HOW DO YOU keep the lights on for 530-years, especially when your main client finds its popularity dwindling? For Rathbornes 1488, salvation comes through reinvention.
Kehoe runs the company with her husband, managing director Vincent Brady, and between them they have pretty diverse credentials. She has a PhD in microbiology from the Royal College of Surgeons and he is an accountant by training and previously worked in National Toll Roads. “I didn’t get it at the start. When you’re an accountant sometimes it’s just another job where you try and analyse what it costs and what you sell it for,” says Brady.Source: Skoda/Rathbornes/YouTubeKehoe joined in about 2015, coming in to help part time following a career break after having children. This is when the company really began to diversify.
“Our core business was the church market, and we all know the hits that the church has made over that period of time and continues to make,” says Kehoe. With more than five centuries of candle making behind it, Rathbornes has racked up a few notable commissions in its time, like the contract for lighting Dublin’s streets – with candles – in the 1700s and also for the lighthouses around the coast.
She dips her hands into a vat of beeswax pellets. “I love feeling it,” she says, rolling the beads through her fingers.