Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh.
Hi Josh, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
In 2016, I married a florist and like most husbands who marry florists, I learned fast that my real job title was “on-call assistant.” I wasn’t gifted at floral design, so my work was the heavy lifting: moving pedestals, building arches, setting out candles, and after every wedding, scraping dried wax off the holders until 2 a.m.
Candle cleaning is the job every florist hates the most. You’ll crack your nails, cycle through five different tools, and still wonder if you got it clean. Worse, the upscale studio my wife had worked so hard to build was slowly turning into a dingy storage unit of waxy candleware.
So I carved out my own workflow alongside her at Good Seed Floral (goodseedfloral.co). She’d focus on the flowers; I’d handle anything with a wick. I developed little tricks for wedding-day styling, kept the shop organized on the back end, and figured out which cleaning tools and methods actually worked on real wax buildup.
Other Austin florists noticed the system and started asking if I’d do it for them too. I founded MAR Candle Co. (marcandleco.com) in 2022 starting with my wife’s inventory and a small set of taper holders, votives, and pillar candles I bought with our savings. I’d deliver and pick up, so they never had to store anything or think about candles past the wedding day. All of my early revenue went straight back into the inventory: new taper holders, hurricane vases, and every size of votive I could find.
Three years in, MAR Candle Co. now holds the largest candle holder collection in Austin: 150+ unique items across our taper, pillar, votive, and lantern collections. We’ve provided candle rentals for high music profile artists like Leon Bridges, Forbes 100 corporate events, and over 500 individual brides. Once a florist works with us, they almost never go back to sourcing candles on their own. It’s simply too convenient, too flexible, and too cost-effective to do it any other way.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The hardest part of running a candle rental business in Austin is probably the math. Florists call it “candle math,” and it goes like this: the bride wants three heights of taper holders on the guest tables in two colors, one color on the rounds and another on the rectangles, two heights in two more colors on the head table, pillar clusters on the bar and welcome table, and two votive styles split across the room. One wedding is enough to make a planner’s head spin. But 15 of those in a single Saturday requires systems to manage it. The systems we’ve built at MAR Candle Co. to keep every order straight is honestly what I’m proudest of.
In other ways, candle rental has actually been a smooth road. The offering is focused, the client is specific, and consistent feedback from florists let us tailor the service quickly. Most of our challenges have been logistical: finding cleaning tools that actually remove wax without scratching glass, packing the delivery van so nothing shifts when we brake hard on I-35, and learning the hard way that the wrong cleaner or water temperature can ruin a taper candle holder or glass votive.
We’ve been impressed with MAR Candle Co, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
MAR Candle Co. exists to free Austin florists from the passion-destroying tasks that get in the way of their real work so they can bring more beauty into the world through floral design. We rent candles, candle holders, and candle-adjacent accessories to florists and event designers across Austin and Central Texas: taper holders in every height and finish, pillar holders, votives, hurricane vases, lanterns, and pearled wax candles.
Florists have a unique and under-appreciated artistic ability. They’re mimicking nature with a live medium on a deadline. They’re guaranteed to be the hardest-working vendor on site, and yet they typically have little backup, which is why husbands, sisters, and friends end up pressed into service on wedding days. MAR Candle Co. is the backup. Florists love our service because it frees them to focus on the florals, not on cleaning, storing, or assembling candle orders. And when a bride changes her mind on candle color two weeks out, which happens often, it’s no longer an emergency. It’s an update to an existing order.
Austin is the only wedding market in the country running a service like this at scale, and it’s quietly become the envy of the surrounding cities. Traditional rental companies typically won’t touch candleware because the cleaning and quantity control are brutal. But MAR Candle Co. didn’t start as a revenue play. It started as a problem worth solving for a community of floral designers we already loved. That’s still the standard we operate by. Florists can see our full collections and request a quote at marcandleco.com.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
Candle trends move slowly. Most of the staples in our Austin collection have been wedding mainstays for a while. But every few years, something genuinely new arrives. Pearled wax candles have surged over the last few years, so we added them to our MAR Candle Co. lineup. They give a sculptural, almost architectural look that photographs beautifully, and Austin brides have responded to them quickly.
Going forward, I expect the rental model itself to be the bigger shift. Couples are more sustainability-minded and more budget-aware than they were even five years ago, and renting candles instead of buying them once is an obvious win on both fronts. I also think we’ll see other markets try to replicate what we’ve built in Austin. We keep our feelers out for what end clients are asking for, and when something unique gains traction here, it usually shows up in our offering within the same season.
Pricing:
- ~$10 for a taper holder with candle and hurricane
- ~$10 for a pillar candle in a glass cylinder vase
- ~$3 for a votive
Contact Info:
- Website: https://marcandleco.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mar.candleco/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marcandleco/
Image Credits
Sarah Tribett Photography
