modern Retail, in a 2025 history of the brand, put Kittredge’s time in charge at nearly 30 years. The Gazette reported that after a break from business he returned to candles in 2010, helping his son Michael Kittredge III launch the Kringle Candle Company in Bernardston, Massachusetts. He died in July 2019 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the paper reported.

From Forstmann Little to Newell Brands.

As a listed company, Yankee Candle widened its retail side. English Wikipedia, citing a Business Wire release of July 2006, says it bought Illuminations, a candle retailer based in Petaluma, California, that summer. On 6 February 2007 the private-equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners completed its acquisition of the company, according to the merger-completion release Wikipedia cites. In September 2013 The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe reported that the consumer-products group Jarden had agreed to buy Yankee Candle.

Jarden itself was then absorbed. When Newell Rubbermaid acquired Jarden in 2016, the combined business became Newell Brands, and Modern Retail dates Yankee Candle’s place in that group to the same year. Newell Brands has owned Yankee Candle since 2016, and its July 2025 announcement still described the candle maker as part of the Newell Brands portfolio.

Under Newell the company has gathered other candle names around it. English Wikipedia records that in 2017 Newell acquired Smith Mountain Industries, the maker of WoodWick, and Chesapeake Bay Candle, and the Daily Hampshire Gazette reported in July 2019 that Chesapeake Bay Candle operations were moving to the Yankee Candle plant in Whately. The South Deerfield store was joined in 2005 by a second flagship in Williamsburg, Virginia; Fox Business reported in March 2021 that the Williamsburg village would close, and Wikipedia gives its closing as April 2021.

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.

A new logo, a larger label, the same jar.

Names and shapes have carried the brand as much as any mark. The Directory lists Housewarmer among the company’s trade names, and Newell, announcing a relaunch on 23 July 2025, said the Apothecary Jar “remains an iconic symbol” of Yankee Candle.

Modern Retail reported on 23 July 2025 that the relaunch introduced a new logo and a new wax formulation, and that a new, larger label on the glass jars carried much bigger imagery of the scent inside, while the brand kept its signature round jars with thick, curvy lids. Aaron Swart, Newell’s senior vice president and general manager of home fragrance, told the publication: “We hadn’t touched this thing in 10 years, and the world had changed a lot in that time.” He summed up the work as “We simplified the packaging. We changed the label. We rethought the photography.” He added: “But we didn’t touch the juice.” He also said the Yankee name was “too iconic to walk away from.” Not everyone thought new packaging would be enough: Mary Ann O’Brien, founder and chief executive of the agency OBI Creative, told the publication that legacy brands should keep their heritage, but that a logo and label change alone was not sufficient.

Newell’s own announcement listed textured labels, metallic embellishments and consistent wax colours among the packaging changes, alongside a plant-wax blend and changes across what it called 83 core fragrances. It introduced the relaunch with a national campaign, “The Scent You’ve Been Seeking,” featuring the actor Brittany Snow, and kept the founding year at the centre of the story, describing Yankee Candle as known for scented candles “since 1969.”

For a design guide, Yankee Candle shows how a heritage candle maker can change its logo, label and photography while keeping the jar shape customers already know. Compare Otherland, a younger American candle brand, and Paddywax. For this guide we use cranberry, evergreen and wax cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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