Photograph courtesy of Dasha Lebedev
Dasha Lebedev is wearing a casual hat with a fish stitched on the brim. She opens the door to her Hapeville studio and reveals a small but mighty candle-making workshop. It’s another day at The Original Tinned Fish Candle, the company that Lebedev launched just a year and a half ago. At the time, she never expected an Instagram page of her quirky, sea creature–shaped candles to take off the way it did.
Born in Belarus and raised in the North Atlanta suburbs, Lebedev grew up eating tinned seafood with her parents and always liked drawing fish. Still, the idea for making candles seemed to come out of the blue, as did the notion to use an old fish design for the packaging. By the end of 2023, she’d quit her full-time job at a tech company and recruited a handful of friends to speed up the production process as orders poured in. Galleries and boutiques found her on an online marketplace called Faire and wanted candles to sell in their shops. As wholesale business began booming, her six friends became her employees.
A recent check-in finds the studio humming efficiently along—a good thing, with between 300 and 600 candles shipping all over the United States each week, as well as to Europe and Australia. As grateful as Lebedev is for her wholesale orders from wine shops, galleries, and boutiques, she also sells to individuals on her website.
Photograph by Noah Orisich
The process to create one fish candle, ready to light, is a lengthy one. For all the brand’s variations, Lebedev designs the fish mold, the label, and the paper for hand-wrapping. Assembly begins with placing stickers onto tins. Next, wax is melted with an all-natural fragrance, such as rose or sea salt. Each tin is then layered with the scented wax at the bottom, and two scented fish are hand-placed to look like they are swimming. “This part is most time-consuming,” she says.
Once the candle is complete, it’s hand-wrapped with whimsical paper—also tedious, but Lebedev’s process is tailored to what her customers love most. “We tried boxes,” she says. “But I polled my customers, and they prefer the hand-wrapping. So we’re sticking with wrapping for now.”
The studio’s edges are cluttered with test stickers, packaging, and ideas scrawled on sheets of paper: particles of Lebedev’s ongoing brainstorms for new products. Yet her inspiration can and does strike anywhere. She regularly buys canned seafood while out and about—she recently found tinned fish at “the cutest sandwich shop on a family trip to Cape Cod”—and hosts tinned-fish parties with friends. Her current favorite way to enjoy tinned fish? “On a toasted baguette, topped with sardine pate and a cucumber for crunch.”
Photograph by Noah Orisich
For this year’s holiday season, fans of the candle company welcome back last year’s vanilla eggnog scent—“They asked for it,” Lebedev says—and can check out the new Fraser fir scent that provides an instant whiff of yuletide season.
Two new styles of candles have been added to the lineup: smaller birthday candles, affectionately called Wishy Fishies, and elegant tapered options ideal for a dinner party—perhaps one serving tinned seafood.
This article appears in our November 2024 issue.
