Smoky Candle

A real product, in a garage.

Soy wax, a wooden wick, two scents: Butter and Berry. We sold about thirty candles by hand, to people we could look in the eye.

Coin, the Italian department store chain, saw them and liked them. Then the budget got in the way. The stock is still real, and it sits in my garage.

The first site sold nothing.

The first version, in February 2026, looked right. The checkout button did not do anything.

A candle is bought for how it feels in a room. A grid of photos does not give you that.

A candle that follows you down the page.

• A WebGL candle modelled on the real jar: the printed label, the black or gold screw cap, the white tube box.
• You open the box, unscrew the cap and light it. Forty hours of burn run in two minutes, and the wax goes down.
• Pass quickly over the flame and it goes out, like a breath. A thread of smoke rises from the wick.
• The crackle, the pop of the box and the clicks of the cap are generated with Web Audio. No audio files.
• As you scroll, the gift boxes assemble themselves: the second candle, the black box with tissue and ribbon, the envelope with the handwritten note.
• Checkout on Stripe. Prices are read on the server, shipping is free from 50 euro.

Three things I learned the hard way.

• A fixed 3D canvas that follows the scroll always lands one frame late on iOS, so the candle shakes. Now the canvas lives inside each section and Safari scrolls it with the page.
• Safari ignores filters on a 2D canvas: the grey logo on the box came out gold. I bake it into an image instead.
• Browsers only play sound after a real tap, and scrolling does not count. The sound button is always in view, and every tap tries again.

Performance

78

before 92

Accessibility

100

before 91

Best practices

100

SEO

100

Lighthouse 12, mobile, measured locally on 23 September 2026. The earlier number is the static first version. The 3D engine weighs about 250 KB compressed, so it loads once the page is ready and the candle fades in.