A small studio in Brooklyn, pouring candles one batch at a time.
Slowburn started in 2019 in a converted laundromat in Bushwick. We were two people, a hot plate, and a stack of amber jars we'd bought too many of. The first scent — still in the line, still the bestseller — was Tobacco & Honey.
We have not gotten much bigger. There are seven of us now, and we still pour every candle by hand. We do not outsource. We do not private-label. We do not use paraffin, phthalates, parabens, or synthetic dyes.
What we use: a soy-coconut wax blend we spent eight months getting right. Cotton wicks. Phthalate-free fragrance oils we blend in-house or with a small group of perfumers we've known for years. Amber glass that we keep after the candle is gone.
The numbers
200 candles per batch. 14 days of cure time. 1 to 3 percent fragrance load depending on the scent. 50 hours of burn on the 8oz. Around 9,000 candles a year — small enough that we still know every one of them.
Where we are
The studio is in East Williamsburg, on a quiet block between two warehouses. We do tours once a quarter, and we pour at the Brooklyn Flea most Sundays from April through October. If you're around, come say hi.
Slowburn is not a real candle company.
Slowburn is a self-directed project I designed and built end-to-end — the brand, the copy, the product photography direction, the UI, and the full-stack implementation. It is a UX and commerce prototype, not a real store. The cart can add and remove items, but checkout is a deliberate stop sign; orders do not ship, and hello@slowburn.studio does not exist.
The point of the project was to see how close a single developer could get to the feel of a real small-batch brand using only typed code, a /public folder of images, and a lot of attention to copy. Every product name, note, and description on this site was written by hand for this project.
— Mustafa