Who we are
A room in
Ravenswood
Chicago Candle Factory is one person, one room and a lot of matches. It exists because ranking candles by how the jar photographs produces a list, and burning them produces an answer.
The reviewer
Kate Gorski
Founder and lead reviewer
Kate Gorski spent eleven years buying home fragrance for independent retailers in Chicago and Milwaukee before she got tired of ranking candles by how good the packaging looked in a photo. In 2019 she rented a room in a converted machine shop in Ravenswood, bought a stack of hygrometers and a kitchen scale, and started burning candles on a schedule.
That room is now the Chicago Candle Factory burn lab. Kate writes every review on this site, runs every burn session herself, and keeps the raw burn logs for each candle she tests. She has no relationships with the brands she covers and no brand has ever seen a review before it published.
She lives in Chicago with a very patient partner and a smoke detector she has replaced twice.
Background
- Eleven years as a home fragrance buyer for independent retail
- More than 2,000 logged hours of controlled burn testing
- Certified in IFRA fragrance safety standards fundamentals
Editorial
The rules
- 01
We buy every candle
Every unit in the index is purchased at full retail price from a normal retail channel. We do not accept review units, press samples or gifted product, and we have never asked a brand for one.
- 02
No brand sees a review first
No brand receives a preview, a fact check, a right of reply before publication or any form of approval over copy. If a brand disputes something after publication we will re-test and correct in public.
- 03
Nothing on this board is for sale
We run no affiliate links and take no payment from any brand we cover. A brand cannot buy a place in the index, a higher score or a kinder sentence, and none has ever tried hard enough to be worth writing about.
- 04
The rubric does not move
Six criteria and six weights, published on the methodology page and applied identically to a $12 jar and a $95 one. If we change a weight, every brand is rescored and the change is noted.
- 05
Corrections are permanent
When we get something wrong we fix the page and say what changed at the bottom of it. We do not quietly edit a score.
Money
How this is funded
The candles are paid for out of pocket and the site carries no affiliate links. That is a deliberate constraint rather than a boast: the moment a link pays us per click, the ranking stops being a ranking. If that changes, this paragraph changes first and every affected page carries a disclosure at the top.
It also means the index grows slowly. Ten brands and 35 units is roughly $1,400 of candles and 2,110 hours of burning. The next session adds five brands.
Coverage