Family-owned Sydney Candle Co. celebrates 20 years in Cortland
A family-owned and operated soy candle company celebrated a major milestone anniversary at their new facility with a ribbon-burning, using a torch to break the ribbon.
Sydney Candle Co. began as a father-daughter business venture in Cortland in Becki Olejnik’s basement in 2006.
The Olejnik family hosted an open house at their production facility on June 12 as part of the anniversary celebration.
“It’s very exciting, and my son is the one who’s going to be carrying it on at some point. It is remarkable. We still cannot believe that we are doing what we’re doing,” Olejnik said. “We’re very grateful to have hit the 20-year mark; it’s just something I would have never, never dreamed of.”
Olejnik’s son, Noah, joined the family business in 2022, focusing on developing their online sales strategies.
“In the beginning, our main focus was wholesale, and we did not have a venue or a medium that we could use to sell retail, so it was mainly selling at trade shows across the country. We tried to get more of our products into more stores, knowing that once we got into the stores, they would order from us in larger quantities,” Olejnik said. “As it turned out, when Noah started with us, he saw the benefit and the new way of selling online direct to the consumer.”
Olejnik said Noah learned the family business and helped Sydney Candle Co. develop more social media sales strategies.
“A dream of my dad’s to buy property someday and build our own dream facility,” Olejnik said. “After he passed, I felt that it was something that I would have loved to have done, but couldn’t have seen it until Noah joined us. It was very exciting to see the growth that we’ve had since the time he joined us. We finally had the funds to expand our services to many more customers, because so many more people wanted our products.”
Sydney Candle Co. hit its 20th anniversary in 2026, but the owners finished building the new facility last summer, according to Olejnik.
“We moved in and started working on Aug. 4, so we did not have time to do any open house or celebration for the move that we did in the building that we built,” Olejnik said. “We waited until the weather was nice for the first opportunity we had after our busy season, when everybody was in town and available to be here, which was June 12.”
This year, the company’s also crafted their first specialty three-layered soy candle as a limited-edition product for America’s 250th birthday called American Pie & Ice Cream.
“One of the other things my dad had wanted to do years ago was order a machine that we knew could do [triple] the amount of product in a day. We waited a long time, but we purchased it in December and just started using it this year,” Olejnik said. “We’ve been doing a lot of testing for the past six months on it, but this is the machine that actually calculates precisely the volume of what you need based on the candle size and how many ounces you’re going to fill. It was the perfect opportunity to do a three-layered candle.”
American Pie & Ice Cream’s layers, from top to bottom, are blueberry pie, vanilla ice cream and apple pie.
As the owner and overseer of production at Sydney Candle Co., Olejnik is brainstorming ideas for candles and sampling fragrances to perfect the pure, hand-crafted soy candles.
“We look at this business as our ministry,” Olejnik said. “We’ve been called to be ministers in our community; the people that we serve and our employees that we pay. It’s so important to us that we share our faith with others and just how good God has been to us. We don’t take anything for granted! I truly believe that this was the life that God had planned for me.”
