People ask what Vicandyls is and we’ve never answered it the same way twice. The honest version: we make things for occasions, and the occasion decides what the thing is.
It started with candles. Small batches, poured on a dining table with newspaper down, mostly as favors for people getting married or having babies. That part’s still true, and it’s still the part with a name attached to it. But it didn’t stay there. It turns out that if you can pour a candle with somebody’s name on it, people will also ask you for the sign, and the seating chart, and forty favor bags, and a shirt with a joke on it that only eleven people will understand.
We’d rather make those than not.
So the actual list, as of now: candles and candle favors. Balloon installations. Welcome signs on mirrors and boards. Seating charts, including one made entirely of paper leaves. Tablescapes with an unreasonable number of pumpkins in October. Custom shirts, tumblers, sashes and totes. A toy box with a child’s name burned into the front and a whole cast of storybook animals burned around the sides. Stickers of somebody’s dog.
None of that is a coherent business category. It’s a coherent sensibility, which is a different thing and much harder to put in a dropdown menu.
What connects it is specificity. A generic centerpiece is a centerpiece. A centerpiece made for one particular table at one particular shower, in the colors somebody actually chose, with a joke on the tag that only that family gets, is a different object. It takes about the same time to make. The specificity is the whole product.
The other thing that connects it is the table. Almost everything on this site was made on the same dining table, under newspaper, in the evening. We’re not romanticizing that. The newspaper’s there because wax and vinyl and paint get everywhere and the table isn’t replaceable. But it does mean there’s a ceiling on how much can exist at once, which is why batches are small, and why the honest answer to “how fast can you do this” is always “depends what else is on the table.”
So: Vicandyls is two people who make the specific things a specific occasion needs. That’s the shortest version we have that’s still true.
Sort of.