A glowing enterprise
When the saints go marching down the production line at Richard Alceda’s factory in Pomona, they’re filled with hot wax and a white wick.
The Bright Glow Candle Co. plant daily turns out 80,000 glass-encased prayer candles, the vast majority of which carry labels showing Roman Catholic saints and other religious figures. Commonly referred to as novena candles, they are sometimes used when praying for special favors.
They indeed have been the answer to the prayers of Alceda, 57, who had several marginal enterprises before starting Bright Glow in his garage 24 years ago.
“It’s a wonderful business,” he said, watching as a machine similar to those in soft-drink factories filled 80 glasses with liquefied wax every 10 seconds.
In addition to the Pomona factory, he has a plant in Miami that turns out 25,000 of the candles a day to supply retailers on the East Coast.
Bright Glow’s products, with the saints’ names in Spanish on the labels, are aimed at the growing Latino market. Last year the company had about $15 million in sales. It has 79 full-time employees.
Alceda, who came to the U.S. at age 19 from his native Peru, might need to light a lot more candles next month as he takes his company beyond its current niche. Bright Glow will be launching a product line in the most competitive sector of the industry: scented decorative candles.
“I like to fight against the big guys,” said Alceda, a stocky man who manages to be friendly and feisty at the same time. “Why fight the little guy? There is no honor in that.”
Alceda arrived in Los Angeles in 1968 after a short stint in the Peruvian air force. He had hoped to become a commercial pilot, but his timing was off -- U.S. military pilots returning from Vietnam were seeking the same jobs.
He supported himself by importing canned seafood from South America and Asia. Later he expanded his import business to include dried chiles and alpaca rugs.
“I have always been by myself,” Alceda said, “looking for businesses I could get into.”
In 1981, sensing that he could make a killing in the frozen shrimp market, he took most of his savings and bought up large lots of the crustaceans in northern Peru. Unfortunately, the El Nino atmospheric conditions that can cause major storms struck that year.
“The floods came in and all the freezers broke down,” he said. “I lost all the money.”
Back in Los Angeles from Peru, he met a man who had worked in a small novena candle factory until the owner shut it down and retired.
“He wanted work, and he told me I should get into the business,” Alceda said. “He would teach me how to do it.”
In Alceda’s El Monte garage, they set up steel drums to hold the heated wax and used pressure hoses to fill the glasses, two at a time.
Most novena candles at the time had silk-screened illustrations on the glass. Alceda instead used glued-on paper labels that could offer full-color illustrations.
And borrowing from the playbook of Coca-Cola and other supermarket suppliers, he told market owners that if they would carry his products, he would stock the shelves himself and take care of the ordering as needed.
“I told them, ‘I’m the expert in this; you don’t have to worry about it anymore,’ ” he said. “It was how I got in. It came down to service.”
His worker quit after a few months, but Alceda kept the business going in the garage until he could move into a 5,000-square-foot plant where he had five employees.
The big breakthrough came in 1991, when he was able to move beyond Latino markets into mass supermarket operations. “I knew the buyers from when I was handling seafood,” he said. “I got them to look at what we were doing in the smaller markets and they took us.”
Bright Glow first got into Boys and Alpha Beta markets, two chains that are no longer on the scene. That led to its being carried by Ralphs and Vons.
“There were years when we had 100% growth,” Alceda said.
By 1998, he was in a 40,000-square-foot plant in Vernon. Two years ago, the company moved into the current factory, twice that size, in Pomona.
The Miami plant opened in 1998, but it was rocky going at first, mostly because of the difficulties of overseeing a manufacturing operation across the continent.
“Everything was fine when I was there,” Alceda said. “Then when I came back, cases would start walking out the door.”
It took about four years for him to find managers he believed he could trust.
Control is the main reason Alceda hasn’t tried to open factories in other countries where labor is less expensive.
The oldest novena candle maker in Mexico, Will & Baumer, makes its products mostly for its home country, South America and Europe. It does about $7 million in sales annually in the U.S. for all types of candles.
But it has not made huge inroads into the novena candle market in this country.
“That product is so competitive in the U.S. and the margins are so small that the cost of freight makes a big difference,” said William Muench, whose great-grandfather opened the Will & Baumer factory in Mexico City in 1898.
Bright Glow will market its new decorative, scented products under the brand name Fleur de Lys. The venture’s products will include jar candles, pillars and votives.
The competition from well-established brands will be formidable. Yankee Candle Co. of Massachusetts, for instance, had sales last year of $601.2 million.
“Scented candles currently account for about 85% of all candle sales, which is almost an entire flip just since the mid-1990s,” said Barbara Miller, spokeswoman for the National Candle Assn. About $2 billion of candles are sold annually in the U.S.
“It used to be that in general, candles were for the dining room, so you didn’t want them to be scented and conflict with food,” Miller said. “Then the idea of candles as a decorative accessory really took off.”
The fragrances for much of Bright Glow’s inaugural lineup are named for high-end apparel materials, such as leather, mink, suede, cashmere and silk. Of these, only leather has an identifiable, real-world smell.
“In most cases with our line, it’s more of a fantasy fragrance,” said Bella Guevara-Ludt, who heads the Fleur de Lys division.
The lineup was accepted by the Sam’s Club warehouse store owned by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., but only for online sales. Costco Wholesale Corp. turned down the line for the time being but said it would be willing to reconsider at a later date.
In the meantime, Bright Glow is trying to persuade its regular supermarket and drugstore chain clients to put Fleur de Lys products on their shelves.
Alceda had four novena candles burning in his office during an interview, but not for religious purposes. They were part of a test of wax compounds to provide a longer-burning candle at a lower price.
He does occasionally light a novena candle with a depiction of Jesus on the label when he prays, Alceda said.
“I think it helps me bring extra strength to my faith,” he said. “But I tell people, if you want to lose weight, you can’t just light a candle and expect it to happen without dieting or exercise.
“It’s like business. You can’t just light a candle.”
