Troy Arntsen created his very first Voluspa scented candle in the kitchen of his Costa Mesa home nearly 30 years ago.
He and his former partner, Traci, were initially selling batches of handcrafted slow-burning candles in local boutiques across Orange County. One day, they received a $3,000 order from luxury fashion house St. John Knits when it was still headquartered in Irvine.
Then an order from Saks Fifth Avenue for 350 candles followed, and the company’s growth was ignited.
Since Arntsen began burning wicks in his kitchen in 1999, he has expanded operations into an 84,800-square-foot facility in Irvine with 160 employees. Now, nearly 500 fragrance products, including diffusers, room sprays and perfumes, are designed, manufactured and distributed onsite.
Voluspa candles, which are made from coconut wax blend, have reached the homes of celebrity customers such as Megan Fox, Victoria Beckham and Halle Berry.
The brand works with over 5,000 global retail locations including Bloomingdale’s and Anthropologie to distribute products internationally and was exclusively an e-commerce retailer until recently. It is now investing in building a brick-and-mortar footprint, having opened three retail stores across Orange County—at Fashion Island in 2019, the Brea Mall last year and the Irvine Spectrum Center in July—with plans for more in California and beyond.
“It serves this purpose of helping us connect with our customers, but also as a way to drive innovation as we look forward into the future,” Arntsen, who serves as president, told the Business Journal.
Voluspa also landed its first brand collaboration in 2024 when Universal Pictures reached out to Arntsen asking if he’d like to create an exclusive fragrance set for the “Wicked” musical films. After rejecting all brand pitches for the previous two decades, this was the first time Arntsen said yes. It sold “extraordinarily well.”
This year, the company worked on its second brand collaboration with the Fender guitar brand, which launched on Sept. 17.
“Since then, we’ve been thinking about ways to use this to further the message of our brand and connect with more customers in innovative ways,” Arntsen said.
From the Kitchen to 85,000 Square Feet
Arntsen, previously an industrial engineer, was working at Cypress Semiconductor when he made a connection with an importer of essential oils. Arntsen said he was inspired by the executives’ entrepreneurial venture and liked the idea of striking out on his own.
After a visit to India and a quick stint joining his friend’s essential oils company as partner, Arntsen and his then-partner, Traci, decided to start a candle business out of their own home instead.
He and Traci, who is no longer with the company, took the Voluspa name from a poem in Norse mythology, which Arntsen said means “beauty created from chaos.”
Before landing in luxury stores across the U.S. and internationally, Arntsen took the candles to local markets first because “early boutique retailers recognized the quality.”
Then, when the orders from St. John and Saks Fifth Avenue came in, it reinforced the quality of the products he was making.
The company gradually expanded its manufacturing footprint as it gained more wholesale partners. Voluspa’s first lease outside the Arntsen home was 800 square feet. A few years later, its space more than doubled to 1,900. Before moving to its current Irvine outpost in 2011, Voluspa was operating out of approximately 27,500 square feet of space in Lake Forest.
The company’s headcount has tripled since setting up in Irvine and might need more space in the future.
Though the company declined to provide financial details, Voluspa’s revenue grew nearly 60% over the prior five years, driven by e-commerce sales.
“It’s been a very steady, incremental growth year after year,” Arntsen said.
Now establishing its own retail footprint, Arntsen said Voluspa is taking a similar measured approach.
“We want to make sure it works wherever we go, and so it’s really about finding the right place, the right location,” he said.
Made in Orange County
From the decorative glass and tin cases to the handcrafted scents, Arntsen labels Voluspa as accessible luxury with a “fair and attainable” price.
Mini tin candles start at $15 apiece with the largest size, a five-wick hearth candle, going for $275, all of which Arntsen says burn twice as long as candles from mass retailers.
“We really have an obsession with our quality, and that’s why we’ve always manufactured here,” Arntsen said, even though manufacturing costs are lower in other parts of the country.
“To me, we’re building a luxury product, and the quality of the product is the most fundamental thing, and I want to have my eyes on it, our whole team and I,” he added.
When the licensing deal with Universal for “Wicked” came about, he said it was because the company could be more creative than other home fragrance brands. It also pushed the limits of what the brand could create beyond its general collections.
“I thought we could really sink into this and design something that really spoke to the artistry of the play itself,” he said.
Arntsen said the candle sets sold well, and the partnership opened a door to new customers and connections. The company later allowed the Coola sunscreen brand to infuse Voluspa’s California Summers fragrance into an existing SPF product, which sold out three weeks after launch last year.
The company’s latest collaboration with Fender launches three new exclusive scents and a new glass container featuring a guitar pick as the label.
Voluspa has also expanded its product lineup the last few years, recently adding wall diffusers and perfumes.
“As we became more sophisticated in communicating to our customers what our brand stands for, we were in a position to be trusted with introducing fine fragrance in the market,” Arntsen said.
What Innovation Looks Like at the Candlemaker
Voluspa is constantly creating new methods to improve operations and products, both on the floor of the manufacturing facility and in the candle-making process. It has created several tools over the last 20 years that only a candlemaker might think of or need.
One of the first evolutions was when Voluspa created its proprietary coconut wax blend about seven years into business, which is still used now.
Standard manufacturing additions have included automated machines for filling and sealing bottles of perfume. However, Voluspa candles are currently poured, cooled and packaged by a combination of employees and machinery.
Arntsen said the company is about to start testing an automated conveyor belt system for making its candles, which are still the company’s largest SKU by far.
Other unique projects include plastic booths that allow employees to step in, smell and evaluate a single fragrance in testing. Several other scented products are being made in the surrounding area.
Another innovation has to do with the candle itself. Director of Fragrance and Education Brittany Bell has been working on a fragrance formula that neutralizes odor in the room and not only casts perfume to disguise the smell.
Voluspa’s newest scent, called Tomato Trellis, is the first to utilize the scent-silencing technology, which captures airborne odor molecules then neutralizes them across all formats.
“We test everything way beyond industry standards to make sure that we do have the best burning candle,” Arntsen said. “So, everything that we do in our factory ultimately has to pass that test in the lab, that this is something we’re going to put our name on.”
— Emily Santiago-Molina