Since winding down his athletic career as a double World Series winner, Mobile native Jake Peavy has explored a variety of business ventures, including a Mobile recording studio. His latest is probably not a pitch that anybody saw coming.

Broken Top Brands is a long way from the locker room, though one could argue that locker rooms everywhere might benefit from the company’s products: scented candles, car air fresheners and personal care products such as lotions, soaps, beard oils and “man spray.”

It’s an unlikely alliance, a partnership between a Gulf Coast investor and a Pacific Northwest entrepreneur who started out making scented candles in her kitchen. But Peavy says his interest is direct and simple: In the business world he’s more of a student, but he sees Affton Coffelt as an entrepreneurial rising star.

Certainly, Broken Top has had a rapid rise.

“As far as the brand itself, I started the company back in 2015,” said Coffelt. “I like to joke that like every great start up, it either starts in your garage or kitchen. I started in my kitchen, making candles, and about a year later moved away from my kitchen into a small manufacturing facility where we expanded our product offerings.”

The line you’ll find online covers a wide range of products in an array of scents. These include some intriguingly unconventional blends: Tobacco Teak, Saguaro Cactus, Pineapple Sage, Birch Charcoal. Each comes with a plush mindset. Using Birch Charcoal, for example, one is urged to picture oneself “Stepping out into the chilled, crisp air of a frosted forest. Cooling eucalyptus and mint meet with woody cypress and sweet smoke to light up your senses in this bold, evergreen scent.”

Broken Top is the name of a mountain near Bend, Ore., which has slopes used by a ski resort. Using its name for her company, and the names of other peaks for various product lines, was a way of identifying her company as a local operation.

From her start in 2015, she found fertile ground, expanding into home fragrances and personal care products. “The whole premise for me, I guess, is to find a fragrance that we love, that our consumers love and be able to put that in every aspect of their lifestyle,” she said.

Market research bore out the sense that there was a demand to be met. Coffelt said it showed that “there was a huge empty space in kind of this men’s gifting category when it came to natural products that smell good.”

There were, of course, bumps in the road – the biggest being the COVID-19 pandemic. Coffelt said she’s “deeply invested in the entrepreneurial community here in central Oregon,” and saw some promising businesses hit hard by the turmoil of the pandemic. “At first it was like, ‘Oh, crap, what are we going to do,’” she said. “All of our wholesale orders were canceled because retail boutiques were shutting down, stores were shutting down.

“Our pivoting point was, we launched a hand sanitizer,” she said. “And it was scented, so it didn’t smell like alcohol. It actually had aloe vera in it so it wouldn’t dry out your hands. We were able to pivot because we were nimble as a smaller company.” Having that product on her website might well have drawn attention to her other products, she thinks.

“Really, that product was a pivotal point for the growth of BT Brands from there,” she said.

Other problems were subtle. As a growing distribution network carried Broken Top products farther and farther from home, there was some pushback on the local place names.

“As we started bringing on sales reps within the gift industry throughout different parts of the country and in Canada and other countries, there was a really big complaint that everything that we offered was very regional,” she said. “So our East Coast customers were very deterred from purchasing those products because of the regionality.”

“So, kind of the evolution over the last few years, we took a few of our top selling scents and renamed them to kind of be more non-specific when it comes to geography.”

There’s at least one exception, the Mount Bachelor line, which is kind of funny. It registers more as a vague but masculine concept, rather than a place name. “We did some case studies and most people would think that it’s just, like, a bachelor scent, like it’s a super sexy man scent,” Coffelt said.

With Broken Top on the cusp of a national-level breakthrough, Coffelt was looking for investors. With his local interests growing nicely – he’s a partner in The Insider food court, which launched on Dauphin Street in summer 2022, for example – he was on the hunt for other opportunities. He and Coffelt said a mutual acquaintance, a consultant, had made the introduction.

“So we just started talking and Jake and I kind of hit it off,” she said. “He was curious in my brand and I was ready to kind of take the company to the next level as far as growth. And had I kind of softly been looking for an investment and wasn’t really sure like the route that I wanted to take. This was just pretty synergetic when we met.”

“It’s been fun since my playing days kind of wrapped up, that within different business entities that I’ve been passionate about, I’ve found this competitive edge in business and trying to be successful and do some things outside of baseball that I love,” said Peavy.

“I didn’t foresee, being a part of something like Broken Top,” he said. “But when you meet like-minded people and hear their story … This was just a fun opportunity for me.”

“Like she said, it was synergetic and, and I was super impressed by what she had already built and then her, her desire for future growth,” he said. “And I think that’s where the opportunity was, to try to move some of the long-term future planning and goals of BT, to put just a little capital into the system to move that stuff forward a little bit faster.”

“I’ve been involved in a lot of different little business ventures since retiring,” he said. “But I’ve never been involved with somebody who, who’s built and established a brand [that] continues to grow. It’s a unique skill set. For me, the most interesting part of being a part of this is growing a brand naturally.”

Sometimes that takes surprising turns. Nobody expected car air fresheners to be a hit for the company, but they have been.

“We’re known for our candles,” said Coffelt. “Our signature scent is our Sea Salt Surf. But really, honestly, we’re kind of turning into a secondary car freshener manufacturer. Our car fresheners have grown a lot over the last year and a half.”

The way things like this play out might be surprising, but the opportunities are created by a deliberate approach.

“The whole premise for me, I guess, is to find a fragrance that we love, that our consumers love, and be able to put that in every aspect of their lifestyle,” she said. “So, part of Jake coming on [is that] aside from the products that we currently have in our line, we’re talking about future expansion into deeper home fragrance products and cleaning products. And that would take those same top-selling scents and continue to incorporate them into different portions of one’s lifestyle.”

“I like to say our, our fragrances are very intentional,” said Coffelt. She wants them to seem clean and natural for a start, and free of potentially harmful ingredients. Peavy said that he knows it’s weird to think of a smell as high-end or luxurious, but that’s the feeling Coffelt has a knack for creating.

“The fun thing for me to watch her do is to find a scent, you know, it starts with a candle, where you find a scent that people like and they want to have around, and then if you can introduce it in other ways, like the car fresheners, I’ve been watching that go crazy,” he said.

“Yeah, the car freshener thing has been crazy actually,” said Coffelt. “A couple of weeks ago Ellen DeGeneres just launched her quarterly Be Kind Box and our car freshener is featured in there.” (DeGeneres curates a subscriber-based line of Be Kind gift boxes available through her www.ellenshop.com website. According to promotional information, “Ellen picks products she loves that are cruelty free, sustainably sourced, and ethically made … [by] brands who are changing the world.”

Broken Top products are available directly from https://www.brokentopcandleco.com/ and through a nationwide network of boutiques. Some products are carried by major retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Whole Foods.

“I think that there’s room for expansion,” she said. “And we are looking at deeply investing in more biodegradability and sustainability when it comes to our packaging. That’s something that you’ll start seeing with BT. It’s becoming more popular in CPG [consumer packaged goods] brands, specifically in the beauty section. And then, I also think that there’s a pretty big gap in luxury cleaning products.”

“I feel lucky to have met such a powerful female business owner,” said Peavy. “She’s a mom, she’s a very well-rounded individual that has learned all this business stuff along the way as well and is continuing to do that.”

“In the beginning, he said, he wasn’t sure what he had to offer besides some capital and maybe some legal resources. “But over the past few months, we’ve spent some time together, I’ve gotten to walk a trade show and learned a bit more about the business. I think we’re pretty passionate about business, and [about] finding ways to be successful and creative and thinking outside the box.”

“I’ve got this MLB Ambassador role with the [Major League Baseball] commissioner’s office that keeps getting more and more responsibility put on me, and that’s a blessing,” Peavy said. “I’ve also worked with the MLB Network and started calling and doing some commentary in games. And then we still have the studio and we still have the seven different restaurants, food halls and bars and different stuff. So I’m still involved in all of those day to day.

“I’ve got outside investments outside of that,” he said. “This was an opportunity for me to not just be some angel investor but to listen and learn along the way.”

“I’ve been fortunate to be along for the ride so far,” he said.