Welcome to the eighth episode of Sustaining Craft the Podcast, a series that features those in a creative, craft-based field. Listen below to learn or keep scrolling to read about Tabatha Reeves and her specialty candles!

—

With the scents of tobacco and peppermint, Tabatha Reeves can make a candle that invokes the memories of a grandfather smoking a pipe in a study.

Or she can build an entirely new narrative, using a mixture of cologne and leather to suggest the presence of a cowboy, just returned home from a long day wrangling cattle. “We try to go with the unexpected,” Reeves said. “We have a specialty candle and we call it Cattle Drive. It’s a custom order, but it smells like a man that’s been sitting outside in a saddle all day long. It’s leather and it’s musk and it’s spice from a cologne. And you kind of get this overall sense that’s there’s a man who’s been working hard in your house, and I know it sounds weird, but it’s a pleasant odor.”

Reeves owns Twisted Lane Candles with her husband, Michael. They started the business to make hyper-realistic scented candles affordable, and offer masculine-based scents that can’t be found anywhere else. Michael was active duty army for many years, and Reeves found that having a candle around that smelled like her husband helped with his absence during deployment. “A lot of our candles remind you of something else, and that’s really what we wanted was when you light this candle, you remember, ‘Oh, my dad smelled like that’ or, ‘My husband smells like that,” Reeves shared. “Especially for people who have husbands that are gone often, because I’m in that boat. I’ve always missed the smell of my husband, and now I have the ability to bring that to other people.”

Twisted Lane Candles offers 82 scents total, with new candles being developed constantly. There’s cedar, sage, red ginger saffron, pipe tobacco — even a novelty line that offers corn chips and beer.  “Everything we get is musky, clean, spicy,” Reeves explained. “[We have] candles that smell like saddles, pipe candles. We don’t sell anything that is in the retail market. Everything we have is unique.”

There are no flowery scents here or anything with a sweet base. “All of our scents cater toward men,” Reeves explained. “Our tagline is ‘No fruit, no frills, no fuss.’”

Reeves first started candle making as a hobby. She wanted something to do, and the sort of scents they enjoyed were cost prohibitive. They had stumbled across a pipe tobacco and whiskey candle in a United States store that cost $35. “It smelled like sugar,” said Reeves. “I went and I did research and I made a bunch for the house, and then people started buying them. The business took off on its own. It went from this hobby to a business almost overnight.”

Now, Michael recruits for the army, and they’ve made the decision to stay in Arkansas for the long haul since they have family in Arkansas and Louisiana, where they met in high school.

And since Michael runs the company with Reeves, and even their children are involved, Twisted Lane Candles is truly a local family business. Most of the candle elements are purchased from companies based in the United States, and all of the candles are tested and assembled locally by the Reeves family.

Their mission of bringing unique candles to the general public is driven by a desire to make candles accessible. “Candles need to be affordable,” Reeves shared. “Products have to be affordable for the general public. Big manufacturers forget that. Most people, especially here in Arkansas, can’t afford $30 for a candle. If they spend $30 on a candle, that’s $30 that didn’t go in the gas tank, or that’s $30 for animal feed that they didn’t have this month. I do, I feel some kind of way about it because I want my product to be affordable. Ten years ago, we couldn’t’ve afforded a $30 candle. Even now, I look at a $30 candle at the store and I’m like, why would I pay that? But with our candles, we want them to be where the general public can enjoy them. … Right now, our cost is $13. Everybody has an extra $13 that they can spend a month on a candle.”

And they keep their product lines interesting, even taking special orders. “We have these really unique niche scents in some of our candles, so they work really well for historical reenactors, but they’re not going to sell to somebody else,” Reeves said. “We have a state park that we contract to that deals with historical reenactors all the time, and one of their properties on the park is a jail. We designed an entire line of candles just for their jail, scents that would have been in a jailhouse in the mid-1800s to early 1900s when it was operational.”

One of those specialty scents is called The Sheriff. “It kind of smells like this dirty man that’s been smoking a pipe,” Reeves explained. “When I smell it, I get the thought of the cowboy with his feet up on the desk, and the big sheriff badge and a hat over his face, sleeping while his prisoners are in the cells behind him. That’s what it conjures for me. Many of our scents are like that. You can smell it and you can conjure this idea of what it is supposed to be in your head.”

But not everyone can smell the candles. “A lot of men can’t smell,” Reeves explained. “I didn’t realize this until I started dealing with men on a regular basis. Men, blue-collar workers, a lot of them can’t smell because they’ve worked around chemicals their whole life. Or they’ve worked around major smells their whole life. My dad is a maintenance man at a roofing plant. My dad can’t smell anything. Asphalt’s burned the inside of his nose. So he can’t smell candles. My dad can’t smell when something is cooking. And he’s not the only one.”

Reeves decided to use wood wicks for her candles, which provide another sensory element of crackling as they burn. “Just because he can’t smell it doesn’t mean he can’t hear it,” she said. “And hearing it brings back for a lot of men in that age group especially, sitting around the fireplace with mom and dad or camping with mom and dad. Hunting with mom and dad.”

Reeves hopes to continue to expand Twisted Lane Candles with more products, adding shampoos, conditioners, and even lip balm. “We want to put these out to people who wouldn’t normally have access to them,” she shared. “We try to be in places where the general public goes.”

Her advice to others in a similar field is to keep testing. “Don’t get discouraged,” Reeves said. “It takes perseverance. Keep persevering, even when you feel like you can’t do it. Yes, you can. One more test. One more try. Because eventually, that one more test is going to turn into the right test. For someone who wants to make a creative business: don’t listen to your critics. Do what you want to do, and how you want to do it.”

—

Find Reeves’ candles at her website, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

There’s a lot more in the podcast episode! We talked about how Tabatha met Michael, the testing involved in candlemaking, the supportive nature of the industry, and how success looks to different people.