With a new home, big investors and soaring sales, Ridgway's Jon Kornbluh has his beeswax candle company poised for big things

At first glance, the office in the northwest corner of the sprawling industrial building appears empty. It’s dark inside on a quiet Friday at Bluecorn Beeswax. A fiber internet installer climbs a ladder on one side of the building. On the other side, a couple workers mill around, tending to various tasks.

But pull open the small office’s glass door and you’ll find Jon Kornbluh seated behind a desk, illuminated by an array of glowing candles — votives and tapers and pillars. He stands, flips a switch on the wall and dimly points out the alternative for lighting is a bank of harsh, soul-sucking fluorescent bulbs. And no candlemaker worth his wax would choose that over the soft radiance of honey-colored, sweet-smelling candles creating a sense of calm, an environment causing visitors to lower their voices before they even realize why.

That’s the sort of atmosphere the 54-year-old Ridgway resident has been trying to foster for customers around the country for 30 years, producing hand-dipped candles of all shapes and sizes. Now he’s aiming to create that vibe on an exponentially larger scale.

Bluecorn Beeswax is in the midst of a radical expansion highlighted by a move this fall into a retail and manufacturing facility in Montrose that’s six times larger than its former home in Ridgway. On the retail side, come springtime, shoppers will be able to sip coffee or an alcoholic beverage from a bar or grab a bite to eat from a cafe. A stage will be built for live music. A new line of scented candles is in the works.

The company is also rebranding. In the first quarter of the new year, Bluecorn Beeswax will become simply Bluecorn, featuring a new logo and new packaging. To top it off, Bluecorn is in acquisition mode, looking at purchasing other candle-making companies.

It’s all thanks largely to an infusion of capital from a private equity group that became a majority owner of the company a year ago and helped boost it into a multimillion-dollar company. But it started with Kornbluh, who now has the financial backing to make his vision for Bluecorn a reality.

“My new partners really shared my belief that creating a kind of global headquarters vibe at this facility was a good move, that the benefit to having a very much public-centric space that invited the world into Bluecorn would not only be a huge benefit to the Montrose community, but that it would be a huge benefit to the Bluecorn brand,” he said.

“And that we’ve got a wonderful product to share, we’ve got a wonderful story to tell and it was just a perfect fit. And personally I love telling that story.”

To appreciate where Kornbluh and his company are headed, you have to understand where he came from. His story begins in a 10-foot by 10-foot cabin along the banks of Butcher Creek in Telluride.

A New York native, Kornbluh arrived in Telluride in the summer of 1990. After spending his first winter in a house next to Lift 8, a one-room, off-grid cabin came open the following winter, and he jumped on it, drawn by the uber-low living cost that allowed him to work as little as possible and ski as much as possible. A propane tank served as the source of fuel for a stove, and Kornbluh built an outhouse in the back. The trouble was, the kerosene lanterns he used for light gave him headaches.

A friend, Baker Steve, offered to bring over his beeswax setup to create a gentler lighting source. He showed up with a pair of 5-gallon galvanized buckets, a bunch of beeswax and a candle-dipping frame. The two strung rope in the cabin and spent the night dipping taper candles. The next day, they took a couple hundred candles to town and sold them all to their hippie friends living in the woods.

“And I was like, ‘Ooh, I like this,’” he said. “I was at that stage where I was like, OK, what’s my next move? I’m a ski bum. I kind of had this feeling of, what I am doing for a career? And I kind of latched onto the candle thing really quick and hard. I loved the process of making it. I loved the idea of selling something that I made.”

He created a rudimentary label and some gift bundles and sold candles at a Telluride craft show. He made $1,000 or so at that first show, which was great money at the time. He asked Steve if he wanted to go into business with him. His friend demurred but encouraged Kornbluh to run with it.

Gradual growth, then a reckoning

Kornbluh began dipping candles regularly. He bought a house in Rico in 1994 and ran the business out of the back. Craft shows in Telluride grew into craft shows across Colorado. He launched a website in 1996 and dabbled in wholesale trade shows in New York and San Francisco but found he preferred the smaller, direct-to-customer sales model.

Gaining admittance to the Union Square Holiday Market in New York City pushed Bluecorn to new heights. He spent months building candles, then shipped them to New York, crashed on a couch in his parents’ Manhattan apartment and sold candles to the thousands of people who streamed through the market every day during the winter holidays.

“That whole thing grew Bluecorn in a very serious way,” he said of the market, which he participated in for nearly 15 years.

It all came tumbling down with the 2008 recession. Kornbluh pulled back, reduced his employee ranks from about a dozen to four and moved his family and the business from Rico to Ridgway. It gave him access to a deeper workforce pool and commercial trucking routes.

He eventually hooked up with Amazon and developed a system in which the tech giant handled customer service and fulfilled all the orders, leaving Bluecorn to focus on manufacturing and shipping products and managing the inventory.

In 2018 he began thinking about selling the business. He’d been making candles for more than 25 years but had resisted taking a big growth leap, unwilling to assume the financial risk. And he was reluctant to pursue more wholesale opportunities, because higher volumes at lower margins meant acquiring more staff and more management on his part.

Kornbluh also admits there were long stretches of time where he lost focus and retreated from the daily operations.

“I got a staff and system going that was more or less self-sufficient without me. I think Bluecorn always did better when I was present. But for my own sanity … I would kind of pull away, whether it was months at a time or even years at a time.

“And whenever I’d come back, there would be this reckoning of cleaning up the systems and the staffing, and I would reintroduce new energy with new products and, you know, just put some energy back in to keep it going. But at no point was I really investing the type of time, money or energy that it took to really grow.”

He enlisted the help of a business broker on the Front Range, a process he called “wildly cathartic.” It pushed him to get his business in order, to identify the shortcomings and growth potential and cut out waste. He began marketing Bluecorn for sale in the fall of 2019. Interest was high.

“And one thing I realized in that process was that I still had lots of energy for running the business, but I really wanted some support. I wanted financial support. I wanted expertise. I wanted partnership, and that I needed an influx of energy on a lot of levels,” he said. Then COVID-19 hit.

The virus proved to be a windfall for Bluecorn. It shut down the company’s manufacturing facility for six weeks, but two to three months’ supply of inventory proved to be enough for people idled at home with little to do other than shop online. Sales today are up 40% compared to two years ago, Kornbluh said.

The pandemic also initially stalled a deal to sell Bluecorn. Talks, though, soon rekindled, and Faison Capital, a Florida-based private equity firm, purchased a majority share of the company in December 2020. Kornbluh retained a minor share of Bluecorn and assumed the title of chief executive officer.

The first order of business: Find a new home.

“We had outgrown Bluecorn before the pandemic hit,” Kornbluh said, referring to its 4,300-square-foot headquarters on Liddell Drive in Ridgway. “And when the pandemic hit, and that growth happened, it was downright uncomfortable.”

Staying in Ridgway wasn’t an option. There was no available existing structure large enough to house its operations, and building new cost too much. They looked north to Montrose, where the vast majority of his employees already lived at the time, and found a 26,000-squarefoot building with great visibility on Townsend Avenue, the main northsouth thoroughfare in town. Bluecorn purchased the old furniture store for $1.75 million in May 2021, according to Montrose County assessor records, and moved all of its operations in October.

The massive size upgrade paid immediate dividends. On Black Friday, Bluecorn shipped 240 direct-to-consumer boxes of candles, according to Kornbluh, who said it was accomplished “with a lot of hard work but with relative ease in this space.” That’s 35 more boxes than the previous Black Friday shipping record in Ridgway.

By the end of the year, Bluecorn expects to exceed $4 million in revenue, according to Faison Capital’s website.

Bluecorn is in the midst of sinking another $1.7 million into a full renovation of the old Furniture Connection property. Production, fulfillment and office operations are up and running. More space means workers can make more candles with greater efficiency. More space also gives Bluecorn the ability to source raw beeswax in larger volumes, allowing the company to take advantage of buying when prices are relatively low.

The next phase is the construction of a retail store, cafe and bar that will serve food, coffee and alcohol. Kornbluh hopes to have those open by March 1.

There will also be a showroom component — floor-to-ceiling glass walls will separate the retail shop and cafe from the manufacturing area while allowing visitors to watch the candlemaking process in action. He said that’s something that’s always fascinated people who get a behind-the-scenes look.

“It’s so rare we get to peer into those worlds,” he said. “It was always a desire of mine to make that transparency part of the new design.”

Bluecorn is also targeting the development of a new line of fragrant candles that will blend coconut wax and beeswax. Beeswax is attractive because it’s non-toxic and burns longer and cleaner than other candle fuels. But its price and availability can fluctuate wildly, and the incorporation of coconut wax is an acknowledgment of that reality, Kornbluh said.

He expects to grow his workforce from roughly two dozen employees to nearly 40 by the end of 2022.

And if that wasn’t enough, Kornbluh said the company is also eyeing other candle companies to buy.

With so much happening in such a short period of time, Kornbluh said it’s important the company holds onto its core values. Asked if he’s concerned about Bluecorn becoming too big and losing the qualities that make it unique, Kornbluh is confident in his answer: no. The goal, he said, remains the same — to sell a beautifully simple product.

“I think that Patagonia still feels like an incredibly intimate experience when you interact with Patagonia because they have held really true to their principles. And they have not wavered in those principles,” he said. “And I think that business integrity or a business message or the soul of a business doesn’t have to die just because you get bigger.”

1075 Sherman St., #200 Ridgway, Colorado 81432 970-325-4412

Mailing address: PO Box 529 Ridgway CO 81432

© 2022 Ouray County Plaindealer