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They have names like “Resilience,” “Surviving,” and “Just A Vibe.”
But these all-natural, soy-based candles are much more than just their names, and their clean-burning fragrances.
Each carefully blended scent, each hand-poured jar represents a triumph over adversity, a light in the darkness in the face of a life-altering event for Pearl & Company owner Kelsey Davey.
“Doing my candle business literally saved my life,” Davey shared. “It got me out of my house, talking to people again and got me to where I feel like I know what I’m doing.”
Davey's is a story of how one moment, one action can dramatically change everything. The first moment — a seemingly simple injury while performing her duties as a South Hadley police officer — sent her life into a tailspin. The second moment — a song, a text and a “moment on the floor” at the lowest point in her life — led to a new path and a new career.
“People would read my story, and people would be in tears and want to hug me,” Davey said of the reaction she got — and still gets — from people at the pop-up shops where she sells her hand crafted candles. “But in my head, I was just doing what I had to do to survive.”
Davey's journey from police officer to candlemaker began with a routine call about an unresponsive person in a parking lot. It was mid-morning. She broke the driver’s window with her baton to administer Narcan, cutting her wrist in the process.
“I remember saying ‘Oh no,’ but I still didn’t think about it,” Davey said, adding she told her sergeant she thought she needed an ambulance for her injury.
At the hospital there was no glass in the wound, but she couldn’t “feel my hand, feel my fingers … everyone thought I was in shock … I just knew I needed to keep moving my fingers,” Davey recounted. In reality, she had severed two tendons and numerous nerves; damage that even surgery seemingly couldn’t heal. The injury was to her dominant hand.
Her career as a police officer and personal trainer came to a standstill.
“I went from being someone who was so independent… my mental health started to suffer,” Davey said, recounting how the every-six-week follow-up appointments led to more disappointment and despair as feeling and function in her hand did not return.
She suffered panic attacks, and night terrors where “all my [police] calls started to run together,” she said, PTSD symptoms and depression. Though people were checking on her, Davey said she felt “so alone,” and that “no one understood” the anguish she was experiencing as she tried to come to terms with the impact of her injury.
Left unable to do the simplest tasks independently — walk her dog, chop broccoli for supper — without help from family, Davey felt her mental health spiral. One day she got a bottle of champagne to “celebrate her life” and planned to end it.
“Then a song came on the radio, my then ex-husband texted me, ‘I’m proud of you’ and I had a moment on the floor ‘grieving everything,’” Davey said. “I decided I wanted to take my life back, my power back.”
Feeling what she described as “a sense of relief,” Davey texted her brother, who was in the wholesale candle business, asking how she could get started making candles.
“He texted back saying. ‘I’ll teach you everything I know about candles,’” she said.
It was “around March 17” of 2023, Davey recalled.
Five days later, she poured her first batch of 36 candles. The fragrances were champagne rose, which she titled “Born to Thrive,” lavender kiwi which she called “Feels Like Home” and a grapefruit mint scented one she titled “Pure Harmony.”
“Each candle name is how I was feeling and what I was going through in the recovery process and even afterward,” Davey said.
Those first 36 candles sold out to family and friends within a week, and “in April, I decided to go into the candle business and launched my candles to the public,” Davey said.
She named her new business Pearl & Company and started selling her candles online in an Etsy shop.
“My dog’s name is Pearl,” Davey said, explaining Pearl is of one of the two the Great Pyrenees she calls her “soul dog” and constant companion during her recovery.
Davey said she named her company after that dog because no matter how low she became, she “couldn’t let [her dogs] down … I stayed because I had to take care of them.”
Davey said she did the first live event with her candles on May 12 — Mother’s Day weekend of 2023 — and her second one on May 14.
“After that, I said, ‘I really like this,’” Davey shared. “I felt like I could be myself again, be open, be honest, share my story and my struggle without judgment.”
And her candle fragrances — and names — really seemed to resonate with people.
“People will pick up a candle because ‘Today I’m Just Surviving’” resonates with them, Davey explained. “Or people will say ‘so and so is going through this, do you have that Resilience candle because this person is so resilient?’”
“No matter what you are going through, I have a candle for that,” Davey added.
And she’s just as mindful of her ingredients. Her soybased wax comes through the candle wholesale company her brother works for. She purchases only high-premium fragrance oils to scent her creations. And the wicks she uses are 100% cotton “so you’re not getting any soot on your walls or clothing” when the candles are burning. In honor of her dogs, all the ingredients and fragrances are safe for use around animals.
Davey recently created her own e-commerce website at pearlncompany.com, where shoppers can find and order all her candle designs and fragrances — including special wedding and divorce collections — as well as an area where clients can place custom orders. In March, she also launched three candle fragrances on Amazon — a vanilla sandalwood scented candle titled “It Is What It Is,” a pistachio caramel fragranced candle called “Surviving” and a watermelon mojito candle titled “Just a Vibe.”
In June, Davey will also be showcasing her candles at several area pop-up events.
On June 7, you will find Pearl & Company at Drunken’ Rabbit Brewery, 794A New Ludlow Rd., South Hadley, from noon to 4 p.m. for the Thomas J O’Connor Animal Control and Adoption Center. On June 14, she will be at the McKinstry Market Garden, 753 Montgomery St., Chicopee, from noon to 5 p.m. On June 28, Pearl & Company will be at Thunder in the Valley, 95 Park Hill Rd., Easthampton, all day.
Davey still pours every candle by hand, using her damaged hand, though often she admits “I still pick things up and I drop things.”
“I spill things, and I go, ‘OK,” she said. “You really don’t realize how often or how much you use your hand until you can’t use your hand.”
TO KEEP UP WITH THE LATEST FRAGRANCES AND EVENTS, VISIT PEARLNCOMPANY.COM, OR FOLLOW DAVEY'S CANDLES ON FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM.
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