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Harper’s Candles

Harper’s Candles

Handmade, proper-smelling soy wax candles, made by animal rescuing nerds

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Handmade Vegan Candles

Proper smelling, hand made soy candles in artisan tins. Cruelty free from source and vegan friendly. Run by people who love rescue animals (also keen on chips and coffee).
A true UK handmade independent business. We make the yummiest soya wax candles with more fragrances than you can shake a stick at. Animal friendly. Home of Flora, the Harper’s rescue Jack Russell and assorted others. We also like chips and beer.
Have a look at the website to see where we will be or how to lay your hands on the beautiful cruelty free candles and home fragrance that know how to do their stuff.

Since this business went limited in June 2017, it became it’s own entity and thus deserves a place here. It is sincerely the beautiful monster that I’m so humbled to own and so stupidly proud of. From it’s tiny beginnings in my kitchen to it’s current status of Business That Occupies (expensive) Shell Schemes, I couldn’t be more thrilled (and a bit ‘pinch myself’ at times). Ethics and love sit at the heart of everything it does. What comes out of Harper’s Candles has to be up to scratch because our customers have bought them and without our customers we are nothing. Much of the artwork revolves around animals and all of my own rescue animals have found their way into Harper’s in one guise or another. This is not a cruelty-free business, it is a business that is cruelty-free and there is a difference. The quality of what is produced here is trialled until I believe that it is second to none and it’s all done without harming animals. It’s no more difficult. It’s no more expensive. It is simply the way it should be. It is so intrinsic that everything must be animal friendly from start to finish because these rescue animals shouldn’t be involved with anything that doesn’t involve kindness, respect and a better way to live with the creatures on this planet. That’s from promoting cruelty free to not using plastic in what we do. In the end it shouldn’t really matter that my bag is animals. I don’t ask everyone to share my ethics necessarily, but businesses should all at least have ethics and support them strongly and with intent. Ethics aren’t expensive. Selling out is. Without conscience the world will never be a better place and that is what we should all be striving to achieve in whatever way we feel appropriate to us. Business should not be business at any price.

In 2012 my only goal was to earn £200 a month so I could afford to go to the supermarket because I didn’t have enough money to buy food. My son would not have been thrilled with empty cupboards. My cats even less so. These days, my long term goal is to see this business on more shelves in Europe and into Australia, New Zealand and I badly want to be in a shop in New York. They don’t have to be big shops and they don’t have to be numerous. Just one independent retailer in each. The reasons are very simple. When I first started Harper’s Candles I was excited and yet looking my friends and family in the face and saying “Yup. I’m going to dig myself out of unemployment in one of the most impoverished cities in the North of England at the start of a recession by starting a candle business” wasn’t easy. I knew it appeared to be a foolish idea but it just seemed right, and yet I was oddly and slightly embarrassed at going from being a reasonably successful professional pen pusher to selling candles at craft fairs or wherever I could fit a portable table. Secondly, my dog was thrown away as a puppy like she was rubbish so I want to see her as the logo for what would technically be a worldwide product. Nobody is rubbish and Flo certainly isn’t. I had wanted to achieve even a minor part of world domination by December 2020 and to have done so would be something I would consider a massive “Stuff You!” to those who treat animals like they’re disposable and also act as a reminder to myself to never be embarrassed or lose confidence when chasing one’s dreams. That’s how manufacturing bad coffee became so lucrative. I won’t achieve this dream right now in this new coronavirus filled world, but it still remains my long term plan. In the end I cannot feel anything but love for my beautiful, quirky labour of love that supports me and my lot and to the glorious people who choose to buy from it. It’s an odd mix of humbled, proud, ever so happy, consistently believing that every idea is a great idea (I never learn) and always vaguely smelling of candles.

Victoria Harper- Company Director

When I started I literally did everything for the business from home, which was making candles to drawing labels to admin and emptying bins, going to events and putting lots of envelopes in piles where I can ignore them better because I hate opening post…. I love working and still do because there’s nothing quite like being a little bit in love with what you created and viewing it as a sometimes wayward but adorable child. Sometimes when I look at it, particularly a trade stand somewhere like the NEC, I feel like I did when watched my son win the egg and spoon race at sports day when he was seven. Immeasurably proud. Since the business went limited in summer 2017 I also got a cool new job title of Company Director, which is almost like having an “I am grown up” badge.

I’ve always made things and I can’t honestly remember when I made my first candle. Harper’s Candles certainly makes my friends and family happy as they cheerfully take one or two home with them, or if you’re my dad ask me if I can’t quickly “knock up one of those nice sandalwoody ones”. Bless him. My dad thinks everything takes ten minutes and that includes motorway journeys which is probably how I never learnt timekeeping as a child. He’s also untidy. I hold my father responsible for a lot.

I was always being told that I should start a small business selling candles, but as much as I loved the idea, I never found the time.

I remember the exact moment in October 2011. About halfway through a rather pointless meeting that was so PC it truly did Plod, I realised with a sinking feeling that if I didn’t start doing something else with my life then all I had to look forward to was more of the same with as much bad coffee as I could drink. Things came to a head when austerity hit about ten minutes later and I suddenly found myself without even a horrid job with bad coffee, but still with a mortgage, lots of rescue animals and a son (complete with school fees) to pay for by myself, which is tricky when you kinda don’t have an income anymore. Sometimes adulting sucks.

So after a significant amount of time trialling (procrastinating) and preparing (more procrastinating) I drew my dog Flora as the company logo and launched Harper’s Candles on April 1st 2012, because I thought it was amusing to launch a business on April Fool’s Day. This was to be my hobby business and own personal empire of happy so at least I’d be busy while I slowly went bankrupt and ended up living in a tent in my parents’ garden.

That’s when it all went a bit mad and within six months I realised that my hobby was bigger than I’d intended.

In December 2014, by investing everything back into the business, working seven days a week almost every week and driving up and down the country going to markets and events, I finally expanded to moved Harper’s Candles out of my house and into a unit. It was wonderful. We were able to cook food in the kitchen at home again and no longer thought walking down the hall sideways to get past the boxes was normal. I could get my life back and separate home from work… By December 2015 I considered moving a sleeping bag into the unit and wearing a badge at home saying “Mum” so my son could recognise me if we passed on the stairs.

I once heard it said that owning a business was like making a monster and if it worked then that monster would want feeding. On the other hand, I love this monster. It’s my monster and I owe it a lot. For starters I didn’t lose my house. By 2016 I owned a business I was truly proud of that allowed me to live with the ethics I’ve poured my heart into most of my life and I even got to take my dogs to work. By 2018 it was a limited company and still managing to keep it’s small independent, quirky roots of which I continue to be so proud.

Flora – Harper’s Logo & Icon

Flo is a fifteen year old Jack Russell rescue from Hull Animal Welfare Trust. She’s a little bit greyer than she was when I drew her as the Harper’s logo in autumn 2011, but she’s still as pretty as a picture (and as naughty as a box of monkeys) and only selectively deaf when she wants to ignore me.

When I got her she was six weeks old and the size of a small guinea pig, which scared the living daylights out of me because I’d never had a puppy before and I thought I was going to accidentally stand on her which prompted me to carry her round with me all day and thus instil in her from an early age that the world revolves around her. Which it does.

Flo’s main jobs seem to be sleeping on her bed next to the big printer in the unit where it’s always warm, waking up when she hears a lunch-box opening and getting in the way when large deliveries are coming into or going out of the unit. She also wants to start a fight with every dog she’s ever met (which is why one of her ears is wonky because Flo is tiny) but she gets told off for that because we’re supposed to be an animal friendly business. Flora is also very spoilt, doesn’t make enough room for me in my own bed and likes having raspberries blown on her tummy. I love her. She is my shadow.

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