I recently had the chance to try out luxury natural candle brand Keap Candles and am so excited to share this incredible purpose-driven company. Plus we’re deep diving into Keap’s heart and soul with founder Harry Doull!

Keap creates all-natural candles boasting fine fragrance scents using a regenerative and virtually zero waste approach. Their intensely luxurious scents are made with 100% plant-based and biodegradable ingredients from mostly organic and fair trade sources. I love that they’re doing things differently with a degree of intentionality you rarely see today, from their limited range of scents to cutting ties with social media. Keap candles are made using 100% natural coconut wax and reusable tumblers in their Kingston, NY studio. If you love non-toxic candles but want something more elevated than an essential oil blend, Keap is the perfect brand to discover.

I tried Timur Moon and Wood Cabin and was blown away by the depth and elegance of these scents. Timur Moon uses Timur Pepper extract sourced from Northwestern Nepal and has this exquisite woodsy, slightly spicy scent that fills up the room easily with a super strong throw. Wood Cabin is also like nothing I’ve ever smelled before. Despite sounding like it’s meant for winter, I find that it works so well even in these summer months. Deeply complex and intoxicating, the notes include Cade Juniper, Wet Moss, Cedarwood, Burnt Pine, Guaiacwood, and Nutmeg. They also provide a clean, even burn with zero tunneling.

Keap has the most streamlined offering of candles I’ve seen. They’ve got just three permanent scents (Wood Cabin, Timur Moon and Wild Figs) you can shop at anytime and a fourth seasonal scent that changes every month. Currently as it’s summer, the seasonal scent is Waves, which captures salty seaside air. They’ve built a loyal Keapee community who opt for their subscription, which can be customized to the scent, quantity and frequency preferred.

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And what better way is there to understand Keap’s ethos than from the human who started it all? Keep reading for my interview with founder Harry Doull…

Interview with Keap Founder Harry Doull

What inspired you to start Keap?

My co-founder Stephen and I were roommates in the early 2010s, and we were completely obsessed with candles. Our apartment was pretty sparse, but we always had a TON of candles everywhere. We’d geek out about them constantly—in a totally non-business way at first.

At the same time, we were colleagues at Google/YouTube and felt increasingly unsettled by the work we were doing. We dreamed of designing a workplace that offered us what we had been looking for when we joined Google. Keep in mind—we joined when it was still the “Don’t be evil” days—and people really believed and abided by it back then!

So we started exploring regenerative business practices—sustainable supply chains, alternative ownership models, anything that had the potential to create “net benefit” as we defined it back then, rather than just profit.

Eventually these two threads crossed, and we thought: What if we implemented these regenerative business ideas on this candle obsession that is so much fun?

That forced us to dig deep into why candles were so meaningful to us, and that soul-searching ultimately led to Keap as it stands today!

“The 3 musketeers” — these were the first candles we ever made, in our kitchen.
They were not very good, but you have to start somewhere!

Keap’s unique business model stood out to me. What’s been the biggest challenges / rewards of choosing this route?

Our business model centers on three interconnected decisions we made early on.

First, we manufacture everything in-house at our Kingston, NY studio. This practice is a rarity in luxury candles where the norm is to outsource to a handful of big contract manufacturers. Getting off the ground was much harder this way, but we now have complete control over ingredient selection and quality standards. We know exactly what goes into every candle, because we’re the ones making them. And we’re able to freely and nimbly experiment with sustainable materials that are too expensive or too niche for big contract manufacturers to consider.

Second, we maintain a deliberately simple product line—currently four scents. We can’t compete with much larger contract manufacturers at producing a wide assortment of candles at high volumes. But we can produce with a much higher level of craftsmanship than they can when we are able to focus on doing one thing really, really well.

Third, we focus on building relationships with fewer, more loyal customers rather than constantly chasing new ones. Our subscription model became the main way we do this—many subscribers have been with us for 8+ years. We’ve also been off social media since 2021, which ties into our focus on building stronger, longer lasting relationships with our community. In our experience, algorithmic content platforms are not reliably conducive to this kind of genuine connection.

Why should you care? These three features together mean that when you buy a candle from us, you are not paying us to cover millions of dollars of Facebook ads or the heavy freight costs to ferry goods to and from faraway contract manufacturers and distributors. By eschewing all that, we are able to invest significantly more in each of our fragrances. According to our master perfumers, our ingredient costs per candle are often double what much pricier luxury brands spend.

It also means our candles are being made by well-trained craftspeople who really care rather than churned out in less-than-ideal conditions. We make them with highly discerning candle fanatics in mind, and you can’t cut corners or compromise on quality with that kind of customer.

Another benefit of this approach is that our business needs less cash to operate with fewer items in inventory, and it has a certain predictability through our subscription: This is the key to our ability to remain financially independent and continue to work with a very long-term mindset.

Our financial independence makes our work as a team so much more purposeful and fun. We get to define goals that align with our purpose of facilitating connection rather than aiming to scale at all costs. We can take the years, and sometimes decades, needed to work on sustainable innovations, like our ongoing 10+ years of work to create the first direct-trade organic-certified wax for scented candles.

Keapee Sofia completing a tray of candles.

But there are drawbacks, and mostly they revolve around the fact that we’re not for everyone. Some people would like us to have 30 scents available at all times and in various sizes, shapes and colors. While that might be nice, we’ve foregone these avenues to get the benefits I laid out above.

And building a manufacturing business from scratch—and doing it right—is a slow and difficult thing. It’s taken some serious resilience to ride all the economic ups and downs of the last few years, but I’m really proud of where we’ve managed to bring ourselves and the incredible community that has supported Keap through these volatile times.

Anything you can divulge about the new collection launching this year?

Actually, we launched our first all-natural Full Circle Collection scent in December 2024 to our subscribers. We’ve since made Timur Moon available year-round to all, and this past May, we launched another seasonally available scent,  Terraces. So let me give you a sneak peek at what’s next!

Timur Moon is our first groundbreaking 100% plant-based, 100% biodegradable all-natural scent (Credit: Claudia Cinquegrana / Keap)

Later this year we’ll be launching our third Full Circle Collection scent. We’re not yet ready to share the name, but it will be going back to our roots: It will be woodsy, deep, dark… and just a smidge witchy. We’re very excited about it.

We’re planning to launch two more in 2026, including one centered on a phenomenal Eucalyptus extract. 

This extract is proprietary to our supplier: The extraction method is similar to an essential oil, but they apply high pressure instead of heat. I can share more about the nerdy science behind this if you’d like! (It’s the same supercritical fluid extraction method used for our Timur pepper extract in Timur Moon.)

The lower distillation temperature allows us to preserve more of the aromatic compounds of eucalyptus—so compared to an essential oil, it smells more refined, subtle and “full.” It helps that the eucalyptus they use for the extraction is of exceptional quality to begin with. Anyway, I find it absolutely beautiful and I can’t wait to make it the hero of this new scent—the vibe will be very “spa” and relaxing. Can you tell I’m excited about it? 🙂   

Most 100% natural candles using essential oils aren’t able to offer the “fine fragrance” like scents of luxury candles. How is Keap able to do it?

We discuss this in detail in these two blog posts (How and Why We Are Moving to an All-Natural Approach to Fragrances and Why Are There So Few All-Natural Luxury Candles?), but the short answer is twofold:

1) Know-How
We have a very close partnership with a 150-year old family-owned fragrance supplier renowned for having the best sourcing and expertise in both natural fragrance ingredients and candle science. After a decade building our reputation, we were able to persuade them to lend their capabilities to solving our ambitious challenge despite our small size. They saw in us an innovative and rigorous partner that could bring fresh ideas to their generations of experience, and they were willing to tackle a project that other fragrance houses aren’t.

2) Budget
Our business model allows us to allocate a much higher percentage of our costs to fragrance ingredients than typical luxury brands. While specialized expertise is necessary, it’s not sufficient if you can’t invest heavily in your fragrance. When your budget allows you to source a much wider array of (more expensive) natural ingredients, you open up more options to overcome the technical hurdles with making all-natural candles that perform like luxury candles.

If Keap could have a collaboration with any artist, writer, or musician—dead or alive—who would it be, and what kind of scent would you imagine creating?

This is a tough one!

I just shared a list of songs that feel in the Keap vibe with a filmmaker working on a Keap mini-doc. Out of those, the dream for me would probably be Haruomi Hosono. I could write pages about all the dimensions I love about this artist — and he’s also been very collaborative throughout his career (this album is one wonderful example).

[Here’s that full playlist on Spotify!]

If we were making a scent together, it would be innovative in some unexpected way, but also rooted in tradition and designed to cultivate a sense of calm and peace. It would definitely be a little weird as well. I could see it incorporating a seaweed extract perhaps… 

Any “dream scent” of yours that’s still too tricky to create naturally? Any “fragrance fails” you secretly loved but couldn’t release?

There are many dreamy scents that are too tricky to create naturally. For example, tomato / tomato leaf scents are currently very popular but most people don’t realize that they are produced synthetically*. That’s not necessarily a terrible thing, but I feel a little frustrated when brands try to mislead buyers into thinking that it’s a natural extract pulled straight from a tomato.

I do personally enjoy those kinds of hyper-green vegetal scents though. We are playing around with a few other vegetable extracts (green pepper, etc.) to create a new hyper-vegetal scent that is actually all-natural. 

As for scents I secretly loved but couldn’t release… Well, our fragrance supplier, Mane, has a hay absolute that I think smells incredible but may not be for everyone. It smells like HORSE — in a very deep, primal way. 

I might have included a tiny bit of it in ALL of our new scents if not for the fact that it doesn’t fit our criteria of being 100% biodegradable. It’s also one of the most expensive fragrance ingredients at $3,500 / kilo, so maybe it’s for the best for the viability of Keap’s business (for reference, our average fragrance cost is around $200/kilo, and most luxury candles are typically in the $80-100 price range).

*I am aware of one fragrance house that has made a tomato accord reconstitution that is plant-based, meaning they isolated individual molecules from a variety of plant sources and combined them to form a tomato smell. However, this naturally-sourced composition is not coming from a tomato. And most tomato / tomato leaf scents you encounter in candles are not using this ingredient. 

Your favorite candle and way to enjoy it?

It usually changes with the season for me. But—and it may be recency bias— I have been continuously obsessed with Timur Moon this year. There are so many interesting aspects to this scent, especially the incredible story around its main ingredient, a very special Timur Pepper extract.

To me this scent works in any season. The scent throw is less frontally strong than, say, our heavy hitter Wood Cabin — but it projects very far and lingers subtly for a long time. That makes it a scent that can comfortably live close to your dining area without interfering with meal time. For me, it has this radical effect when I enter the room it’s in, where I find myself thinking “Oh man, I love this room!”. It’s so unique and captivating. Our master perfumer Ugo really nailed it with that one.

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