Northwest Waxworks
Northwest Waxworks started as a pretty simple idea: use digital fabrication to turn mountain terrain into candles people would actually want.
It got complicated quickly.
What looked at first like a geometry problem turned out to be a stack of interlocked problems: terrain data, CAD, notebook tooling, mold design, wax behavior, text legibility, process repeatability, branding, market fit, and then, once all that was already plenty, a whole notebook-runtime migration from Jupyter to marimo.
This series is my attempt to reconstruct the actual shape of the project from the evidence that survived: git history, running notes, pour logs, mold logs, business docs, and assorted artifacts scattered across too many folders.
The short version is this:
- I built software because the object was too specific to tune manually.
- I learned that mold and wax process problems were at least as hard as the code.
- I tried to turn the whole thing into something legible enough to sell.
- The first market contact gave me a pretty clear “not like that.”
- Then I came back around with jar candles, a narrower product idea, and a second-generation marimo-based toolchain.
If the goal is a neat founder myth, this is not that.
If the goal is to see how a real project changes shape when geometry, materials, and market reality all start arguing with each other at once, heck yea, that is this series.
What this series covers
- why software belonged in a candle project at all
- how I got from real mountains to usable geometry
- why aluminum molds were not the answer I hoped they were
- how wax, scent, color, and cooling turned into their own engineering discipline
- what it took to make the workflow repeatable enough to keep iterating
- how the brand and market story diverged from the internal technical story
- what changed when I came back to the project with jar candles and a marimo-first stack
What Is the Project?
The first question is: what is the project? That sounds obvious, but it was the problem underneath a whole pile of other problems. I was trying to make mountain-shaped candles. More specifically, I was trying to use digital fabrication to create wax sculptures derived from real terrain. That part was clear enough. What was much less clear, especially early on, was whether this was fundamentally a candle business, a fabrication experiment, a software project, an art object, or some scrappy mutant combination of all four.
Mountains Into Geometry
The geometry pipeline was stanky for a while. What I needed sounded simple enough: select a real mountain, extract usable terrain, shape it into something I could fabricate, and iterate quickly enough to compare ideas instead of getting lost in tooling churn. In practice this meant GIS inputs, notebook environments, CAD viewers, mesh processing, and a lot of dependency weirdness all trying to occupy the same room.
Molds, Materials, and the Real Problem
I thought the hard part was going to be the geometry. It was hard, sure. But once the mountain shapes started becoming workable, the project revealed its real personality: molds, wax, curing, shrinkage, leakage, demolding, lettering, and all the little physical details that do not care how elegant the code looked five minutes ago.
Repeatability and Product Shape
At some point a prototype stops being interesting just because it exists. That was the phase I hit in late spring 2025. I had enough geometry, enough molds, and enough poured objects to know the idea was real. What I did not have yet was a workflow that could survive iteration cleanly, or a product shape that felt settled enough to build around.
Bringing It to Market
A technically interesting object is not automatically a market-ready object. That sounds obvious. It was still a lesson I had to pay for in the real world. By the time the project reached this phase, there was already a lot of serious work behind it: terrain-derived geometry, custom tooling, mold iterations, pour logs, text refinements, process math, and actual candles that looked pretty good. The next step seemed straightforward enough: make the brand legible, get the booth and collateral together, and see what happens when the project leaves the workshop.
Jar Candles and a Second Toolchain
The second version of the project looks narrower and smarter. After the first market-facing phase stalled out, the evidence does not suggest I gave up on the whole idea. It suggests I came back to it with a different product shape, a different notebook runtime, and a stronger bias toward operational coherence.