[P.F. Candle Co.] Kristen Pumphrey & Thomas Neuberger

This week, we sit down with Kristen Pumphrey and Tom Neuberger, co-owners of P.F. Candle Co., the California-born home fragrance brand known for its clean, modern scents and iconic amber jar candles. Kristen and Tom share the full story behind their 15-year journey — from learning to make candles at age 12 and selling early blends on Etsy, to navigating craft fairs, bootstrapping every step, and ultimately opening three retail stores across LA, San Francisco, and Brooklyn.They walk us through P.F.’s deeply intentional product-development process: building mood boards, working with fragrance houses, learning the language of perfumery, iterating endlessly on scent mods, and managing production timelines that can stretch from nine months to a year and a half. We discuss how they forecast demand in a high-cost, razor-thin margin environment, the systems they use to avoid overbuying, and how unexpected moments — like a Wirecutter feature that triggered a 2,500-person waitlist — force even seasoned operators to stay nimble.We also dig into what it really means to manufacture domestically today. Kristen and Tom break down the realities of sourcing U.S.-made materials, negotiating credit terms, weathering tariffs, and scaling while staying self-funded. They share candid lessons from retail expansion — picking neighborhoods, avoiding bad real estate, designing stores through a DIY lens, and staying grounded in curation and customer connection.Finally, we explore why authenticity in press still matters, how P.F. thinks about new vs. returning customers, why some product bets fail (and what they learned from them), and how the team stays creatively energized after more than a decade in business.If you're interested in CPG, scent and product development, bootstrapping, retail strategy, or the realities of scaling a small but mighty brand, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.