A lifestyle change prompted title attorney and Baton Rouge resident Caroline Borck to start a part-time business. Now, working in the kitchen of the house her husband built on Spain Street, Borck spends the better part of her afternoon making soap and candles from scratch.
She operates her company, Sea+Sparrow, out of the house in Beauregard Town, selling her homegrown creations. And, she says, her business has seen great local response thus far.
It all began when Borck and her husband Nathan decided to try for a child. Ridding her home of everyday toxins would create a better environment for all three of them, Borck says. She found that making homemade, organic deodorant, laundry detergent and sunscreen was something she enjoyed.
“I really wanted to become more health-conscious and earth-friendly,” Borck says. “So I asked myself, ‘What else can I make?’”
But she admits her very first batch of candles was terrible.
“They had no smell to them,” she recalls, laughing. “When you pour the fragrance in, it smells really potent, but then once it dries through the wax it’s not as strong.”
Borck uses a melting system to create her products.
For the candles, after she weighs the wax and adds the fragrance—one pound of wax per ounce of fragrance—she melts the mix in her homemade double-boiler. Borck prefers to work in one- and two-pound increments.
The final combination, after taking about 10 minutes to melt, is poured into a container to cool and set. The wick then inserted, all Borck has left to do is add her label. All containers from Sea+Sparrow are refurbished materials. Her labels are, too.
“Everything comes secondhand,” Borck says, pointing to a candle in a miniature ceramic bathtub. “That belongs to my mother-in-law. She wanted me to fill that for her. All of the jars come from Goodwill or other thrift stores. I plan to start branching out to estate sales and garage sales soon. The tags are from Whole Foods bags.”
Borck’s soaps are glycerin based. As with the candles, she uses a delicate melt-and-pour method to create them.
Amy Benoit, owner of Amy’s Country Candles, says candle-making is all about trial and error. She’s been pursuing the business since 1999 and found a niche creating her own unique scents.
Benoit has her headquarters in a 9,000-square-foot building in Thibodaux. She even has chemists and perfumists working alongside her to help develop new scents. Currently she’s working on creating candles called Cajun Man and Country Chick.
“It is a lot of work,” she says. “But anything worthwhile doesn’t come easy. You have to put forth the effort.”
Benoit says her business took off like firecrackers. Her candles are sold in various stores throughout the state, including Baton Rouge.
Borck says that, like Benoit and other established candle-makers, she’ll let her business grow as large as possible.
At dinner one night with friends, the conversation turned to dream jobs. She doesn’t see melting, mixing and pouring ingredients together to create candles and soaps as work. She says it’s fun.
“When I come home, and I make candles and soaps, I don’t feel like it’s a job, you know?” she says. “I do love my full-time job, but I love doing this, too.”
