For Mikey Kim, launching businesses has long been a bit of an obsession. He launched his first company at 18, sold it within a year, and has created ten businesses since. So when he was laid off as CMO from a startup in 2020 with six months of runway to find work, he decided to explore being his own boss once again.
A natural creative, Kim wanted his next venture to allow him to work with his hands. He began experimenting with candle making from the living room of a two-story walk-up he shared with his roommate, Jawny McQuade, in Los Angeles.
“There were natural candles on the market, but you’d light them and smell nothing,” he recalled. “I thought there was an opportunity to solve a problem and turn my creativity into a successful business.”
He started by making a batch of 500 candles inspired by the smell of the outdoors. Dubbing his business Hemlock Park, he opened an Amazon storefront and sent his products to Amazon’s warehouses using Fulfillment by Amazon, which handled storing, packing and shipping to customers. The candles old out within a month.
He doubled down, making larger and larger batches that would also sell out. Soon, the boxes of candles started to overwhelm the apartment.
“As soon as you walked in, the fragrance was amazing, but so overpowering,” said McQuade, who Kim tapped to run the company with him as Hemlock Park’s Director of Media. “I told Mikey, ‘I’m happy to keep working with you, but you’ve got to get this stuff out of here. We can’t live in a candle!’”
Within months, Kim moved the business to a dedicated production space in northern Nevada’s Sierra region. Today, Hemlock Park handcrafts about 20,000 candles a month in its production studio. The company now employs a small local team of artisans who hand-pour each candle, along with remote employees supporting marketing and operations.
“It’s important to us to create jobs in our community,” McQuade said. “We want to know the people who make our products. We want relationships—with our team and our customers.”
The new space also gave the company room to scale while staying true to its ethos: handmade, natural, and locally made. The brand uses FSC-certified wooden wicks sourced from the Midwest, U.S.-sourced plant-based coconut wax, and essential oil blends formulated in-house. It is also carbon neutral and partners with One Tree Planted to support reforestation efforts in North America.
“Being made in America is very important to us. It’s a staple of what we do,” McQuade said. “It allows us to support our community and have control over what goes into our product.”
Though Hemlock Park is unique, candles themselves are not a niche product. To stand out, Kim enrolled in Amazon Vine, which helps sellers populate product pages with unbiased reviews from Amazon customers.
“Amazon Vine gave us real customer feedback from day one,” Kim said. Not only did the reviews help build trust with potential customers, but served as an informal focus group, helping him improve products. “If a scent isn’t what customers expect, we tweaked it. We’re constantly reading reviews and improving.”
The company has also expanded beyond candles into reed diffusers and spa products, all still handmade and made in the U.S. As production increased, Kim began using Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD), Amazon’s low-cost bulk storage solution, to manage inventory and ship products more efficiently.
“AWD lets us store inventory without filling up every square foot of our studio,” said Kim.
Today, Hemlock Park has sold more than 1 million candles and ranks among the top performers in its category in the Amazon store.
“Our sales have more than doubled every single year,” Kim said. “We started as a brand no one had heard of, with zero reviews. Now we’re top 10 in our category.”