Jimenez Julien, founder of WickAndWax

Why I built a batch record for candle and soap studios

The first studio I sat in belonged to a woman in Providence who had been pouring soy containers for nine years. She had two hundred and forty jars curing on steel shelving, a wall of fragrance jugs with handwritten dates, and a spiral notebook that was, by her own description, the single point of failure in her business. A buyer from a regional gift chain had asked her for lot documentation on a scent she had shipped four months earlier. She spent an entire Sunday reconstructing it from receipts, packing slips and memory, and she got it mostly right. Mostly right is a terrible place for a business to live.

I had spent the previous decade building operational software for manufacturers who could afford enterprise systems. What struck me in that Providence studio was that the makers doing the most careful work often had the least usable tooling. Enterprise batch systems assume a plant, a quality department, a barcode infrastructure and a budget. Spreadsheets assume you will remember to open them. Between those two extremes sits an enormous number of American studios pouring somewhere between forty and nine hundred units a month, selling on Shopify and Etsy and at Saturday markets, and being asked with increasing frequency for documentation they have no practical way to produce.

So I stopped guessing and went to visit. Over about two years I spent time in candle and soap studios in Rhode Island, North Carolina, Oregon, Wisconsin, Texas and upstate New York. I watched people pour. I learned the difference between a cold process cure schedule and a paraffin set time, why fragrance load percentage matters more than fragrance weight, why the wick series is part of the recipe and not an accessory, and why net weight in grams gets typed wrong so often. I also learned that almost nobody wants a new system. They want the numbers they already write on masking tape to end up somewhere they can be found again.

That became the design rule. WickAndWax does not ask you to change your process. It asks you to record the lot when the case arrives, the pour when the pour happens, and nothing else. Everything downstream, the cure date, the label, the ingredient declaration in descending weight order, the order to batch link, the cost per unit, is derived from those two moments. If a feature required a maker to do extra work at the bench, it did not ship.

How I work with the studios that use it

I still do onboarding calls myself for new Wholesale Ready accounts, and I read every message that comes through the contact form on this site. When a maker tells me a label template is wrong for her category, that is a bug and it gets fixed on a schedule I will tell her out loud. I run a monthly call with about thirty studios who volunteered to look at work in progress, and their objections have killed more features than they have created. That is the correct ratio.

Experience and expertise

• Twelve years building production, inventory and traceability software, most of it for regulated physical goods.
• Two years of field research inside US candle and soap studios, including forty three recorded pour sessions.
• Working knowledge of Fair Packaging and Labeling Act requirements for cosmetic and household product labeling, and of INCI ingredient declaration for soap sold with cosmetic claims.
• Founder of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes WickAndWax and a small portfolio of other operational tools.
• Hands on with the boring parts: CSV imports from six supplier formats, thermal printer drivers, and the Avery templates that makers actually own.

How this product is built and maintained

WickAndWax ships small changes weekly and holds anything that touches the label builder for a documented review first, because a bad label is a real world consequence and not a rendering bug. Every compliance rule in the product cites the requirement it implements, and when a rule is ambiguous we say so in the interface rather than pretending to certainty we do not have. We do not publish a claim on this website that we cannot support with account data, and the numbers on the home page come from aggregated, anonymized usage across paying studios, refreshed each quarter.

Editorially, I write the copy on this site myself. No testimonial is composed, edited for flattery or attributed to a person who did not say it. No statistic is rounded up to look better. If a page says makers report six hours back each month, that is a median from a survey I can produce. Customer data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never fed into a model. Backups run daily and are held thirty days, and any maker can export the whole workspace to CSV at any time, including after cancelling.

What I am accountable for

Uptime, the correctness of the label output, the honesty of this website, and answering my email. If WickAndWax loses a batch record, gets an ingredient declaration wrong, or bills you for a month after you cancelled, that is mine to fix and I will tell you what happened rather than sending a status page link.

Published articles

Everything below is written and maintained by me for The Pour Room, the WickAndWax magazine for candle and soap makers, and reviewed against current US labeling practice before publication.

Read the whole magazine in The Pour Room

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a product question, a compliance question, a bug or a complaint. I answer within one business day. If you would rather talk it through with your own recipes on screen, use the request form on the home page and mention that you asked for me directly.