Penn & Beech Candle Co. — Local services in Carmel

As someone who recently left Penn & Beech after working there for nearly two years, I feel compelled to share my experience, not out of spite, but out of a genuine concern for the well-being of the team and the values our community chooses to support.

Throughout my time at the company, I witnessed an ongoing pattern of employee turnover, nearly a complete cycle of staff changeover within just a year and a half. While high turnover is often a sign of deeper operational issues, what concerned me most was the lack of care shown toward the staff by ownership. From my perspective, the company relied heavily on team leads who were expected to operate as de facto managers, despite being compensated nearly equivalently to the entry-level staff.

Unfortunately, leadership decisions seemed largely driven by online customer reviews, which were treated as absolute truth. Instead of engaging directly with employees to understand a situation fully, assumptions were made and disciplinary actions were often taken with minimal conversations and little context. For me, this approach created a workplace atmosphere that felt reactive and unsupportive.

It’s also worth noting that while Penn & Beech positions itself as a high-end, community-focused brand, I found the value of the products did not align with their pricing. The candles often produced excessive smoke, which raised concerns among many of us, though customer feedback on this issue was generally dismissed as user error rather than seen as a potential product flaw.

One of the more troubling turning points for me was the sudden dismissal of a member of the management team. Her removal came without clear explanation, yet she was asked to stay and train one of the owners who was stepping into her role. The ripple effects were immediate and significant. Within days of that announcement, a significant number of employees resigned (many of them team leads). Schedules were then cut drastically, even for associates with wide availability, impacting overall morale.

Personally, I had minimal interaction with ownership, despite being a fairly long-term employee. When those rare interactions did happen, they were cold or dismissive, contributing to my feeling of an overall sense of detachment and disregard for the people keeping the day-to-day operations afloat. Observing how fear seemed to shape internal leadership decisions, such as managers hesitating to recognize employees based on one owner’s opinion, only deepened my concern for the culture being cultivated.

Penn & Beech is often seen as a community gem, but I believe that public perception does not align with internal realities. Supporting local businesses should also mean supporting the people who make those businesses run, and in this case, I hope more people take a closer look at how the staff are treated behind the scenes.

I genuinely hope things improve for the team that is still there, but I cannot, in good conscience, recommend supporting a business that does not reflect the community-minded values...

I don’t write reviews often, but my experience with this company left me genuinely disturbed — both as a customer, former employee and as a human being.

First and foremost, the products are not safe. The materials used to make the candles are not good quality. The candles do not burn cleanly - regardless of what the company says. The owners know the kind of products they put out on the market and instead of trying to improve, they ignore the issue and sweep it under the rug. Take a look around the shop, the evidence is right in front of your face. Look at the ceilings, walls, outlets, all covered in black soot. Notice how your candle jar turns black? - soot. Notice black substance when you blow your nose? - soot. The alcohol diffuser base smells like straight gasoline and the owners are aware of the issue and choose not to do anything about it. The products pose a serious health risk that resulted in several trips to the doctors office - making me question what I was inhaling in my own home and place of employment. When I reached out to express concern, I was met with condescension and gaslighting. Instead of being heard or helped, I was made to feel like I was imagining things — as if caring about health and safety was unreasonable. That kind of response is not only unprofessional, it’s dangerous.

But the most upsetting part of this experience wasn’t even the product — it was experiencing firsthand how the company treats the people who work there. Employees are spoken to with blatant disrespect, subjected to rude and abusive behavior, and are expected to endure a toxic environment just to keep their jobs. No one — absolutely no one — deserves to be treated that way. Mistreating staff through harsh words, intimidation, hostility, belittlement - is never acceptable, and not only was it tolerated - it was encouraged by owners. Penn and Beech is built on a model of power and control.

This company has a long way to go on many fronts.The owners preach transparency, yet time and time again they’ve proven to be anything but. Profiting off harmful products while mistreating the people behind the scenes is beyond unacceptable. I beg you to think twice about supporting a company that profits off the hard work of others while failing to provide a safe, respectful, and fair workplace. Until there's real accountability and change, I recommend taking your...

I posted a review last year that has magically been erased. I will not bother retyping the story of how I was treated in front of my daughter, her friend, and several customers one evening. I had made reservations that somehow didn’t go through, or a glitch when I made the reset. So there was no reservation when we got there, I was told to come back in a few with my girls for a possible opening…. Then when I came back It was pretty much the scene out of pretty woman. The worker rolled her eyes, grabbed her coworker to the back room where they were clearly talking about us, animated looking at us, shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, then walked to the front where we waited in front of others and said they could not help us and asked us to leave in the most bothered rude tone they could. It takes a lot to get me upset, I am a nice person. I was kind and didn’t make a scene, bc in return I thought an honest review would be better. Everyone around us was as shocked and embarrassed as we were . It was the most elitist attitude I’ve ever witnessed. I shortened this review, but I hope in the future the employees here are more properly trained in customer service, and how to properly treat customers if there...