Why We Started Emberwood & Hearth

Every brand has a version of this story — the one about how it started. Ours isn't dramatic. There was no single moment of clarity, no pitch deck, no business plan. There were two people who already spent a lot of time making things, and a question that kept coming back: what would it look like if we made something together?

Where It Came From

Steve started as a hobbyist woodworker — the kind of person who builds a shop over years, learns by doing, and gets obsessive about materials and technique. What began as a hobby eventually became something more deliberate: the CNC routing, the finishing work, the careful attention to grain and surface. Those skills weren't professional credentials. They were the result of putting in the time.

The candle idea came out of the woodworking, not the other way around. The question was: what could a piece of finished hardwood actually be part of? The more we sat with it, the more the pairing made sense — not just a lid on a jar, but an object where the wood and the candle belonged to the same world, carried the same character, and lived together naturally in a room.

Before the first candle was poured, the name existed. The identity came together first — the name, the aesthetic, the sense of what this brand was meant to feel like. That's when it became real. The moment everything crystallized was when a thought experiment became a direction, and from there, Steve and Daniela built the full plan together: the product line, the scent collection, and the production process that makes Emberwood & Hearth what it is now.

The overlap between wood and candles wasn't obvious at first. They don't live in the same section of any store. But they live in the same room — and more than that, they share something harder to name. The warmth. The materiality. The sense that something was made by hand rather than produced at scale. Once that clicked, the question stopped being "why these two things" and started being "why would anyone separate them."

What We Were Trying to Build

We weren't trying to start a candle company. We weren't trying to start a woodworking business. We were trying to build something cohesive — where every object in the line belonged to the same world and carried the same character. The handcrafted candle and the hand-finished hardwood lid aren't two products; they're one object. The tray underneath isn't an accessory; it's part of how the candle lives in a space.

We make 100% soy wax candles with natural wood wicks, poured into black glass jars and finished with hand-routed, locally sourced hardwood lids. The fragrance oils are phthalate-free and skin-safe — sourced as individual oils and blended by us to hit a specific scent brief we write ourselves. Every pour is small-batch. Every lid goes through the CNC and then through a hand-finishing process using natural tung oil. Steve and Daniela do all of this together, themselves, in Plainview, New York.

What Small-Batch Actually Means Here

We use the phrase "small-batch" because it's accurate, but it means something specific to us. It doesn't mean "artisan-sounding." It means that Steve cuts and routes every lid on a Shapeoko CNC from locally sourced hardwood — red oak from Long Island lumber yards, sapele for trays, cherry for select pieces. It means that Steve and Daniela pour every candle together. It means that each candle cures for at least two weeks before we burn-test it, and we burn it through its full life before a scent earns a permanent place in the line.

That's the process. It's slower than it could be. That's the point.

What Emberwood & Hearth Is Now

We're based in Plainview, NY, on Long Island. We sell through our online store at emberwoodandhearth.com and at local farmers markets. The operation is intentionally lean — no outside production, no outsourced finishing, no scent formulations developed by a supplier. Everything that carries our name went through our hands.

It's still early. The line is small and we're learning constantly. But the core of what we set out to build is already there: a small-batch candle brand where the woodwork and the candles belong to the same story, and where every piece carries the same standard regardless of which craft produced it.

We started this because we wanted to make things worth keeping. That hasn't changed.