The Merry Wick: Hand Poured Candles for You

Inside: Meet Sam Casale, the creator of The Merry Wick, a candle company that evokes memories through delightful scents.

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This interview was originally published in the Fall 2021 issue of Crochet Foundry Digital Magazine.

In this issue I’m happy to introduce you to Sam Casale, the genius behind The Merry Wick, a hand poured candle company. Did you know that smell is one of the strongest senses connected with your memories? Established in 2020 The Merry Wick’s mission is to elicit emotion through smell. The scent from your first kiss, your childhood home, summer bonfires with your closest friends… The Merry Wick was created with the desire to experience the things we love in a new way.

Mrs. Deveter: Sam thanks so much for chatting with me. I am already a customer of The Merry Wick so I’m very familiar with your product, I love the scents you have crafted! I think I need to place a new order for Morning Brew and Roasted Marshmallow which my daughter quickly claimed as her own. You are a super talented crochet designer. What made you venture into hand poured candles?

Sam: Quite a few things actually, but I still remember when I first had the idea. If anyone reading is a “Swiftie” they will be very familiar with the fact that Taylor Swift released an album called Folklore last year while we were several months into lockdowns due to the pandemic. This album was very therapeutic for me, the lyrics really pull you into a very visual landscape and story that is easy to imagine yourself in.

I remember listening to the album one night and since there is so much sensory language in the songs I had the thought of, “What would this song smell like???”. Though that is a little bit of a crazy thought, these particular songs made the process feel easy as they really describe the environment for you.

So then like any crafter I dove into research on my phone at 2am trying to figure out how much it would cost to get enough candle supplies to tinker with the idea. So then 3am rolls around (I have since adopted the sleep schedule of a normal human) and I’m lying in bed listening to the songs, taking notes on what kind of scents I think would fit into the environment of the song. I found fragrance oils that I felt matched up with my notes and then placed an order and then just fell in love with the whole process of developing scents that had a meaning behind them.

I have always loved candles and aromatherapy, I truly believe that scents are very powerful in affecting our moods and the thought of curating my own scents was just so exciting to me.

Mrs. Devter: What a great origin story! I can totally identify with music making you wonder what it might smell like. I’m sure everyone reading can identify with early morning brainstorms that birth a business! As I mentioned you are an amazing crochet designer we might even see one of your designs in the magazine very soon, how are crocheting and candle pouring similar?

Sam: That’s a super interesting question! At face value I think people would think there couldn’t possibly be any similarities, but at least for the way that I approach them I think the thought process is actually similar.

When I started really getting into crochet, my main motivation and excitement was that I could envision a garment in my mind and then try to translate that into a physical product. With trying to design that garment I would have to consider which stitches would lend themselves well to the overall vision, and then there would be a lot of testing and a lot of math.

Developing the candle scents is actually fairly similar! I need to envision the feelings I want to invoke and the environment I want to create, then like choosing stitches for garments, I need to consider which scents would lend themselves to creating that feeling. Then additionally just like making garments, there is a lot of testing and math haha.

Just like how in crochet, if you change your math up a little bit, your garment can turn out to be a totally different size or shape than you anticipate; with candle making and mixing scents, something as simple as adding just 5% of a fragrance oil (which can literally just be a few drops) can completely change the entire scent, that is why testing and nailing down your math is such an essential part of the creative process.

Mrs. Deveter: That makes perfect sense. If I have to gauge swatch in crochet to get the right size I see how testing is so important for candle making, but I’ll leave that to you! I know this might be a silly question but which takes longer; crocheting or candle pouring?

Sam: While the answer to this really depends on what you are crocheting haha, I think crocheting will almost always take more active work hours, but candle making, at least the way I do it haha, actually takes much longer than people would assume.

I will find myself at the dining room table, surrounded by over 100 bottles of different fragrance oils for several hours just combining different scents. My standard for creating scents is usually mixing together at least 3 fragrance oils to get a complex scent that I’m happy with. There have been times where I have gotten crazy and mixed up to 4 scents, so you can IMAGINE how many scent combination possibilities there are with even just 100 different fragrance oils! So yes with that being said, just finding fragrance combinations that evoke the feeling I’m looking for can take a very long time.

Once I know what scents I want to combine I need to play around with the ratios, which is a very tedious process and can also take many hours. Like I said before, having 5% more of one fragrance over another can change the scent completely so finding the right balance between 3 or 4 fragrances can be a struggle, and a lot of math haha.

After all of the math is done, the literal creation of a single candle usually takes about 45 minutes to an hour. Then once the candle has been poured, since I use soy wax, it is recommended that you let the candle cure for 1 to 2 weeks before you light it! (This is the most painful part when you are super impatient like me haha). Then there is even more testing after you light it to make sure that the hot throw of the candle is good (aka how far away you can smell the candle from where it is sitting). So long story long, the entire process of creating a candle can actually take just as long as a crochet project if not longer depending on what you are making!

Mrs. Deveter: Well then I guess that wasn’t a silly question. Planning and testing definitely take time! How do you come up with the names of your candles? They are all so cool. I think my favorite is Champagne Problems!

Sam: Awww thank you! I wish I could take more credit for the names, but those are mostly all Taylor Swift hahaha. For the candle collections that I have that are inspired by her music, the candles are actually just named after the songs that they are inspired by.

As much as I love Taylor, not all of the candle collection I have done or will do in the future will be named after her songs haha. For example, the candles that you love, the Roasted Marshmallow and Morning Brew were not Taylor Swift related at all.

Those were from my Winter Collection where I really wanted to focus on scents that evoked the feelings and environments associated with Winter! Some of the names for those candles came easier than others. I know it isn’t a revolutionary name or anything, but for example I called that scent specifically Roasted Marshmallow, rather than the classic Toasted Marshmallow because I really felt like the smoky part of the candle was too strong to compare it to lightly toasted marshmallow hahaha, it really felt like a heavily roasted burnt marshmallow. So there are subtleties like that that I consider when finalizing a name.

The candles that I made for this collaboration with Crochet Foundry were super fun to name! When I was making the scents for the collection I had the prompt of Boho Autumn, so I tried to aim for scents and names that were still associated with autumn, but much more toned down and subtle than what you might find at Bath and Bodyworks.I wanted the names and scents of these candles to still have a very autumn feel to them but to be playful and a little whimsical which is how I came up with names like Enchant and Whisper.

Mrs. Deveter: You REALLY do love Taylor Swift! How do you pick your fragrances? Do you only use oils?

Sam: Yes, I use fragrance oils! I have not yet experimented with essential oils or anything of that sort. I know I already touched a bit on how I choose fragrances for certain scents and how it really just has to do with the emotion you are trying to evoke.

Depending on my mood, I will either be very traditional with my ideas or get a little wacky with it haha. Say I know I want to make a tropical scent, it makes sense to reach for the fruity, citrus, floral scents to try to nail down that kind of feeling. Sometimes I like to just try out something totally left field though, that you wouldn’t expect to work. A lot of the time it REALLY doesn’t work, but every now and then you come up with a combo that surprises you! For example, I have a banana bread scent and there is a brand of sunscreen called Hawaiian Tropic that I used to use that smells a bit like banana, and boom that scent doesn’t make me think of baking, it makes me think of memories from the beach and band camp!

So there are just little fun things like that where maybe you would think lemon would just be a fresh summer scent, but somewhere in your mind lemon brings back a memory of making pound cake with your grandma during Christmas time. That’s the super fun and powerful thing about scents, they are so personal and so complex!

Mrs. Deveter: That’s perfect. I love the way you approach your fragrances. What scent are you working on now?

Sam: Well as you may know, Taylor is releasing the re-recording of her album Red very soon, so I’m not going to lie, there are more Taylor themed candles on the way. It’s so much fun trying to create scents based on songs so I really can’t help myself there!

However, I have had some plans to create some Disney themed scents which have been fun to develop, and in general I think I might try to create a new collection based on a movie, tv show, or book. Trying to immerse yourself in these worlds that you only experience in your mind is so much fun to me!

Like recently, I really loved WandaVision, as I know many other people did too haha, but it’s so much fun to play around with the idea of like what would the town of Westview smell like based on the visual cues that they give you in the show, or there is a scene where everyone is suddenly thrown into a circus camp, what would that camp smell like? I don’t know, but ideas like that really get me excited.

So in general the ideas are endless and it’s really just up to deciding which one I am most excited about at the time haha!

Mrs. Deveter: Thank you so much for sharing all this great information with us. If you are interested in purchasing these delightful scents please click the link https://www.themerrywick.com/

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