Product Design

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.