Praying with your hands: why we make things slowly

We have been asked more than once why we do not scale the pours. The honest answer is that we could — the equipment exists, the contract manufacturers exist, and we have had the conversation twice. We would make more money and fewer decisions.

Here is the argument for not doing it.

The work is the prayer

There is an old monastic idea, ora et labora — pray and work — which in practice means the two are not separate activities competing for the same hour. The washing up is not the thing you do before you can pray. It is a form of it, if you are paying attention.

Pouring wax is unusually good for this. It has a temperature you have to wait for, a pace you cannot rush, and a failure mode if your mind wanders. Fifty candles is about ninety minutes of standing still doing something with your hands and nothing with your phone. We have prayed more in that room than in any other part of the week.

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters. — Colossians 3:23

What smallness protects

Fifty at a time means we know what went into every one. It means a bad batch costs us a morning rather than a quarter. It means the person who poured your candle is the person who labelled it, and if something is wrong with it you are talking to them.

It also means we can stop. If a design is not right, we do not have four thousand units in a warehouse arguing with us about it.

The part that is not romantic

It is slower and it costs more per unit, and there are weeks where the curing rack is the reason we cannot fill an order. We are not pretending this is a clever business strategy in disguise. It is a choice with a price, and we pay it.

But the whole shop is built on the idea that a made thing carries something of the making. We would be strange to say that on the label and then outsource the pour.