From Private Label Candles to Handmade Gifts: The Southlake Gifts Story
Inspired by a love of the historic candle-making tradition, Southlake Gifts has been painstakingly creating candles by hand since day one. As of 2022, we’re focused on bringing our unique gifts to Canada.
We didn’t start out making the same outside-of-the-box home decorations we offer now—but our passion for the craft has remained the same from the start. To give you a better glimpse of what motivates us, we thought we’d share a bit of our story.
The Beginning: Private Label Candles
Prior to launching the brand Southlake Gifts, our team spent more than 15 years focused on white labelling and private labelling for major gifts shop and candle brands.
For those who aren’t familiar, white labelling is a service where a manufacturer applies a client’s branding to a product. For instance, a boutique clothing store might want some luxuriously scented candles with their brand dress on them to display in their store. In this case, we were the source for them!
During these years, our founders mastered the ins and outs of candle-making. As it turns out, making high-quality candles isn’t just about pouring wax in the vessels, sticking wicks at the bottom, and adding fragrance or essential oil (although these are important steps).
We discovered that many areas of the candle-making process require keen oversight and attention to detail, which informed how we chose to develop the business. In order to maintain the utmost quality, it was essential that we make our candles by hand—from pouring the wax, to painting them.
Launching the Brand: From Custom Candles to Southlake Gifts
From all the experiences we gained making custom private-label candles, we knew we wanted to have our own brand to present our vision to the world. That’s where Southlake Gifts was born.
In 2019, we decided to focus on releasing candles under our own label rather than creating branded candles for private-label clients. While they still could make great corporate gifts, our designs would be for everyone—not just business owners!
We began by launching our products under the name Southlake Gifts on Amazon. While our unique designs enjoyed instant popularity, it wasn’t until 2020 that things truly took off.
Global Reach, But the Same Boutique Craft
Our Lucky Charms Cereal candle went viral through a video on TikTok and was featured in numerous blog posts and media stories. People around the world connected with our fun, lighthearted take on food-themed candles, so we doubled down our efforts to grow our offerings.
In 2022, we expanded to Canada and Australia. This expansion was a significant milestone for us, and it demonstrated our team’s commitment to growing the brand and reaching a wider audience.
Despite the growth, we still use cruelty-free and non-toxic ingredients containing no lead, plastics, paraben, phthalates or synthetic dyes. With our own in-house design and production studio, we’re able to inspect each candle from the initial ingredients to the finished product.
While we still offer white and private labelling services, we can now bring comfort, inspiration, and whimsy through scent to far more people. And better yet—every one of our candles is still hand-poured, hand-crafted, and hand-painted.
For each of our customers who have followed us along the way: we truly appreciate your support. Our passion for making unique handmade candles of the utmost quality remains stronger than ever!
