Local business sets up shop at Davis Sunflower Festival

Written By JULIA LLOYD

Growing up in this community was what made Melissa Lester confident her local business would be a success.

June & Rose Candle Co., is a local business Lester started up in September 2018, however, before opening her own candle business, she previously owned a fashion boutique in town for seven years. 

“I had always carried and sold candles in the store. I have two little boys who are five and seven and I always burned candles, but when they were born I started looking more and more into about what is actually in a candle and it is terrible,” explained Melissa. 

After doing all that research, Melissa decided to start acting proactive and create candles that are safe to burn when small children are around. She found out that a lot of candles have lead in their wick and dangerous chemicals that can cause cancer. 

So, what makes June & Rose Candle Co. different? 

To start, all of Melissa's candles are 100 per cent all natural soy wax. They are hand poured in her Caledon home. All of the material she uses is sourced from Canada and the scent is created using high-grade fragrance oils, free of paraben and phthalate chemicals. Melissa also uses a cotton wick so that there are no traces of lead, ensuring the candle can burn up to approximately 50 hours.  

“Working for myself has now given me the opportunity to volunteer at my kids' school and watch them grow-up,” she said. 

Melissa does everything from making the candles to filling orders from the comfort of her home studio. She currently works alone, but said she is considering hiring an employee in the future since she has recently seen an economic growth in her business. 

Since the Caledon community supports local businesses as much as possible, Melissa finds that a lot of her business comes by word of mouth. When customers visit her website, they can find all the stores that carry her candles. 

She also makes candles for weddings and other kinds of events where she actually works one-on-one with the customer to create a custom scent. As well, the business makes revenue by supporting local events, such as the Davis Sunflower Field Festival — which ends this Sunday (August 18). 

As a way to promote her business, Melissa created two featured scents that are not available online and can only be bought at the sunflower festival. The scents are sunflower and sunflower honey. Every $1 from each of those scented candles sold, will be donated to the Canadian Celiac Association. 

Melissa offers a local pickup service and accepts empties from previous customers and so she can reuse the empty jars to house new candles.

“The reason I chose the name June & Rose Candle Co., is because on June 11 my parents got married, my husband and I got married on June 11, my first born son was born on June 11 and we found out about our second son on June 11 — and my grandmother's name was Rose,” explained Melissa.