After Searching the World Over, Chesapeake Bay Candle is Finding the Way Home

Having started the company in the basement of their Annapolis, Maryland home in 1994, husband-and-wife team Mei Xu and David Wang are preparing to bring part of our production back to our roots near the Chesapeake Bay. More than sixteen years after everything started, we are proud to announce the opening of our first domestic factory in the beautiful state of Maryland, where our brand’s dreams were born. Our new Glen Burnie factory in Anne Arundel County is our fourth manufacturing facility, but our first in the United States.

Equipped with a state-of-the art research and development center and laboratories for fragrance evaluation, fragrance stability testing, and burn testing, this facility will be used to produce an extensive range of filled vessel candles through standardized, automated production. With over 125,000 square feet of space, the space will soon also house a warehouse and operate a distribution center.Having a factory only a few miles away from our headquarters in Rockville, Maryland also allows us to strengthen collaboration between our creative team at the headquarters and research and development and production at the factory.

From the very beginning, Chesapeake Bay Candle has established a reputation as a consumer-inspired, design and fragrance driven company. Every home fragrance collection is anchored in a macro trend responding to current consumer attitudes and reflecting the latest trends in fragrance, color, design and texture relevant to the home industry. Macro trends are identified by our Product Development & Design team in Rockville through a complex, global research process including domestic and international trade show visits, store visits, as well as analysis of emerging trends in fashion, the arts, and pop culture. Our research is filtered into the creation of macro trends relevant to the world of home fragrance – culminating in trend-forward design that has earned our company a reputation as an undisputed style leader in the industry.

With a deep understanding of the magnificent power of scent, Chesapeake Bay Candle collections are grounded in our “Fragrance First” philosophy: fragrance design is always the first building block in every new product line. Our unique alliances with the best fragrance vendors in the U.S. and Europe allow us to bring sophisticated, multi-note scents to the market at affordable pricing. Our collections offer well-balanced fragrance assortments – typically representing all eight fragrance families and providing a captivating scent for every taste and personality. Once fragrance and color stories are finalized by our PD&D team in Rockville, the new product must go through a rigorous development & testing process to ensure it meets our premium quality standards and will entice the consumer when it hits the market.

For domestically produced candles this development and testing will occur at our Glen Burnie Research & Development and Testing Centers. Proposed candle ingredients are tested for stability and compatibility in our Stability Testing Lab. In the R&D Center we develop a unique formula for every new candle – optimized for the given format (size, shape), wax type, color and fragrance combination for a premium fragrance delivery and a clean burn. The formulation is burn tested in our Burn Performance & Fragrance Evaluation Laboratories to verify optimum burn, fragrance throw, and safety both of development and mass production product.

A typical fragrance can have many different raw ingredients and not all ingredients are automatically compatible with a selected wax formula. To ensure the highest quality product, we partner with our fragrance suppliers in the development process to ensure that the fragrances are developed to best perform in our wax formula. The selected fragrances go through verification testing to ensure that they are fully compatible with our proposed wax formula upon arrival at the factory.

Once a candle formula is fully established, the product is ready to go into production. With our fully standardized, automated production process, the Glen Burnie factory has the capability to produce 2000 candles per hour.

The production process includes the insertion of the pre-waxed wick into the vessel, followed by the pre-heating of the vessel ensuring a nice clean finish on each candle, and the pouring of the wax formula into the vessel. Depending on the style of the given product, our production process allows for up to four pours of wax.

Over four hundred feet long, our conveyer line is long enough to allow for ample cooling time as the candles travels into the labeling and packing area. Once it arrives here, the candle receives its side and bottom label and its lid before it is packaged in the appropriate packaging.

After the candles are fully packaged, the product is ready to begin its journey to the retail store – Target, Kohl’s, and Hallmark are just a few examples – where it is waiting to be purchased and enjoyed by the consumer.