Reflecting on Five Years of HLC
This is a very special (and slightly emotional) edition of Confessions of a Candle Snob, because Hotel Lobby Candle is officially five years old.
Five feels… big. Old enough to have found our footing, but young enough to still be learning as we go.
I started Hotel Lobby Candle in the living room of my New York apartment in 2020, during lockdown, surrounded by boxes filled with rejected candle samples and more unanswered questions than I could count.
I still think about that first launch all the time. The fact that people were willing to buy a candle they had never smelled, from a brand that didn’t exist the week before, will never not amaze me. If you were one of those early customers—or if you found us somewhere along the way and decided to stick around—please know how grateful I am for that trust.
And if you need proof of how little I anticipated we’d expand—across categories, products, and formats—look no further than our name. Hotel Lobby Candle was clearly chosen by someone who wasn’t thinking quite this big. (FWIW… we’re working on this. More to come in 2026.)
We didn’t have a budget to shoot photos for our launch, so I took all of the pictures myself. In my bedroom.
Along the way, there have been plenty of moments that humbled us, challenged us, and taught us more than any business book ever could.
Like our very first launch, which went live at 9am ET. I was so hyper-focused on making sure everything was perfect that I never stopped to consider what 9am meant for West Coast. (Yep, that would be 6am.) Let’s just say I received some very direct feedback from candle snobs in California who did not appreciate setting an alarm that early. We now launch at 1pm ET.
Or the time we received a shipment of candles where every single one had a microscopic scratch on the rim of the glass—about half the size of a grain of rice. Matt (a Virgo) and me (a people-pleasing perfectionist) couldn’t stomach the idea of selling candles that were even slightly “defective,” so Matt flew to our warehouse in Columbus, Ohio, armed with black paint and a tiny paintbrush, and spent three days painting roughly 500 candles by hand. I swear I’m not making this up.
Over the years, we’ve received more than a few panicked emails from customers needing a candle for a birthday or special occasion the very next day. If we saw they were located nearby, we’d pull from our personal stash and deliver the candle ourselves. Same day.
That’s the level of care and love you get when you shop from a small, founder-owned business—sometimes it looks polished, and sometimes it looks like black paint, a tiny brush, and three very long days in a warehouse in Ohio.
Somehow, those scrappy moments became the foundation for everything that followed.
Somehow, those scrappy moments became the foundation for everything that followed.
Over the past year alone, we expanded into more than 100 retailers across the country (including a number of fabulous hotels), partnered with Anthropologie—first in-store, and then on our Hobby collection, which launched just last week—debuted a Prosecco candle with Josh Cellars, and introduced our very first Eau de Parfum.
The fine fragrance launch was covered as an exclusive in Women’s Wear Daily, something I’ve been dreaming about since day one. When I first saw the headline, it was one of those “wait… is this real?” moments I’ll never forget.
The fine fragrance launch was covered as an exclusive in Women’s Wear Daily, something I’ve been dreaming about since day one. When I first saw the headline, it was one of those “wait… is this real?” moments I’ll never forget.
Five years in, Hotel Lobby Candle is still fully self-funded, still detail-obsessed, and still built with the same care that went into packing orders from my apartment floor in 2020.
To our community: thank you for supporting this brand, for gifting our candles, for sharing them in your homes, and for proudly calling yourselves candle snobs. You are the reason we get to keep doing this.
xx
Lindsay