The problem

The story of VelaRosa comes from humble beginnings, and a need to make our house a home.  I’ve always loved burning candles.  It seems to make a home cozier.  Certain scents evoke certain feelings, and I’ve always varied my scent choices with the seasons.  Crisp apple scents for the fall, Pine and cranberry scents for Christmas… You get the picture. 

Over time, however, I began noticing that some of my favorite scents, purchased over and over again at the same popular candle stores, seemed to lack the strength, intensity, and ability to fill my home with fragrance.  I had to spend extra money to purchase 3-wick candles in my favorite scents to get the same level of scent diffusion that I was previously getting with a one-wick candle from the SAME stores in the past.

As the years went on, and we added our first child to our family, life became more and more hectic, to say the least.  One night, when we had left the house for a dinner out, it dawned on me that I couldn’t remember if I had blown out a candle that I had been burning in the kitchen.  And, to be honest, this wasn’t the first time that I had forgotten a candle burning after leaving the house.  Speaking with girlfriends, I found that I wasn’t the only one who did this.  One girlfriend, in fact, confessed that she had left a candle on top of her TV, and went to bed.  The following morning, she woke up to find that the candle glass actually melted into the top of her television.  So Scary! These stories set off a ‘fix it’ switch in my husband.  For the next 5 years (on and off), my husband “tinkered” with different ways to automatically blow out a candle. 

At this point, you're probably telling yourself, hold on... he's not fixing the weak candle fragrance problem... you're right, I'll eventually get to that part...

The first concept

My husband’s ‘tinkering’ started with playing around with some cardboard cut outs during a family vacation in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Then, it progressed to glassware and plastic packaging.  It evolved bit by bit until one weekend, while I was out with our daughter, he stumbled onto what he thought was an answer.
 
On Sunday, July 18, 2004, he showed me this:

He explained that if he were to blow air from the bottom of the white bowl with holes, the air would sustain the flame. If he stopped the air from blowing, he was able to extinguish the candle. I thought to myself, “well, that’s underwhelming”, and went about my day : )

In the next blog we continue with this history.  Until then, please sign up for our Kickstarter campaign email list, where we’ll launch the VelaRosa candle fragrance diffuser!

You can sign up here: VelaRosa email list