A long time ago, the slang phrase “mind your own beeswax” was coined, and that’s exactly what Aurora resident Zachary Pugh is doing.
Pugh is the founder of Zax Beeswax – a grass roots, make-it-in-your-basement beeswax enterprise whose product lines includes Mason jar candles, soap, honey, votive candles, tea lights, lip balm and more.
Pugh, 35, who currently is a police officer in DuPage County, said he founded the company back in April 2015 and to date has produced over 110,000 candles, which remain his number one seller, followed by honey and then the lip balm products.
He grew up in Elmhurst and found his way to the beeswax business by following a diverse path.
“I did food management when I was younger and entered some state competitions in the culinary arts and I actually got a scholarship to the Culinary Hospitality Institute in Chicago which I wound up turning down,” he said. “During high school, I was with this police explorer group where they let you do ride-alongs and you got a uniform and helped out with traffic control and that sort of got my foot in the door (with the police).”
At the age of 19, Pugh said he enlisted in the Air National Guard in Madison, Wisconsin, and after training, took the police test where he was “sworn in as a police officer on my 21st birthday.”
He spent a year working in Willow Springs before moving on to serve as an officer in a DuPage County department.
The candle and beeswax enterprise, he said, can be traced back to attending “farmers markets in Oregon, Illinois, during Autumn on Parade festivals that are held there where my family lives.”
“I’d buy these beeswax candles that I would recycle into tea lights and I’d give them away as gifts and sold some on eBay and friends said I should start a business,” Pugh said. “I did a Kickstarter campaign looking to raise $1,500 for startup costs and wound up getting $6,500 in sponsorships. After that, we started selling on the website and things just got bigger and bigger.”
Pugh said throughout his life “there were always candles around the house” and that he particularly enjoys the naturalness and purity of beeswax.
“This isn’t something you get at Bed, Bath and Beyond and it’s a rustic, natural wax that is something bees produce and it’s flammable,” he said. “The way we designed things back when the business started – it wasn’t supposed to be something feminine but something in the middle like Mike’s Hard Lemonade. We actually started with a man’s line of candles that included fragrances like coffee and leather and summer camp which smells like grass and soil.”
Pugh said when the mass shooting occurred at Henry Pratt Co. in Aurora last year, he was in Evanston and “felt helpless I couldn’t do anything.”
“I live just a few blocks from the Pratt building and after the shootings, we came up with these Aurora Strong Resilience Candles to raise money for the police and families of the victims and sold about $3,500 worth of merchandise which allowed us to give a $2,000 donation,” he said.
Aurora resident Kimberly Sterr helps Pugh out with production making tea lights and specialty candles and said the two found each other back in November of 2017.
“What appealed to me about this was the natural products as there is no petroleum and I like the beeswax as it creates negative ions and cleans the air,” Sterr said. “I’d always made my own candles and now that I’m retired from doing commercial insurance, this was a good fit.”
Bridget Donnell, 28, of Aurora, who works as the assistant deli manager at Prisco’s Family Market in Aurora, said she also handles ordering local products and that “we like working with local people that take care of us.”
“We know these are products we can trust and we like the candles and local honey and anti-bacterial products,” she said. “It’s all about things that are all natural.”
Pugh admits he has had a little fun with the name of his company as well as his email contact which is kingofsting@zaxbesswax.com.
“A co-worker suggested I use ‘Zach’ but I changed the spelling to ‘Zax’ since it rhymes with ‘wax’,” he said. “The ‘king of sting’ was more about me – usually this is a more feminine type business and king of sting fits my abrasive personality.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
