Door County Candle owners win big - really big - on NBC game show 'The Wall'

STURGEON BAY - Christiana and Nic Trapani certainly made a splash on the season premiere of "The Wall."

The husband-and-wife co-owners of Door County Candle Co. won $1,350,633 on the episode of the NBC-TV game show that aired Tuesday night, April 11. The episode started streaming on the network's Peacock streaming service Wednesday.

The Trapanis are the ninth team in the show's four-plus years to win more than $1 million and the first since season 3. The highest amount a team has won is just short of $1.75 million, and the maximum a team can win, if every ball falls into its best slot and the team plays perfectly, is above $12 million.

The Trapanis were invited to be on the show in March 2022 after producers learned of the company's Ukraine Candle project that launched in late February 2022 to raise funds for the nonprofit relief organization Razom for Ukraine after Russia invaded that country. The blue-and-yellow candles made national news and sold internationally, raising more than $1 million to date, and Christiana, a second-generation Ukrainian-American, talked about the effort with host Chris Hardwick on the show. The couple went to Los Angeles to tape the show in late August.

The gameplay of the show, which has NBA superstar LeBron James as one of its executive producers, has teams of two contestants try to answer a trivia question as balls bounce and rattle down a four-story high pegboard of a wall that gives the show its name. Correct answers mean the ball turns green and the contestants win the cash amounts the balls fall into, but those amounts are deducted for the red ball that results from an incorrect answer or no answer.

So how'd they win all that money?

Christiana and Nic answered questions together during the opening Free Fall round and got all five correct, putting $135,521 into their bank.

For the second round, one of the contestants goes into an isolation room and answers questions from there, while the other has options on how many balls to drop based on if they believe their partner will answer correctly. Nic, a trivia buff who Christiana said on the show is "really good at general knowledge," went into isolation.

The round opened with a Super Drop, with seven balls falling at once and the resulting total of the amounts in the slots added to the Trapanis' bank. That gave them an additional $160,103.

In the round, Nic answered two of three questions correctly, but the wrong answer cost the team only $1 while his correct answers added $75,100 and $165,200 after Christiana went for a two-ball drop on the first and a Wall to Wall seven-ball drop on the second. The close of the round, with seven red balls dropped, cost them $35,301, leaving them with $500,622 in their bank heading to the final round.

The third and final round opened with four green balls dropping one at a time to add to the bank, after which Nic tried to answer three more questions, then four red balls dropped to deduct from the bank.

Meanwhile, Nic was sent a contract that offered the couple $215,521 — the amount won in Free Fall plus a $20,000 for each correct answer in the last two rounds — which he could take or rip up without knowing how much was in either the contract or their bank because he was isolated. It can be a tense situation, and some contestants in the past have taken guarantees far below what they didn't know they had in their banks, accepting a sure $85,000 to $195,000 when their banks held close to or more than $1 million.

The drop of the four green balls pushed the Trapanis well into seven figures. The first landed in the $1 million slot, after which Christiana dropped to the floor — "I just didn't know what to do to express myself," she said Wednesday morning — and the second hit $500,000. The last two only hit $10 and $1, but the couple was just above the $2 million mark at that point.

Nic then correctly answered the first two questions of the round correctly but only garnered an additional $11 for them, then dropped $50,000 by missing the final question, leaving their bank at $1,950,644. The drop of the four red balls, one of which landed in the $500,000 slot, deducted another $600,011, resulting in the Trapanis' final total of more than $1.3 million — assuming Nic ripped up the guaranteed contract and went for what he didn't know was in their bank.

Which, fortunately, he had.

"In that moment, I was very excited," Christiana said Wednesday morning, the day after the show aired. "I was happy knowing that either way we were leaving with something. But I was so excited that I just kinda looked down for about 10 seconds to compose myself."

"The suspense of it, you had to be on (the show) to really see the full effects of it," Nic said. "We were trying to be relaxed about it, but when I came out from behind the wall, it was fun because it was the first time I'd seen Christiana in a long time."

Nic said Wednesday the decision was "a very anxious experience," but he put his faith in the instincts that served Christiana and him in the candle business.

"Something we always keep going back to is, trust our gut," Nic said about the decision. "We've done that day in and day out with how Christiana runs our business. We kinda approached this in the same light."

All told, the couple gave correct answers to nine of the 11 questions they faced, with Nic going 4-for-6 while in isolation.

"It's funny, but when I came out and (Hardwick) said I got this many right, my first reaction was, what'd I get wrong?" Nic said with a laugh.

'Everybody was screaming' during the show

Until the show aired, Christiana and Nic, and Christiana's parents, who were in the studio audience for the taping, had to keep secret if they won anything on the show, which is standard procedure for any prerecorded show where prizes are awarded. The couple said they certainly had people try to get them to spill the beans in the six-plus months since they played the game, but they held firm.

"We definitely did get a fair amount of that," Nic said. "But I think we did a good job of keeping it under wraps."

The Trapanis didn't hold a big viewing party for the show. Christiana said they watched it with a few friends, some staff and volunteers who've been helping the business since the Ukraine Candle project launched and became a massive hit, and her grandmother, who came to the U.S. from Ukraine following World War II.

"A lot of them have been with us since we started this (Ukraine project), on the whole journey," Christiana said.

She said it was interesting for her and Nic to be able to watch the show. For her, because the game moved so fast and so much was going through her mind during gameplay that she couldn't really remember everything that happened, and for Nic, because he was isolated and didn't know what was happening on stage.

Of course, not knowing ahead of time how it went, the couple's guests became more than a little excited during the show.

"I didn't hear a lot of parts of the show because everybody was screaming," Christiana said. "There were a lot of tears and laughs, for sure."

What do you do with $1.3 million?

Christiana and Nic told the Advocate they'll use the money they won to help make improvements they found they needed after the massive increase of business Door County Candle experienced from the Ukraine Candle project, such as new equipment and increased space for production and storage.

They also plan for the changes to help them with other candles made specifically for charitable efforts, a goal Christiana and Nic have held since they took ownership. These include Beachside candles to help people in Florida affected by Hurricane Ian, Tin Candles for Ukraine to be used a source of light and perhaps heat, and most recently a Hope Candle to help children in need from the huge Feb. 6 earthquake that devastated parts of Turkey and Syria.

Last year, before they were on the show, they expanded to just about double the size of their previous space, to about 6,200 square feet. With the funds they're getting from the game, they hope to add another 8,000 to 12,000 square feet to the facility and are looking at ways to improve production, such as an automated wick inserter that places the candlewick directly in the center of the candle.

However, Nic said the company plans to continue to make candles the old-fashioned way, with people pouring the molten wax into glass jars.

"We're always going to make candles by hand," he said. "But we're looking at improvements in the process."

Contact Christopher Clough at 920-562-8900 or cclough@doorcountyadvocate.com.

FOR MORE DOOR COUNTY NEWS: Check out our website