How P.F. Candle Co. lit up its collabs strategy

At P.F. Candle Co., it seems no scent has gone unmatched.

The brand recently released its latest—and biggest—collab to date in partnership with Peanuts for the 50th anniversary of the Beagle Scouts. It’s one of the first times P.F. has done a licensing deal, founder and Creative Director Kristen Pumphrey told Marketing Brew, and the plan is to make full use of it over the next year, with an initial run of 15,000 candles produced so far.

In the last three years, P.F. Candle Co. has collaborated with a variety of brands, including Big Bud Press, Lisa Says Gah, and the L.A. Times. Its first collab, with TikTok in 2021, capitalized on trending recipes on the app, with candle scents ranging from whipped coffee to feta pasta. This year, in addition to Peanuts, P.F. Candle Co. has worked with the band Wallows to create a scent inspired by their latest album and with sparkling-water brand Aura Bora on a watermelon-and-chili-flavored drink. The brand also makes custom scents for stores like Boston General Store and Foggy Notion, she said.

Pumphrey told us that the decision to pursue collaborations as a marketing strategy came when the brand became more direct-to-consumer and upped its manufacturing capabilities.

“When we felt like we had the capacity within our production line to take on projects like this, something unlocked for us, and we were like, ‘Let’s go see how many fun things we can do,” she told us.

With more than a few candle crossovers now under the brand’s belt, Pumphrey said the strategy has not only been fun for employees, but also drawn new customers and increased site traffic.

Match made in heaven

For a standard P.F. Candle Co. line, the development process can take up to a year, Pumphrey said, which means products aren’t designed to capitalize on short-term trends. Collabs, on the other hand, typically take three to six months to develop, “so you can really take advantage of the hyper-specific internet trends and go big on them,” she said.

The Peanuts collab was one of the brand’s quickest turnarounds in development, she said, having received an inquiry from the brand in February before its August release.

When a potential collaborator approaches, Pumphrey said her team looks at the timeline and either decides to create something from scratch or pull from a library of unreleased scent samples. “The cool thing is getting to bring…this third space to life by saying not only, ‘What does their brand look like?’ or ‘What does it sound like?’ but also, ‘What does it smell like?’” she said.

The “tricky thing,” she said, is that collabs often don’t live forever. “If someone falls in love with the fragrance that we created custom for one of these collabs, they’ll email us like, ‘When are you going to bring this back?’” she said, adding that she’s excited to have more time with the Peanuts collab for that reason.

Pumphrey said P.F.’s main demographic has traditionally been consumers between 24 and 35 years old. As a 16-year-old brand, she said one question her team has wrangled with is whether its customers are growing up along with it or remaining in the same age range. Given Snoopy’s popularity with Gen Z, Pumphrey said the latest collab is part of an effort to attract a younger audience, as was the work with the band Wallows.

“If [our base is] staying the same age, how do you continue to stay relevant in an authentic way that doesn’t just feel like just throwing a bunch of TikToks up?” she asked. “Creating products that Gen Z actually really, genuinely adores feels like a really wonderful entry into that [demo] that just feels organic and fun.”

Pumphrey said affiliate and influencer partnerships have also helped the brand get in front of younger customers. For the Peanuts collab, she said that cross-promotion on social accounts, like @SnoopyGrams, which has more than 3 million followers, has been key to reaching their audience.

“I always look at a good collaboration like a Venn diagram,” Pumphrey told us. “You don’t want to go so far outside the box that your existing customers are like, ‘What are you doing?’ but you really want to reach their end of the Venn diagram.”

Selling the candles at stores Pumphrey described as tastemakers, like Friends NYC in Bushwick, Brooklyn, has been another reliable entry point with new audiences. At the brand’s own flagship store in Echo Park, her team recently started hosting events to celebrate collaboration releases, with s’mores and chain-stitching offered in-store earlier this month for Peanuts.

Pumphrey said collabs have brought additional traffic to the brand’s website and help provide levity in between product launches. The November 2023 L.A. Times Plants collab, which was inspired by California flora and promoted in the newspaper’s gift guides, was one of the brand’s most effective in reaching a new audience, she said.

Next on the horizon is a collaboration with the band Washed Out, as well as with the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, which will be released in line with fall (aka “candle season”) and ahead of holiday gifting time. Another collab with the Redwood Forest Foundation is slated for next year.

Following the Aura Bora collaboration (which was partly a tongue-in-cheek response to Aura Bora reviews that compared its flavors to candle scents), Pumphrey said she’s excited by future “sensory crossover” opportunities in the food and beverage space and has also been eyeing the hospitality industry for hotel scenting opportunities.

One day, Pumphrey said her dream collaborator would be Vans. The “Hand-poured in California” line on P.F. Candle Co.’s packaging is an homage to the brand, she said, referencing the “handmade in California” label that Vans used to put on its shoeboxes when she was growing up.

“In my mind, that’s at the top,” she said. “It’s almost scary to chase it, because then what do you do after that?”