From Trend Chasing to Timeless: Building a Candle Brand That Lasts

#022 We shift from making more to selling better and lay out a practical plan to build a timeless candle brand around a classic line. Trends fade, but focus, systems, and the right sales channels turn a small catalog into real growth.

• why a classic year‑round line beats seasonal hype
• letting customers decide your signature scent
• the real costs of adding more products
• supplier turnover risks on oils and vessels
• focus, repetition and recognition in marketing
• reusing content assets every 60–90 days
• three growth levers: customers, AOV, frequency
• sales channels: markets, wholesale, parties, fundraisers, subscriptions
• email automations that convert and re‑engage
• time blocking and simple systems that scale

Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you have found this episode helpful, I would love a like and/or subscribe to this podcast or if you're watching on YouTube. You can always get our free downloads at our website at candlebusinesspro.com. And we would love to see you inside of the inner circle if you want to become a member today.

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Transcript

The Creativity Trap

Seasonal Lines vs Classic Foundation

Trends Fade, Brands Endure

Let Customers Pick Your Signature

Supplier Cycles And Stock Risks

The Hidden Costs Of More SKUs

Brand Identity And Customer Clarity

Case Study: Express And Identity Drift

Bath & Body Works Playbook

Focus, Repetition, Recognition

Repurpose Content And Assets

Keep Seasonals Stable, Limit Newness

Sell More Without More Products

Markets, Wholesale, Parties, Fundraisers

Subscriptions And Email Systems

Time Blocking And Operational Systems

Start With Six, Master The Sale

Final Takeaways And CTA

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Candle makers love creating. It's in our DNA. But what happens when that creativity starts costing us more time, energy, and money than it actually brings in? In today's episode, I want to help you shift from making more to selling better because it's not more products that you need, it's more customers who know, love, and buy what you already make. The co-founder of Garznet Beacon Candle Company and the founder of Candle Business Pro, where we help candle makers go pro. We have lots of free and paid resources that you can find at Candle Business Pro.com or in the show notes below. All right, so let's talk about this. So there's a lot of people that I see this time of year, we're in fall, going into winter, and I see brand new candle businesses trying to get started. And they're starting with a line of fall or winter candles because we're going into that season. So I completely understand. I completely understand why they would want to do that. But as soon as the new year hits, as soon as the holidays are over, those seasonal candles should be gone or should be going away. And now what do you have to revert back to if you didn't start with a classic line of candles? That those candles that you're going to always have year-round that your customers know you for. I I understand chasing trend. But what happens is we start to chase what's hot now, and it's going to be gone really soon. So I would encourage you that based on what your niche is, who your target audience is, those are two things that you should really have dialed in before you even start making candles for a specific person. You have to have that person in mind. We don't create just a line of candles and then go and try to find people to buy them. You have to have someone in mind. We talked much more about this inside of the inner circle that you can certainly learn more about on our website. But as far as this goes, you have to have someone in mind. When you have that person in mind, that customer avatar, you need to build a brand for them. And building a brand for them requires a foundation. So whether you want to call it your classic line of candles or your year-round, your rear, your your year-round line of candles, whatever you want to call it, you want to have that settled first. You want to have that lineup ready to go, always available to buy. That is what your brand will be recognized for. This sugar lemon candle, we have sold over$100,000 worth of this in the last three and a half, almost four years that we've been in business. All of our customers know this candle. It's kind of our signature. We didn't know it was going to be our signature. It was part of our classic line that we came out with when we first started our brand. And then the market dictates what your signature is going to be. Don't assume you're creating a signature scent for your brand. People might not want that, right? If we were to have assumed what people were going to want and create an entire business around that, then that means last year our Santal candle would have been our signature scent because that was such a highly uh candle in demand. We sell so much of that online. We sell so much of it at our stores because it was what was trendy. Santal was such a trendy scent based on the Leilabo perfume and their candle, which is fantastic, but it's over$300. We created a Santal candle and we sold it like crazy. We still sell it okay, but it's not trending anymore. It's not what was hot last year. Two years ago, grapefruit was the scent. Now$50 a month in grapefruit scented candles. It's one of my favorites. I absolutely love it. But it doesn't mean that's what our customers are going to want. So when you know who your customer is, you then create your classic foundation around them. Then when seasonal candles come, you can have fun. You can have fun tasting the latest trend. But keep in mind that those trending scents, especially when it comes to seasonal, the suppliers are coming out with new cents every year because they don't want you using last year's oil anymore. They want to give you something new so they can make more money, right? Because if you have leftover oil from the previous season, you don't need to buy more. So they're going to come out with new oils all the time. That's how they do business. I totally understand. It's the same thing with vessels. If you go and buy a hundred vessels that you're going to create, let's say in red and green, okay. At the end of the season, whatever you have left, you're going to possibly assume I'll just hang on to these until next year, until next holiday season. And then I'll just be able to get those back out. And then I'll have to buy a few more of them based on how many I need to make, and everything will be good. What's going to happen is next year, those vessels are not going to be available. It's just, it's just, they turn over. They turn over and they come out with something the newest and the latest and the greatest, right? And then we all flock after what's the hottest thing. Okay. So be really, really cautious about building not just seasonal, but also just building a brand in general around something that's trending. That's why my brand is built around a clear Libby jar that will not go away. They've been in business for hundreds of years. It's just a clear jar, and I dictate what it's going to look like. I dictate the labeling on there, right? Um, we have full control over that. So, you know, it's not a vessel that's going to go away. If you're going to be buying um beautiful, colorful vessels this time of year or at any time for a specific collection, that's fine. Just keep in mind it may go away one day. So building your classic line and your evergreen, your year-round collection, and something that might be trending can be risky. So let's talk a little bit more about uh the cost of just adding more product in general, um, whether that's more candles, more, more seasonals, um, more different lines, more different collections, or it can be adding a completely different product, such as adding in the wax melt or adding in room sprays or perfumes. If you've been in the around for a couple of years, last year everybody wanted to do the car air fresheners, right? Charms, they would call them. Where'd they go? That was all last year. We had a supplier that we were able to buy these little tens with a little wooden piece that would go in there and the oil would be absorbed by that. And so they were car fresheners. The suppliers don't even make those anymore, or they don't sell those anymore because they just it was a trend and it went away. So if you have like what we do, have any of that extra stuff, now you're just it's at a loss, right? And so now we're losing money. So we may have sold some, but we also lost on that too. Um, if you've seen my video where I did a walkthrough of our entire store, um, I I showed you the basement and I showed you where we have all this storage of extra stuff that we have purchased over the last few years. We've acquired quite a bit of stuff that is no longer for sale, that we can't do anything with it besides unique one-off um productions of, right? We'll have a private label, or we'll be making some donation type of candles, or we'll just do like a one-off. If I have an extra 12 of something, maybe we'll just make a special scent in it for, I don't know, a Taylor Swift album coming out, right? Taylor Swift comes out with an album. We need to make a limited edition run of candles. I'll do them in one of those vessels that we have just sitting around. Uh, but it's not something that I can just continuously make over and over and over again, which so maybe I wouldn't do a Taylor Swift because I think that that stuff just goes crazy and crazy. So I might need to do that in a vessel uh that would be able to uh make more and more of it. But you know what I'm saying. Like we we've accumulated so much stuff and not just vessels, but I'm talking also in oils as well. We've even done it with wax. We've tried a couple different waxes in the past, and we and it didn't work out. When you keep trying more and more, you just keep spinning more and more, and it ends up just being a waste. Um, so there's our financial cost of adding more. There's also gonna be the time cost. The time cost of adding more. Every new candle means new testing, new descriptions, new listings on your website, new social media, new displays if you have a store. Um, and then what are you gonna swap out? The more that I'm posting about our room sprays is the less I'm posting about something I know sells a ton of, right? So something to keep in mind there's gonna be a lot of time cost in adding more products. Uh, there's gonna be the marketing confusion. If you start out with a seasonal line of candles for your brand, your customers don't know who you are. You have to have your customer dialed in. You have to know who is your customer and what niche are you in. Build that collection of your classics or your evergreen or your gear round, that foundation to set your business up for success so that you are recognizable to your customer so that they understand that you're making candles for them. Then when you want to do seasonal candles, sure, go ahead and do those, but make sure that you're always coming back to that foundation so that customer doesn't get confused. That customer doesn't see you changing direction so many times that they're they don't relate to it anymore. I'll give you uh just a quick example on that. Express, express for men. Clothing store in the malls, um, malls for some of your younger generation uh is a place where some of us would go and shop and they have a bunch of stores in there nowadays. Everyone's just doing it online. But there used to be a place where we went and bought stuff in in person. Um, those are called shopping malls. So Express is a store, and for 15 years, I bought everything from Express. Um Express started to change up. They they were struggling as a brand, so they started changing up a lot of what they were doing and who they were going after. Um, they were coming out with different collections of clothing, and it just it it's it's I stopped being their customer, right? Um, they weren't making clothes for me anymore. It did they they they changed completely. They went, they tried to go uh more elevated and being more fancy, doing more suits and ties. Um, that seemed to have not worked. It didn't last very long. And then they've also now they've kind of gone kind of athletic and kind of younger and more streetwear. So they totally have lost me, which is totally fine. You can grow out of a uh brand, but they've kind of lost their identity. And so they're closing up a lot of their stores. That's just like on a bigger scale identity crisis that a brand would have. And we see that happen with uh a lot of brands where you'll start to see them try a whole bunch of different things because they're struggling and then they end up kind of fizzling out and kind of going away. It's those brands that always have the same foundation that you can revert back to and then they can revert back to year after year after year. You look at like Bath and Body Works. So they're gonna come out with all kinds of different seasonal stuff. They come out with tons of them, right? But when the seasons are over, they can revert back to that foundation that you know you can always get when you go to Bath and Body Works. And that's not just in their candles, that's gonna be in their lotions and their soaps and their sprays and all of that. They're always gonna have those year-round collections. And then they're gonna sprinkle in the uh trendy stuff, you know, around that. So something to keep in mind. Focus on your foundation first. Another cost of adding more products is the emotional burnout. It can get exhausting. I'm just looking at when we created our when we did our room sprays, and now I'm glad we did our room sprays, but you will get burnt out from just chasing after what's the hottest thing and the latest thing, right? We luckily didn't do that with our room sprays. Our room sprays are in fact are just our classic line of candles. We have 10 um candles in our classic line, and that's what our room sprays are. So we're not chasing after any trending sense when it comes to that. But when you come out with a new collection, and whether it does well or maybe it doesn't do so well, it can be exhausting. You're gonna start figure, you know, thinking, did I fail? How, why did this not sell? Well, who are you selling it to? Do you already have a foundation? Because if you don't have a foundation of customers, who did you intend to buy? And so I do feel that as creators that we love to make candles, we love to make home fragrance products, whether, whether that is, you know, the candles or the room sprays, or maybe you make soaps, you know, but chasing after what's trending rather than taking that time and spending that on how do I sell more? You know, there's three different areas on how you can grow your business. And so the first one is you have to have more customers. That makes the most sense. Figure out ways of getting more customers, okay? The other thing is you have to raise the amount of money they spend when they purchase. So your average order value. So what is your average order value? If you don't know what that is, that's something for you to look at. You can have the same amount of customers and you have them spending more, you obviously then make more. So raising the average order value is the second way of growing your business. And then the third way of growing your business is to have that same customer buy that same product more times. So instead of them buying from you, say twice a year, you have to get your customers to buy from you three times a year. So those are the three ways that you grow a business. You either get more customers, have those customers spend more money, or have them buy more often. Now you notice I didn't say anything about add more products, add more products. That's not what you need to do to grow a business. Of course, you're gonna want to add more collections when the time is right. We probably rust out in adding a couple of our collections. Um, we're glad that we have those now, but we wouldn't have done it as the foundation. Again, have a foundation uh collection of candles. Let's talk about the power of focus. Your best-selling candles should be your number one focus. Anchor all of your energy for your brand to that classic line of candles. Again, year-round, sure, we're gonna have different seasonals. We're gonna do some limited editions. We actually have a candle of the month every month that we come out with a brand new scent, but we can always anchor back and focus on our classic line of candles through emails, through social media. And now we have those assets that we can just kind of reuse over and over and over again because we're focused on them. So we're gonna add in more things, but we are focused on that main product. So repetition builds recognition. The more you communicate a specific product or collection with your customers, the more they're gonna recognize it, the more they're going to want to make sure that's part of their uh their buying ritual or their routine that they're using your products for. When they keep seeing the same things over and over and over again, even if they haven't purchased yet, they're gonna be more intrigued on why. Why, why have I not tried this and why is everyone else really liking that? I think a lot of the reasons that we sell so much of this candle is because we promote it over and over and over again. And that's why this one sticks out over some of the other ones that we have. So repetition will build your recognition. So when you create social media assets, you don't have to recreate them over and over again. We will repurpose them about every 90 days or so, we will keep using the same assets, right? So any of the images or videos or unboxing experiences that you may have, keep those and be sure just to keep reusing them. We talked in the episode about social media, how when your business page posts something that because Meta wants you to spend money on ads, they won't show your post to all of your followers, um, whether that is on Instagram or Facebook, you're gonna get about 10 to 15% might see that organically without you putting ad money behind it. Uh so just keep that in mind that you know you can post that same image or video again next month, uh, and then again, and then again, and also within email. So don't feel like you have to always create new. If you have a solid foundation of products, create a bunch of social media assets for them, and then just keep repurposing them over and over again. We're still using these same um assets that we had created on. We hired someone on Fiverr, and there was like 50 bucks, and it gave it like a hundred different social media assets for our classic line of candles. So each of our 10 got like, I think 10, maybe eight to 10 different images, and we just keep reusing those over and over again. So when you add new products, you now have to create all new of that. And that to me is the exhausting part is recreating social media stuff and posts over and over again takes so much time to where I'm glad we're not putting out as many new products. Uh, to share another thing with you, our fall line of candles and our winter line of candles, they're not new. This is the third year now that we had the exact same four fall and four winter candles. They're not even new. We're not even putting out new scents um within those collections. Now we do, as I've mentioned, we have our candle of the month. So we are gonna have a brand new candle every single month. That's good for our subscribers, but also there's a limited edition available in our stores and on our website. So we promote that to the people that are on our email list. Um so we do have a new one in those holiday or seasonal months, but those are a limited run. But besides that, we have our standard four candles that we have had every year for fall and winter. So you do not have to keep adding new. Okay, so instead of adding more new products, thinking that we need to have a more robust brand and different collections, what are some ways that we can actually just focus more on selling the products that we have? So here are some practical ways that you may not be selling your candles that you might want to consider. Uh, doing markets and pop-ups. That is the easiest way to put your products in front of someone and getting a direct, you know, on time, uh, as it's happening, response to what they feel about your product. They might not buy your product, they might open it up, and when they smell it, they are going to have a reaction on their face. When you see that, you know right away, do they like it, do they not like it? Regardless if they buy it or not, your price point might not be right for that specific person. You can be priced too high or even too low. Uh, it might it's not about did they buy it or not. Now, sure, sales does come into play, but when they open up your product, they smell it, do they like it? And you'll know that without them buying it. You'll see that reaction, or you'll you'll hear what they say. That's different. Oh, that's unique. Usually they don't like it if they say that I love it, that's amazing. How much is this? Those are all indicators that they want something. You of course then go on to give your price drive based on if they, you know, complete the purchase or not. But that's another discussion for another day. So um sales channels. So you have markets and doing pop-ups. I highly encourage everyone doing those to get an understanding of if you have a good product market fit for your candles or not. Uh, the other thing is wholesale. Um, wholesale is something that we do. We have about 150 plus uh wholesale accounts now that we have garnered over the last three years. January is when I usually shift from our holiday sales to now I just focus on wholesale until our summertime ramps up. That is how we've been able to get as many wholesale accounts as that we have. We don't rely on fair for our wholesale. Now we're on fair, of course, and we we definitely get some orders from there, but that's not where over 95% of our wholesale orders come from us doing outreach. It's something that we teach in our wholesale course. Um, it's actually just the strategy we use. I just give you what our blueprint is and I explain to you how to do it. Um, but wholesale is another fantastic sales channel. So don't think about adding more products. Think about other ways of selling. So you have your markets and your pop-ups, you have wholesale. Uh, you can do pouring parties. Doing mobile pouring parties, if you know, we have a brick and mortar store, we can do pouring parties there. You don't need to have that. You can do mobile pouring parties where you go into people's homes, you go into conference rooms at uh businesses. Uh, for instance, we will do some at the at the banks here in town, or you can go into doctor's offices, all kinds of different small businesses or large will have conference rooms. They they will have a budget for a team building event. They will hire you to come and do a candle pouring party with their team or their organization, holiday parties and stuff. It's very, very busy around that as well. Um, again, this is one of the workshops that we teach inside of the inner circle. Uh, fundraisers. Fundraisers is a way of selling candles that we got started with and has done so much business for us. So we just crossed over$75,000 in donations that we've been able to give to organizations. And that's a lot of money for them, but that's also a lot of money for us because we're not giving 100% of our proceeds, we're giving a percentage. Generally, and kind of what we're where we're at right now, for the majority of fundraisers we do, we will give the organization about 25% of the proceeds from the sales. So for every$1,000 that is generated from the campaign, they get$250. We get$750. That$750 covers, you know, our labor, our cost of goods, all of that. On our end, uh the it's a win-win. It is another way for them to raise money. And it's a win-win for us, not only just for the sales itself, but also to have new eyes um on our products and new customers, uh, new followers on our social media, um, new emails for us to email with uh to hopefully, even if we didn't sell them today, hopefully to sell them in the future. Uh, I talk a lot about fundraisers uh inside of the inner circle as well. Uh, and then subscription boxes. Focus on setting up a subscription box where you have a candle of the month. Um, there's different strategies to go about that. So I won't go into the details on that now, but that's another sales channel. So if you haven't tried all of these different sales channels to move candles, I wouldn't be focused on just adding more products. Uh, adding more products isn't going to create more sales necessarily. Make sure that you have a really good email campaign setup. You should have an automation. When people give you their email address, they should go through a sequence of emails that is welcoming them. Uh, one of the emails is going to ask them to come and follow you on social media. One of them is going to be to uh give them a discount for them to purchase with you. And then after people purchase from you, you should have an email sequence set up that they're receiving emails thanking them for their purchase, asking them how it was and for them to leave a review, and then another discount for them to come back and buy from you again within a certain amount of uh time. You don't want to have a discount code without an expiration date. You always want to have an expiration date because you need to create that urgency for them to come and buy with you. Okay, so just to recap today, let's focus more on the selling of our products and making sure that we have a system in place. Are we collecting everyone's email addresses? Are they going through an email sequence once we have that? That's going to systematically sell you more candles, more products by having the right systems in place. So if you don't have all those systems in place, uh your social media should all be scheduled out. You should be planning and scheduling that out. You can do it for a month at a time. Uh, on Monday night, I am working on wholesale, and Chad is working on creating the social media content for the for the week. And so, of course, you know, there's two of us uh running this uh business from the top. Um, of course, you you know, doing it on your own. I completely understand there's a lot to do. Uh, but try to do it in time blocks. It's actually, we have a time block seed. If you are in the inner circle, we have a uh template for you that you can use there as well for time blocking. But get your systems in place so that you're not just throwing stuff out there and just hoping for a sale. Your website should be sound, it should have all the trust factors put on there. People come to your website, they go through a journey, they hopefully purchase. If not, they at least give you your email, give you their email address, and then you start a sequence with them on warming them up to becoming a customer. Don't focus on what might be trending right now or getting the latest sense or using the latest vessels. You do not need to do any of that to build a solid foundation around your uh classic line of candles. Make a line of candles, it only has to be six candles at the most when you start and make those sell first. Figure out a way to sell those six candles, then start adding to it. Because then it's gonna be so much easier to sell anything you add to it, whether you're gonna add soap or room sprays or wax melts, whatever you want to add to your classic line after the fact, totally fine. If you want to do seasonal candles, totally fine. But make sure you have a solid system in place for actually selling what you built this brand for. We built this brand around this classic line of candles. We had our customer in mind. We knew exactly who we were going to be selling these candles to. We built that foundation, and now everything else that we add, whether it's products to our website or if we are adding complementary items within our stores, they all have that one customer in mind. So, something that hopefully you can take away from this. You do not need to add more products, you just need to add more customers. And figuring that out is going to help you tremendously to get your brand off of the ground and growing. Then the rest of it's easy when you do add more stuff. You already have people to buy it. You have people ready to open up their purses and their wallets and spend money with you. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you have found this episode helpful, I would love a like andor subscribe to this podcast or if you're watching on YouTube. Again, thank you for your support of me and this channel. You can always get our free downloads at our website at candlebusinesspro.com. And we would love to see you inside of the inner circle if you want to become a member today. Thank you so much. Take care.