Camia Rhea
Business: Experiential retail store selling candles, cards, apparel and candle-making workshops
Owner: Camia Rhea McMiller
How to contact:
Editor’s note: Made in Tarrant is an occasional Q&A series on small businesses started in Tarrant County. Submit your business here.
Camia Rhea McMiller was 16 when she began making and selling candles to her mom’s co-workers for money.
She moved the business into pop-ups and opened her first brick-and-mortar shop in a downtown Arlington storefront in October.
All this as McMiller, a junior marketing student at the University of Texas at Arlington, piles on the credits toward her expected 2027 graduation.
McMiller sells candles, cards and apparel. In a nod to the need to diversify revenue to cover the new expense of running a store, she also offers $55 slots in regular candle-making workshops for date nights, girls nights out, bachelorette parties and the like.
McMiller, now 21, runs the store with her mother, who left a job in accounting to help out.
She sat down for an interview with the Report at her store, which she named “Camia Rhea,” which includes her middle name.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Wax is poured by attendees of a candle-making workshop at the Camia Rhea shop on Feb. 28, 2026, in Arlington. Attendees got to choose up to two scents to add to their candles to create their own scents. (Maria Crane | Fort Worth Report/CatchLight Local/Report for America)
Nishimura: Tell us about how you got into making candles.
McMiller: I went to (Mansfield) Summit High School, and I believe it was 2021 when I started making my own candles. I had a big interest in buying candles and buying a lot when they were on sale. Then when everything had burned down, I would melt them and make a bigger candle.
I went to Hobby Lobby and bought a kit, and I learned to make my own. I started selling to my mom’s co-workers and they started wanting more. It just kind of snowballed. I ended up finding a local supplier and getting all of my materials from there.
Nishimura: What goes into the science of candle-making?
McMiller: It’s very important to know what wax you’re using, because each works differently.
Before I opened the store, I used soy wax. Soy is harder, so it doesn’t need as big a wick. When I switched over to the coconut apricot wax, I tried using the same wicks that I had before, but they wouldn’t burn properly, so I couldn’t sell them.
It was weeks and weeks of testing. Each of the vessels has a different diameter size, a little bit of different wick. You have to know what fragrance load you want to put in your candles as well. If you put in too much fragrance, you won’t smell it. It has a sweet spot.
Fragrance is weighed by attendees of a candle-making workshop at the Camia Rhea shop on Feb. 28, 2026, in Arlington. Attendees got to choose up to two scents to add to their candles to create their own scents. (Maria Crane | Fort Worth Report/CatchLight Local/Report for America)
Nishimura: When you got started, how much were you selling the candles for?
McMiller: I was selling them for $15, and that was my price for a long time, until I went to my first pop-up. And then I switched to $30. And that’s when I switched to a bigger vessel.
Nishimura: You mentioned pop-ups. Let’s talk more about the evolution of how you’ve sold candles.
McMiller: It’s really hard to sell online because people don’t exactly know what it smells like. So I would always just rely on word of mouth, or my mom’s friends, my sister’s friends or family members. I tried selling online. I did go viral on TikTok a few times by just pouring my candles and stuff like that. November 2023 is when I did my first pop-up, and that’s when I started to sell to people who weren’t so much in my circle.
Candles and other products such as fragrances, wax warmers and cards line shelves at the Camia Rhea shop on Feb. 28, 2026, in Arlington. Camia Rhea McMiller has been making candles since she was 16, and opened this shop back in October. (Maria Crane | Fort Worth Report/CatchLight Local/Report for America)
Nishimura: Where were you doing these pop-ups all around the region?
McMiller: I think the furthest I went was in Southlake.
Nishimura: How did the pop-ups help improve your business?
McMiller: I started to do the math. I was looking to know what I could do to make a good profit and that I could come back another time. So it became less of a hobby and more like an actual business.
Nishimura: This is your first retail location. Tell me how this happened for you.
McMiller: I go to school over here. I think it was last July, my mom and I were just driving around.
It’s been my dream to open a storefront and design what I feel the brand would be physically. I would go on Pinterest and say, “If I had a store, this is what I would do.”
We were just talking about it, and my mom said she was wanting to go into business. So driving through here on Front Street, we saw the sign on the door. I think it was like two days later, and we applied, and we moved in about maybe three months later.
Candles and other products such as fragrances, wax warmers and cards line shelves at the Camia Rhea shop on Feb. 28, 2026, in Arlington. Camia Rhea McMiller has been making candles since she was 16, and opened this shop back in Oct. (Maria Crane | Fort Worth Report/CatchLight Local/Report for America)
Nishimura: Did you have a sense right away that you needed more than retail products to make the storefront work?
McMiller: Yes. Candles are quite hard to profit from, so I knew I needed something to fall back on. I wanted to have something that would bring people together and have a personal experience.
Nishimura: Do you have a long-term lease here?
McMiller: We have a two-year lease here.
Nishimura: What other ways are you exploring to grow this?
McMiller: I was thinking recently that I could do a perfume bar, since I could do the same fragrances and allow people to do perfumes. We’re also going to have an event in March where it’s similar to the workshops, but it’s going to be faster paced. They can come in, they can make a 4-ounce candle instead of an 8-ounce candle.
Nishimura: What happens when you graduate?
McMiller: I’m going to continue what I’m doing now, because I do love it.
Scott Nishimura is senior editor for the Fort Worth Report. Reach him at scott.nishimura@fortworthreport.org. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://fortworthreport.org/2026/03/08/made-in-tarrant-camia-rhea-candles-light-the-way-for-uta-student-entrepreneur/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://fortworthreport.org”>Fort Worth Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/fortworthreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/cropped-favicon.png?resize=150%2C150&quality=80&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
<img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://fortworthreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=421608&ga4=2820184429″ style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://fortworthreport.org/2026/03/08/made-in-tarrant-camia-rhea-candles-light-the-way-for-uta-student-entrepreneur/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/fortworthreport.org/p.js”></script>