Ukraine relief effort gets Door County Candle owners on NBC game show 'The Wall'
Owners Christiana and Nic Trapani were contacted by producers of "The Wall" after they became aware of the business' Ukraine Candle fundraiser. The episode in which they were contestants airs April 11
STURGEON BAY - In the coming week, Door County Candle Co. will be back in the national spotlight it found itself in a year ago.
That's because its owners, Christiana and Nic Trapani, are competing in an NBC game show where they will talk about the reason the business entered that spotlight − its enormously successful effort to raise funds for people in need in Ukraine.
The husband-and-wife team are the featured contestants in the season five premiere of "The Wall," airing at 8 p.m. Tuesday and available for streaming on the network's Peacock service starting Wednesday.
If you haven't seen "The Wall," you may remember seeing ads for it. You also may remember one of its executive producers − basketball superstar LeBron James, as well as host Chris Hardwick.
It's the game show with a four-story-high, brightly lit pegboard of a wall that gives the show its name. It plays like a supersized version of Plinko game from "The Price Is Right," where balls drop from the top of the wall and bounce and rattle off the pegs before dropping into slots at the bottom with a designated prize.
That's basically what happens in the show, but knowledge also is needed along with the luck of the bounce. Teams of two contestants have to answer a trivia question within a certain time as the balls drop down the wall. Correct answers mean they win the cash amounts the balls fall into, but those amounts are deducted for incorrect answers or no answer.
And with a $150,000 slot in Round 2 of the game and a $1 million slot in the third round, the amounts are pretty eye-opening. The maximum prize a team can win, if every ball falls into its best slot and the team plays perfectly, is above $12 million, and the most any team has won in a show is just short of $1.75 million. Eight teams have surpassed the $1 million mark in the show's first four seasons.
Despite the potential bonanza, Christiana and Nic weren't really looking to be on the show until the show contacted them last March.
They were plenty busy at the time, trying to fulfill orders for the Ukraine Candles that Christiana, a second-generation, 100% Ukrainian-American (her maiden name is Gorchynsky), had Door County Candle begin making and selling in late February after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. All profits from the candles go to the nonprofit relief organization Razom for Ukraine.
Christiana said at the time she expected to sell maybe 50 of the handmade blue-and-yellow candles. Instead, the company sold more than 4,500 in the first week they were on the market and, after the story of the candles made not just local but also national news, around 20,000 in the first three weeks, more than they usually sell in a year. To date, the Ukraine Candle fundraiser has raised nearly $900,000.
'A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity'
The news coverage also led to the Trapanis getting onto "The Wall." Christiana said someone who saw the story contacted one of the show producers, which led to a call from the show last March. But with a small staff and the sudden tidal wave of business, the call was just one in a long line of phone orders for candles.
"Obviously (it was) a busy time," Nic said. "We were crazy busy. … The phones were ringing all the time. It would just kinda be a little bit of chance when the right call was picked up at the right time.
"One of our volunteers ended up picking up this phone call and answered the questions the producers had. I was standing close by and overheard the questions. That was when I got involved and started going through the process."
The show producers eventually invited Christiana and Nic to become contestants. They flew out to Los Angeles in late August to tape the show, but it wasn't a slam-dunk decision to take some time off for it because they were still extremely busy with the Ukraine Candle project as well as Door County Candle's regular business demands.
"It was an interesting time. There was still a lot of everything going on here," Nic said. "It definitely was a balancing act."
"We were going back and forth (on whether or not to do the show)," Christiana said. "We wanted to do it but we'd had maybe one day off all summer. We were like, can we leave?"
The couple received encouragement from friends and employees to do the show. Christiana said they spent time creating manuals for their staff to be able to run things in their absence, which they hoped to do anyway at some point for the benefit of their staff.
"We decided it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so let's do it," Nic said. "It was our first chance to step away from what we were doing."
"And Nic loves trivia, so it was a perfect fit," Christiana said.
Christiana and Nic said they don't watch much TV and began watching "The Wall" after they got the call. They said their preparation consisted of honing their knowledge of trivia.
"Every morning on the way to work, it was like, here's 20 questions," Christiana said.
"It's a fun game because it's also a game of chance," Nic said. "You can't really prepare or overprepare. You gotta go in with whatever knowledge and deductive skills you have. And, you also have got to have confidence in the person you're playing with. And, there's a lot of trivia nights (laughs)."
It's about the mission
It won't be revealed if the couple won money on the show until it airs. If they did, their plan is to use the funds to help make improvements they found they needed after the explosion of business they experienced because of the Ukraine Candle project. New equipment and increased space for production and storage are among the upgrades Christiana and Nic hope to make.
"I think the Ukraine project helped propel the company beyond what we were previously able to support," Nic said. "We've had a substantial reinvestment putting a lot of capital into the business."
Beyond that, the Trapanis said they were excited not just for the chance to help improve their business and help the Ukraine relief effort, but also to raise awareness of the effort to a potentially new and wider audience about a year after it launched. Their relief projects have expanded since, with additional special candles designated to raise funds for victims of Hurricane Ian in Florida and the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, although those happened after they taped the show.
"It's really exciting to get our mission back into the news on a really large level and to a different audience," Christiana said.
"That definitely was our focal point," Nic said. "We wanted to focus not on us but on the work done for the people of Ukraine, on our donations to Razom for Ukraine. … We're bringing a lot of aid to people in need. The story to be told on 'The Wall' is exactly that."
Contact Christopher Clough at 920-562-8900 or cclough@doorcountyadvocate.com.
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