It may sound insane—over $500 for a mere candle? Are we crazy, or are we crazy?
Neither, when the candle in question is a Jo Malone offering. Crafted using only the best ingredients into luxurious, evenly burning sticks, Jo Malone candles command exorbitant prices, and more importantly, receive it without a second thought.
Just like Jo Malone Colognes, what makes these candles so expensive? Are they worth spending a sizable chunk of your not-so-sizable paycheck on? Here’s what you need to know.
What Is Jo Malone?
For the uninitiated, Jo Malone London, the namesake of the founder, is a British brand best known for its scented candles and perfumes. Founded in 1990, the brand is among the world’s most successful and popular niche fragrance houses. Jo Malone also sells an impressive range of home fragrances and bath products.
Earlier restricted to the UK market, the brand exploded in the American market when founder Jo Malone appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Despite the acquisition of the company by Estee Lauder in 1999, Malone served as the brand’s creative director until 2006.
Why Is Jo Malone So Expensive?
If so many people around the world are willing to shell out hundreds for something as simple as a candle and literally watch their money go up in flames, the candles in question must be something!
So what is it about Jo Malone’s candles that demand such a high price? Here are a few possible reasons.
High-Quality Wax
Unlike inexpensive paraffin and synthetic waxes that most brands use, Jo Malone goes all natural, using only a blend of luxurious organic waxes such as coconut wax, beeswax, and soy wax (derived from coconut oil, bee hives, and soybean oil, respectively).
These waxes melt very slowly, giving you a longer-lasting candle that burns evenly, cleanly, and smoothly. They’re also a more sustainable alternative to the synthetic waxes that are generally used to produce candles.
Additionally, waxes such as beeswax retain fragrance excellently, letting you enjoy the tantalizing fragrance for far longer than generic candles can afford.
The Wick
This may seem like such a humble, mundane thing to pay attention to, but Jo Malone ensures that even its wicks are of the highest quality—because they know what a huge role this simple thing has to play in keeping the flame burning consistently.
The brand creates and manufactures its own linen/cotton wicks, in as many as 400 different styles, thicknesses, and sizes.
Every wick is a self-trimming wick, produces lesser soot compared to traditional wicks, and is equipped with a small metal disk at its base, ensuring that the heat is evenly distributed and those annoying, messy, large pools of wax aren’t created.
These wicks are thoroughly tested—every time a new candle scent is created, all the wick types are tested to see which one works best for the scent (burns evenly, dispels the scent efficiently, and produces the perfect flame).
The chosen wicks are then hand-straightened and incorporated into the candles with the utmost precision and care.
Such attention to detail warrants a high price, which is what Jo Malone’s candles demand!
Unique Fragrances
At the end of the day, high-quality materials can only get you so far—creating a unique brand identity through your products, by efficiently using said high-quality materials, is what defines a brand’s success.
You’ll see that this is the case with most high-end brands—such brands keep their products highly exclusive and unique and don’t offer fragrances that are widely available or possibly available with a competitor.
Truly successful perfumeries make sure that their products and scents can’t be replicated by the competition, which requires tons of effort and a lot of investment in research and development.
Jo Malone does all of this, setting it apart from the rest of the competition. The brand spends a fortune on coming up with novel, bespoke fragrances, and transfers some of the costs involved in this process to the consumers via exorbitant (and all things considered, justified) price tags.
The best part, though, is that despite the exclusivity of its scents, Jo Malone has quite an impressive range of fragrances, catering to every kind of palette.
High-Quality Raw Scents
Jo Malone uses only the best premium essential oils to create its gorgeous scents, sparing no expenses. These natural oils, despite their high cost, produce better scents than the low-quality, low-cost synthetic ingredients that most candle manufacturers use to save money.
The essential oils used are combined with layers of wax before being shaped into candles, ensuring that the products are evenly scented and that this scent disperses evenly for the candle’s entire burn time.
The price of these quality fragrances reflects in the final price that customers pay.Â
Expert Craftsmanship
Each Jo Malone candle is handcrafted by expert candle-making artisans in England, unlike the generic machine-shaped candles that are available in the market. In fact, the brand claims that from the beginning to the end of the manufacturing process, each candle passes through 16 expert pairs of hands before it is finally ready to be sold.
Even the glass that is used for packaging is hand cut and etched beautifully by artisans.
Excellent Packaging
Most companies don’t pay enough attention to this aspect of their products, but not Jo Malone! The candles come to customers swaddled in premium packaging, placed in beautiful, luxurious glass bottles, or elegant, tastefully decorated boxes.
If you’re gifting these, you most likely won’t need any extra wrapping!
Brand Name and Reputation
Like most high-end companies, the prices of Jo Malone’s products reflect its brand name and reputation. As one of the best candle brands in the world, you can rest assured that the reflection is quite strong!
All of these factors place Jo Malone above the rest of the competition, whether it’s the uniqueness of its products, the manufacturing process, and the overall product quality, leading to sky-high prices.
What Is the Price Range of Jo Malone Candles?
Jo Malone offers six series of candles to its customers—home, deluxe, luxury, charity, travel, and townhouse candles.
Each line comes with a unique range of fragrances, such as peony and blush suede, pomegranate noir, lime basil and mandarin, pastel macaroons, English pear and freesia, peony and moss, wild berries and bramble, and wood sage and sea salt, to name a few.
Depending on the series, the price of candles ranges from $38 (for travel-sized candles that weigh about 65 grams each) to $525 (for 2,100 grams of some of their signature scents).
The price also depends on the fragrance; for more specialized fragrances such as the violet leaf and bergamot home candle, the brand charges $105 for 200 grams, whereas, for an orange blossom candle in the same series and size, you’re only going to shell out $75.
The brand’s range of deluxe candles is available in 600-gram sticks, costing about $210, while the townhouse range has 300-gram sticks that cost about $140.
The Final Word
While we could write pages on why the price of Jo Malone, the only way to know whether or not the price is justified is to buy yourself a Jo Malone candle—though we guarantee that once you light it, it’s going to be love at first whiff and any regrets about the price you just paid will quickly fade into the distance!
Luxurious, gorgeously scented, expertly crafted, consistent and clean burn, and of the highest quality; if such qualities don’t command a high price, and more importantly, justify it, what else does?
Just bring home one of these beauties and you’ll find that they’re worth every penny.
