Why handmade candles cost more than supermarket ones

A supermarket candle can cost £4. A handmade one from a small maker is usually £12 to £30. It is fair to ask where the difference goes, so here is the answer from inside a small candle business.

The materials are different

Mass-market candles are usually paraffin, a petroleum by-product and the cheapest wax available. Most small makers use plant waxes; ours is coconut wax, which holds fragrance well and burns evenly, and costs several times more than paraffin per kilogram. Fragrance is the same story: fragrance oil used at a proper load, rather than the minimum a formula allows, is one of the biggest costs in the product.

Then there is the vessel. A factory buys glass jars for pennies at volume. We cast our own stone vessels, one at a time, from raw material, and each one takes days before it can even be poured.

The time is different

A Limewick candle passes through nine steps: the vessel is cast, cured, sanded and sealed; then wicked, poured with coconut wax, cured again, labelled and boxed. Every step is a person, not a production line. Casting cannot be hurried because curing takes the time it takes. Small batches mean each candle gets attention, and also mean no economies of scale; we pay retail-adjacent prices for materials a factory buys by the tonne.

None of this is a complaint. It is just what "handmade from scratch" costs when it is literal. The full process is on our Made From Scratch page.

What you get for the difference

A wax chosen for how it burns rather than what it costs. A scent that stays consistent from first light to last, rather than fading after a week on display. And a vessel that is the opposite of packaging: a cast-stone object designed to be kept, cleaned out and used again when the wax is finished.

You also get the less visible things: fragrance compliance done properly, labels that follow CLP safety rules, and a maker who has burned every batch they sell.

So why are ours £12?

By the logic above, a candle like ours would ordinarily sit closer to £20. Ours is £12 because Limewick is early and still being built, and we would rather grow on the strength of the product than on a marketing budget. We call it founder pricing: early pricing while Limewick is still being built. Same handmade process, early-stage price.

It is not a discount, and it will not last forever; it is the price of arriving early. The thinking is laid out on the Founder Pricing page.

The honest summary

Supermarket candles are cheap because everything about them is chosen to be cheap, and that is a legitimate product. Handmade candles cost more because the materials cost more, the labour is real, and the batches are small. Whether that is worth it depends on what you want a candle to be: a consumable, or an object with a scent inside it.

If it is the second, the range of coconut wax candles in cast-stone vessels is where to look, at the early price, while it lasts.