The wizard of wax - Andy Glanzman of Northern Lights Candles

Nation's Business, March, 1994 by Ben Fanton

Back in 1976, Andy Glanzman started making candles out of necessity. An elderly friend in western New York needed looking after, and Glanzman and his wife, Tina, moved in with him briefly to help out. The friend's old farmhouse lacked electricity, not to mention heat or running water.

Today, Glanzman is still making candles, hundreds of thousands of them that he sells to customers all over the world. But it's not likely that anyone is setting a match to any of his creations. Each candle made by his company Northern Lights Candles, is a hand-sculpted, collectible work of art, signed by the craftsperson who created it. Although they may be similar, no two are exactly alike.

"We have over 150 different designs," says Glanzman, formerly a professional rock guitarist, as he walks through his small but rapidly expanding business in rural Wellsville, N.Y. The place is full of colorful wax wizards, dragons, unicorns, cats, bears, bunnies, pigs, penguins, and lots of Santas.

"We make a lot of Christmas items," he says as he passes several of his 140 employees putting the finishing touches on the Santas they've made. "We sell probably 75 percent of our annual production during the Christmas season."

The firm's candles retail from $7.95 to $125 each, with the majority priced around $20.

Northern Lights now has gross sales of about $4 million annually and sells wholesale to more than 2,000 retail stores. It also operates 30 kiosks at Christmastime in shopping malls in Canada and the Northeastern United States and has agreements with 20 owner/operators who set up other mall kiosks throughout the U.S. and abroad.

Glanzman's first candles, purely functional, were made by repeatedly dipping wicks into melted wax. His interest, however, soon switched to sculpting. Through experimentation, he developed a formula for a special wax that had the right properties for hand forming. When he set up a table at a local craft fair and made $250 in one weekend, he realized that he might be able to make a living with his creations.

"We started traveling to the biggest and best craft shows in the country," Glanzman says. "I was making them all myself at that time, and after a while, I just couldn't keep up with it. First of all, my hands were getting raw, and I knew that I could sell a lot more than I could make."

The obvious solution was to hire employees and teach them how to create the candles, a choice that suited Glanzman's personality. "I get bored very easily," he says. "If I do something for a while, even if it's a money-generating proposition, I still want to get somebody else to do the actual production so I can move on to other things."

His most valuable role right now, he says, is "making a future for the company."

That future looks promising. In addition to his distribution network in the United States, the candies are sold overseas, in such countries as England, Italy, Australia, and Germany, and they are the No. 1 make of collectible candles sold in Japan. Northern Lights captured the award for best gift import at the Tokyo International Gift Fair in 1990.

"It's quality, it's uniqueness, it's made in America, and it's cute," Glanzman, 40, says of his products' appeal to the Japanese. "If you have those four things, you can sell anything in Japan."

Other keys to the success of Northern Lights Candies, according to Glanzman, are its marketing acumen and its emphasis on developing new products and maintaining low overhead--not even Glanzman has a private office in the company's crowded headquarters. "We put all our money into labor," he says.

Training for employees is extensive. According to Glanzman, some of the more intricate sculptures can take years to learn while even the simpler ones take months to master. On the up side, however, is flexibility. If one item isn't selling well, the employees can just stop making it and switch to another.

Glanzman is quick to praise his staff. "I look at this place and [see] a lot of good people here," he says. "It's really the people here that make this happen."

There's one person in particular to whom he gives credit: his wife, Tina, who has been part of the operation since the bleak days of 1976 and serves as the company's controller. "I'm not financially oriented; I'm more in the creative area," Glanzman explains. "She's more down to earth, dollars and cents."

Upbeat about the company's prospects, Glanzman says, "I think we're going to have a really bright future." Then he adds: "No pun intended."

Ben Fanton is a free-lance writer in Wellsville, N.Y.