Yankee Candle Company

Yankee Candle Company is a U.S. home fragrance retailer and manufacturer known for its scented jar candles, wax melts, and related home and car fragrance products. The brand sells through its own stores, its website, and a broad wholesale network that includes mass, specialty, and off-price retailers across North America and select international markets.

The company traces its origins to 1969 in Massachusetts, when founder Mike Kittredge, then a teenager, made his first candle from melted crayons as a gift for his mother. That home project grew into a small craft business, then into a regional operation, and eventually into a national specialty retailer. As production expanded during the 1970s and 1980s, Yankee Candle moved from the Kittredge family home into a former mill in Holyoke, then into a larger site in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, which became the company’s long-term manufacturing and retail base.

A key milestone came in 1993 with the opening of Yankee Candle Village in South Deerfield. The flagship store was designed as a tourist destination as well as a retail outlet, drawing bus tours and regional visitors. A second Village flagship followed in Williamsburg, Virginia in 2005. These experiential locations, together with a growing presence in malls and outlet centers, helped establish Yankee Candle as one of the largest candle-focused chains in the United States.

Ownership shifted as the business scaled. Private equity investment in the late 1990s supported a faster store rollout and an eventual public listing. In 2013, Yankee Candle was acquired by Jarden Corporation. Jarden later merged with Newell Rubbermaid in 2016, creating Newell Brands Inc., which continues to own Yankee Candle as part of a broader global consumer products portfolio. Under Newell’s ownership, the brand has invested in product development, including a fragrance innovation and R&D center opened in South Deerfield in 2019 to modernize testing and scent creation.

As of December 2025, Yankee Candle operates approximately 340 branded stores across the United States and Canada, alongside a sizable e-commerce business and wholesale distribution. The stores are concentrated in enclosed malls, outlet centers, lifestyle centers, and tourist-driven locations, often in established regional shopping nodes. Over roughly the last five years, the company has shifted from aggressive unit growth to a more selective approach, focusing on the productivity of each location. Under Newell Brands’ restructuring and portfolio optimization efforts, Yankee Candle has been closing a group of underperforming stores in North America, on the order of about 20 locations, while working to improve margins and reinvest in the remaining fleet.

The brand’s strategy today centers on strengthening existing stores in high-performing centers, renewing leases where sales support long-term performance, and pursuing relocations or consolidations into stronger projects rather than broad, market-opening campaigns. At the same time, Yankee Candle continues to expand its product assortment and online capabilities, which support in-store traffic through omnichannel shopping patterns and gifting occasions.

For landlords, brokers, and developers, Yankee Candle represents a long-established specialty tenant with national name recognition and a track record in both enclosed and open-air formats. Stores typically perform well in environments where home décor, gift, and seasonal tenants cluster together, and they can function as repeat-visit draws thanks to frequent product launches and strong holiday business. While the brand is not in a phase of rapid net new expansion, its current posture favors maintaining a meaningful brick-and-mortar footprint, renewing and upgrading viable locations, and selectively pursuing opportunities in high-performing malls, outlets, tourist destinations, and mature lifestyle centers across North America.