Kristen Pumphrey
Room to make things.
Kristen Pumphrey built a candle company around a California sensibility. Keeping a creative life of her own has become part of the work.
Kristen Pumphrey has hobbies she would rather not turn into a business. Knitting and quilting are among them. In a June 2026 conversation with Sobremesa, the founder of P.F. Candle Co. explained the pleasure of making things without needing to be especially accomplished at them. A person who has already converted one creative interest into a livelihood knows how easily the next can become another obligation.
There is a private life to protect, too: tennis, yoga, time with her daughter and watching Survivor with family. Pumphrey’s products offer customers a version of California living, but she does not treat every part of her own life as material for the brand. That boundary gives the work somewhere to draw from.
The original business was much smaller than its ambitions. Pumphrey started P.F. in 2008; it remains independently owned with her husband, Thomas Neuberger. The company’s familiar amber jars and understated labels now belong to a broad collection of home fragrance, all developed and produced in California. What started as a maker’s enterprise has become an employer and a manufacturing operation.
The moment it began to feel consequential arrived in 2013. As Pumphrey recalled to The Everygirl in 2018, West Elm ordered 4,000 pieces—more than the business had produced over its previous life. She and Neuberger had just returned from their honeymoon. They sold at markets to bring in production money, moved the operation into downtown Los Angeles and delivered the order a little late. The following year brought hiring and more large retail accounts.
California was a choice as well as a market. Pumphrey had lived in New York and Austin before heading west; Neuberger’s studies helped draw them to Southern California. In that 2018 interview, she spoke about the attraction of having mountains, beach and desert within reach, and of living among the city’s different communities. The landscape supplied more than scenery. It gave her a vocabulary for what a home might smell like.
By August 2025, Pumphrey told The Creative Independent that P.F. employed 63 people and made about 3,500 candles a day in-house. Its products reached thousands of stores, alongside its own retail locations in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Those operating figures offer a useful measure of a private company whose revenue was not disclosed in that interview: this was no longer a kitchen-table sideline.
She was also candid that the team had previously reached 95. She appreciated the more stable phase the business was in. Growth had required things from her beyond inventing scents, and early years in Los Angeles had left little room for friendships. Rebuilding a life around the company mattered. So did continuing to make things herself, including painting with her daughter and experimenting with incense from garden sage.
The commercial decisions have been specific. In a 2025 Shopify interview, Pumphrey described making fragrance and packaging that could appeal across genders. Wholesale relationships prompted experiments, including incense, while sales data helped identify demand for a Brooklyn store. A premium Hi-Fi collection gave longtime customers another option as their tastes and spending changed. The ambition was to keep a recognizable company while allowing its audience to grow up with it. Behind-the-scenes content also put the actual making on view, including Neuberger pouring candles. For a product sold partly through atmosphere, showing the hands and process behind it offered a more concrete reason to believe in the brand.
Place still provides the creative thread. In her 2026 Sobremesa conversation, she connected Arroyo Oak with Pasadena’s dry creek landscape and Golden Coast with the meeting of sea air, redwoods and sun-warmed sage around Big Sur. These are interpretations of places rather than literal souvenirs. A scent has to work in someone else’s room after it leaves the landscape that inspired it.
The company’s public commitments make that room-making tangible for employees. P.F. says its base wage is $23 an hour and lists fully subsidized health insurance, transit passes and a matched retirement plan among its benefits. It also reports donating more than $50,000 toward Los Angeles wildfire relief in 2025. Those are company-reported commitments, grounded in the place where its products are made.
The amber jar gives Pumphrey’s experiments a familiar home. Her life outside the factory leaves space for the next idea.