Photographs by Shane Van Boxtel, Image Studios | Styling by Shalene Enz
A strip of blue painter’s tape is still adhered along the ceiling line inside Door County Candle Company’s retail store. It exists as a bittersweet time capsule that harks back to Feb. 26, the day everything changed for the small Carlsville candle producer.
That was the day owner Christiana Trapani — who had only taken the reins of the 29-year-old candle company eight months earlier — launched a fundraiser to support the war efforts in Ukraine, which had fallen under Russian attack on Feb. 24. Trapani, a second-generation Ukrainian American, and her husband, Nic, had intended to begin some interior updates at the store, but things took a sharp turn after the fundraiser was announced.
“We were going to start painting that day, but where the paint stops [is] when I went to Nic and said, ‘We have 250 orders. You need to get down now,’” Trapani remembers. “That’s as far as we got, and then he came off the ladder and started making candles.”
The painting may have come to a halt that day, but something bigger was just beginning.
What started as a goal to raise $5,000 for the besieged country of Ukraine has turned into a community-galvanizing effort that has secured over $800,000 in donations with the help of more than 200 volunteers.
“It really makes me so emotional,” Trapani says through tears. “I know this community is amazing, but I never thought what a big impact it was going to make. It’s incredible that with a candle we’ve been able to unite so many people who wanted to help but didn’t know how.”
Fanning the flames
Candle-making was never in the career plans for Trapani, who spent her early childhood in a suburb of Chicago speaking Ukrainian as her first language. Both sets of Trapani’s grandparents immigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine and played important roles in preserving and celebrating the family’s cultural heritage.
“Growing up, my grandpa always told me I would own a business one day, so he kind of put that in my head,” Trapani says. “My grandpa always made me so proud to be Ukrainian.”
After she finished second grade, Trapani and her family relocated to Door County. That was where, in 2020, Trapani launched Door County Delivered — an online custom gift box service featuring locally-made Door County products. Trapani was purchasing cherry-scented candles from Door County Candle Company for her gift boxes when the retiring owner floated the idea of her buying the business, which specializes in hand-poured, small-batch candles and scented wax products.
Despite having no candle-making experience, Trapani decided to flex the entrepreneurial muscle her grandfather had seen in her by buying the candle company in June 2021. Only eight months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. It hit close to home for Trapani, who still has family living in the country.
“Right away, I felt a sense of grieving and anger,” she says. “My grandma began reliving WWII. She was shaking and crying and in disbelief. We were all on the phone with my aunt [in Ukraine], and she was crying. We were all crying, and in that moment I’m like, ‘We need to do something.’ That’s when the idea of the candle came to light.”
Trapani decided to donate 100% of net profits from the sale of the company’s Ukraine candle — a 16-ounce, vanilla-scented, blue and yellow candle meant to resemble the Ukrainian flag. She launched the fundraiser in a Facebook video that quickly received media attention from national news outlets including PBS NewsHour and ABC World News Tonight with David Muir.
“I thought we would sell 50 to 100 candles and that would be cool,” Trapani says. “But that weekend alone we sold 4,000. The week of the David Muir airing we got like 25,000 orders.”
In her Facebook video, Trapani expresses heartache, concern and fear for the citizens of Ukraine and commits to supporting organizations working to maintain Ukraine’s independence.
Profits from the Ukraine candle fundraiser are being donated to Razom for Ukraine, a nonprofit responding to the Russian invasion of the country by providing hundreds of tons of tactical medical kits, hospital supplies, medications and communication equipment. The organization’s emergency response initiative sends on average more than 50 pallets of aid to Ukraine each week. In the first month of the war, it shipped over 218 tons of supplies.
“‘Razom’ in English means together,” Trapani says in the Facebook video. “Though we are a small community, we are so powerful. With the help of our friends working together, I know we can make a huge difference.”
Door County united
Bringing people together is exactly what the fundraiser did, says Michelle Lawrie, executive director of Door County Economic Development Corporation. With only 10 employees, Door County Candle’s fundraising efforts have relied heavily on volunteer support — more than 200 community volunteers have contributed over 20,000 hours to the cause. This includes local residents, visitors and Trapani’s own family members.
“That’s the kind of fire she puts into people,” Lawrie says. “She makes them want to contribute their time helping. That’s how she inspires people.”
And with the fundraiser’s success, Trapani needed all the help she could get. Door County Candle Company typically produces about 15,000 candles annually. In 2022, the business has produced 85,000 Ukraine candles alone — not counting their other products. Over 35,000 orders came in during the first month of the fundraiser.
As the orders poured in, so did the volunteers — including Ginger Lord and her husband, Patrick, of Appleton. The retired couple began making the drive to Carlsville, just north of Sturgeon Bay, twice a week to volunteer after visiting the shop in March and seeing firsthand the fundraiser’s impact.
“Honest to gosh, the line of people was out the door, around the parking lot and around the building,” Ginger Lord remembers. “I asked Christiana if she needed volunteers, and she said when can you come this week?”
At only 3,500 square feet — which includes retail, production and storage spaces — quarters were tight trying to produce such an unprecedentedly high volume of candles. In addition to hiring a night shift and bringing on volunteers to meet demand, Trapani says she had to quickly reconfigure space to make it work.
“We don’t have a lot of space, so we had to be really creative in making so many candles,” she says. “We shrunk the store. When weather permitted, we put candles on pallets outside to dry. We even put them in our cars. We would stack them up because we didn’t have space to put them anywhere else.”
Packaging and shipping the candles proved to be another challenge.
“In the beginning, we didn’t know how to pack this stuff. We were using newspaper and bubble wrap and getting out no more than 100 a day. With 40,000 orders, that was not going to work,” Trapani says. “So we had custom boxes designed for our candles by our packaging partner in the Fox Valley, which eliminated the use of bubble wrap and sped up the process.”
The business’s largest single day saw just shy of 1,000 orders being shipped. Through working with their raw goods suppliers, Door County Candle was also able to expedite its manufacturing process — pending supply chain setbacks which at times made it difficult to procure candle wax, jars, lids and fragrances.
“At the peak, we could make 1,600 per shift, but that was pushing every single limit of our equipment and people,” Trapani says.
The Lords typically helped with packaging candles, which included boxing them with packing slips, adhering shipping labels and wagoning them outside for delivery pickup. Other volunteers helped with placing wicks in candle jars, cleaning jars and labeling the candles.
“It was very healing to feel like you were helping not only people in Ukraine but getting to know people driving up from all the states and locally too,” Lord says. “We had a common focus on our energy and were doing something that made you feel like you were making a difference.”
Maybe it was the close quarters of the shop’s physical space or the hunger for community brought about by COVID, but Lord says the intense camaraderie among the volunteers and Trapani’s family inspired her to keep coming back.
“It’s a bona fide, grassroots, care-for-your-neighbor, handmade, happy place to be,” Lord says. “It was really a blessing to be in that family. I said to Christiana, ‘You are my new family. You are my family now.’ It’s such a bonding experience.”
A bright future
While Door County Candle is not defined solely by its Ukraine fundraiser, the initiative has had far-reaching impacts on the business’s production flow, e-commerce sales and overall philosophy.
Trapani says she knew the business needed to grow when she bought it, but expansion plans that were in the works for this past spring were put on hold to focus on the Ukraine fundraiser.
In July, the business finally broke ground on a 3,000-square-foot expansion that will nearly double the size of its current footprint. The fundraiser caused Door County Candle to grow its e-commerce sales from 1 to 65% of the business almost overnight, so the expansion will include a dedicated e-commerce fulfillment area, a conference room and enhanced storage capacity.
“Right now we can only store about 12 candles of each scent in the space we have. With the expansion we can store 48 of each scent,” Trapani says. “They go so fast between online and in-store sales, it’s really hard to keep up, so that’ll be really nice.”
The additional space and storage will be essential for Trapani, who says her fundraising efforts are far from over. In October, Door County Candle began donating 100% of net profits of their beachside-scented candle to Hurricane Ian relief efforts through the American Red Cross. To date, $13,000 has been raised.
Trapani is currently working with Razom of Ukraine to launch a one-for-one candle donation initiative this winter — for every Ukraine candle sold, one will be donated to Ukraine as it braces for ongoing blackouts as Russian missile strikes continue to target energy facilities.
“For us it’s a luxury, but for them a candle is a source of light and heat. It takes [the fundraiser] a step further,” Trapani says.
But Trapani’s impact is as local as it is global, says Lawrie, who worked with Trapani on offering tours of the facility to Door County high school students during Manufacturing Month in October.
“We are trying to change the face of manufacturing, and she helps us to do that,” Lawrie says. “She helps impress upon people that not only can they be in manufacturing, but they can be entrepreneurs.”
Whether connecting with local students or donating to the citizens of Ukraine, Trapani says giving back is now ingrained in Door County Candle’s DNA.
“I want to continue having a philanthropic part of our business,” she says. “That’s a big part of us now, and I want that to continue to be a big part of us moving forward — we are igniting change with candles.”
