How Barn Owl Candles Stopped Their Vessels From Cracking

Barn Owl Candles started the way a lot of good things do, at a kitchen table. Ron and Theresa Shearer began pouring small-batch soy wax candles in 2021, and from the start they wanted a vessel that felt as considered as what went inside it.

The first vessels were cement. They looked the part, but they kept cracking, and a cracked vessel is a real problem when there is a flame involved.

Ron went looking for something stronger, and he kept coming back to hemp. He knew how tough it can be, the way hemp rope holds, and he had seen builders out in California working with hempcrete. If it could stand up in a wall, maybe it could keep a candle vessel from splitting.

So he tried it. He blended our Milled Hemp Hurd Powder into a hempcrete mix and poured it into vessel molds, and the cracking stopped.

Then he pushed it further. Theresa says he torched a few of the vessels on purpose, just to find out how much heat they could take before they gave. The number surprised even the people he tells about it, and a lot of them hear the whole idea and say that it is kind of genius he thought to put hemp in there at all.

The hempcrete does more than hold up. It is lightweight, it has a soft matte finish that fits their modern, minimal look, and every vessel comes out a little different. They also built the vessels to be refillable, so the candle keeps going long after the first pour burns down.

Four and a half years in, what began as a home hobby is now stocked at two Ohio shops, Midnight Readers in Applecreek and LincWay in Dalton, alongside craft fairs, wholesale accounts, and their own website.

We love seeing our hemp hurd end up somewhere this creative. Ron figured out something we had not seen anyone else try, and the candles are genuinely beautiful because of it.