Over twelve years, Integrity Candles has grown from a small business run by mother and son, Linda Saul and Frank Gumley, into a well-known and respected independent business in regional NSW.
Looking for a lifestyle change in 2008, Linda bought the basis of a small candle-making, hobby business from a friend. She established the new enterprise on her family’s farm outside Coraki, in northern NSW, and set out to see where it would take her. Initially making simple candles with an emphasis on high quality ingredients, and selling at local markets, she was encouraged by her success and the positive response to her candles. Mastering more elaborate techniques, Linda’s candles became more sophisticated, and her horizons broader, selling now in pop-up shops in shopping centres.
Linda learned to make wax lanterns, which were immediately popular. With the business growing, Frank joined, further expanding the Integrity Candles catalogue and artistic base, and enabling them to sell more and further afield. Linda and Frank took the pop-up shop to Sydney and other large regional centres with great success. Frank moved the workshop into a warehouse in Byron Bay where the business continued to grow from strength to strength.
After 7 years Frank left Australia to pursue his own career, so Linda became the sole business owner and candle maker. She continued to nurture the business in line with her personal vision – with pride and integrity. It is important to her that each product she makes and sells is the best she can make it. As a logical outcome of Linda’s personal ethos, Integrity Candles offers our customers products of the best possible quality, representing excellent value for a hand-made art-work. Linda works hard to personally make every candle product offered by Integrity Candles herself. She loves her craft and she loves being able to deliver to you an artwork you will treasure.
When Linda is not busy in the workshop, she can be found working in the sprawling farmhouse garden lapped by the Wilsons River. The farm is a koala sanctuary, where it is common to spy a mother koala and joey happily dozing in trees by the house or along the driveway. The background chorus of birdsong is ever-present; birdbaths scattered throughout the lush garden and the plethora of flowering habitat trees ensure a thriving population of native birds – lorikeets, eastern rosellas, butcher birds, plovers, kookaburras, sea eagles, magpies, baldy pigeons, top-notch pigeons, crested pigeons, rails, noisy minors, fig birds, mistletoe birds and more – all living in noisy harmony.
This is the essence of Integrity Candles – generosity, creativity, honesty and wholesomeness, with Linda’s love of nature reflected in every product she makes.