Candle Witch is really the dream of our founder, Teri Davis-Tolladay. Teri spent many years working for the hi-end retail stores in Beverly Hills selling products like Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent or the Apothecary at Barney's/NY. Countless hours working with cosmetics and fragrances finely honed her color and aroma skills, until she became very adept at knowing what colors and scents worked well together.

 Teri started making candles quite by accident. As she is fond of saying, "I had this wonderful black furniture, and I wanted candles that were black, but were scented with Jasmine. Only nobody made them. So finally I had to go out and make them myself."

 Making candles is one thing, but designing them is a whole other matter. When you are designing a candle, there are no recipes, no instructions, no books, nothing. It takes a lot of practice, and sometimes even a few accidents. Teri loves to design candles. That's why we do so many custom orders. Every custom candle is a new design, a new challenge, and new way of putting together a candle. Far from easy, candlemaking requires a great amount of skill; wax is sensitive to the smallest fluctuations in temperature, most scents will significantly change the color of the dye, and each candle requires 6-10 hours of constant labor. When finished, a handmade candle from Candle Witch is a unique, one-of-a-kind, beautiful piece. In fact, some of our customers think our candles are so beautiful that they never light them, they just collect them.

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The newest member of Candle Witch; Trevor Tolladay. click to enlarge.

For even more photos, click here.

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 Of course, you could buy machine made candles, which are quite a bit easier to manufacture, and therefore cost a lot less. But who's going to put a machine made candle on their mantle, and pull it down only for special occasions? No one we know.

 The other half of The Candle Witch is Eric Tolladay. Eric is a freelance graphic designer, who happens to also design/build web pages. (go to www.pixelectomy.
com for a peak at his artwork) Teri met Eric at the gym, when she was first starting out The Candle Witch, and was looking for someone to design her business cards. One thing led to another, and 1 1/2 years later they got married. (1 3/4 years later she finally got her business cards)

 There's now a new member at Candle Witch; Trevor Lee Tolladay. Trevor was born June 6th, 2001 at 11:28 am. He was born a pretty heafty 7 lbs, 15 ozs., and 20 inches long. Needless to say, his parents are pretty excited about him.

 Teri and Eric both work out of their home in Sherman Oaks, where they fight over who gets to go online first, and who has to clean up the cat boxes. Teri and Eric are owned by 3 adorable cats. "We love our cats very much", says Teri. Eric just groans because yet another cat has jumped into his lap while he is working on the website. (Hint: if you want to get on their good side, compliment them about their cats.)