The vibrant orange hue and the sweet smell of vanilla greet your senses as you approach the door of Sniff of Adventure, a candle shop on Newbury Street.
The co-owners, Adam Shane and Christopher “Chris” Swank, started their candle venture in 2020 and are about to hit the one-year mark in their Boston location.
“When everyone was sent home packing during COVID, we looked at each other and said, what does the future hold?” Shane said. Like most people during the pandemic, the two spent much of their time watching TV. Shane wanted to do more than watch television, so he started making candles.
Candle making felt like a natural progression for the two, as candles played a significant role in their wedding six months before they started experimenting, Shane said. They loved the personal element of selecting the candles for their wedding, so the addition of learning how to make them felt like a natural step.
“[The candles] are true adventures, life adventures between the two of us, a culmination of our life together,” Shane said.
Their adventure-themed candles range from hiking Machu Picchu, beach walks and ziplining in Costa Rica.
“Memory is so triggered through smell, and it just made sense, so we embarked on this candle adventure through our own adventures,” Shane said.
“Our first year was doing it all masked up during COVID; we were selling outside our house in Provincetown, people would walk by, and we would be like, ‘Hey, come sniff around’ as a joke,” Shane said. “From that, we built a website.”
The owners said the most important factor in maintaining Sniff of Adventure is their strong team. “Bringing on amazing talented people to help us, like our amazing general manager in Provincetown … and the awesome designer that we work with,” play a vital role in their business practice, Shane said.
Swank, an alum of the Bouvé College of Health Sciences graduate program at Northeastern, attributes his time in school for his ability to “spread [his] wings and become more social and involved with all kinds of different things I normally wouldn’t have done,” Swank said.
As an LBGTQ+ couple, the two found many positives in building their business in Boston.
“We started in Provincetown, which is such an accepting environment for us, and we built our brand around a community that supports it, and that community then carried over to Boston,” Shane said.
Kelly Corrigan, a friend and patron of Sniff of Adventure, said she would describe the business as “absolutely heartfelt.” Kelly is sensitive to scents and finds that the candles don’t affect her because of their natural ingredients. Corrigan’s favorite candle is called “a scent to remember” because of its sentimental meaning and its sent profile of birch, pine and rosemary.
“The two characters on it are based around my sister and her husband, who has since passed away from early onset Alzheimer’s,” Corrigan said.
Corrigan, Shane and Swank have been working to help find a cure for Alzheimer’s for years.
“They’ve donated 20% of that candle’s profit to the Alzheimer’s association. Talk about having meaning,” Corrigan said.
Shane’s favorite candle in the shop is the gingerbread candle. The candle is “an amazing fall-winter candle. It has essences of cloves, spice and gingerbread, but it is also the first house we sort of built together as a family, so it’s got a lot of great memories to it,” Shane said.
Swank’s go-to candle is the Croatian Catamaran.
“A couple of our best friends were celebrating a birthday, and they asked Adam and me just to show up in Dubrovnik,” Swank said.”We had just opened our shop in [Provincetown], like we were fresh. We were open for maybe two months, and we were kind of stressed … we showed up to a catamaran for the week around the islands of Croatia.”
Selling candles isn’t all they do at Sniff of Adventure. They offer sip-and-sniff classes, where you can make two candles of your own adventures right inside the shop, three to four times a week. Find Sniff of Adventure in Boston at 254 Newbury St., or online.
