How My Candle Business Sells Every Day | 10 Ways That Actually Works

#023 We map out every sales channel that keeps our candle business profitable, from storefronts and Shopify to Amazon, wholesale, markets, parties, fundraisers, subscriptions, private label, email, and press. Along the way we share pricing rules, calendar timing, and systems that turn interest into daily sales.

• separating home and work to avoid burnout
• setting up Shopify with strong photos and pop-ups
• offering meaningful welcome discounts tied to margins
• building email flows for welcome, cart, post-purchase, re-engagement
• deciding between FBA and FBM on Amazon
• timing wholesale outreach with the buyer calendar
• using markets for scent testing and price confidence
• running mobile pouring parties with host-paid minimums
• designing fundraisers with partners who have an audience
• launching a simple monthly subscription for recurring revenue
• landing private label, weddings, and corporate gifts
• pitching local media to compound visibility

Download the free list of sales channels at candlebusinesspro.com/daily. You can also grab free resources at candlebusinesspro.com and use the Shopify link in the show notes for the best current deal.

SPONSORS & DEALS

💼 View exclusive deals only for podcast listeners

***

WHEN YOU'RE READY

📬 Free Candle Business Supply List

🚀 #1 Candle Making Course

🧪 Mastering Wholesale Course

🧞‍♂️ Join the Inner Circle!

***

CONNECT

🐦 Free Facebook Group

📹 Subscribe on YouTube

📸 Connect on Instagram

***

SHOW LOVE

💜 Leave a review on Apple Podcasts

🟢 Leave a rating on Spotify

Transcript

Why Sales Channels Matter

Brick‑And‑Mortar: Pros, Cons, Boundaries

Shopify Basics And Must‑Have Setup

Pop‑Ups, Email Capture, And Discounts

DIY Your Site Vs Hiring Help

Selling On Amazon: FBA, FBM, And Strategy

Wholesale Timing, Trade Shows, And Accounts

Markets For Proof Of Concept And Pricing

Mobile Pouring Parties And Pricing Rules

Fundraisers That Drive Revenue And Reach

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. Today I want to talk about the multiple sales channels that we use to bring in revenue. So we have been in business three and a half years now, and we sell candles in a lot of different ways. We have wholesale retail stores, online daily sales through our website, multiple different sales channels. People ask us where do they start? What is going to be best for them? So today I'm going to go through and break down all the different ways that we are currently bringing in revenue from our candle business. If we haven't met before, I'm Sebastian Garzett, co-founder of Garzent Beacon Candle Company, alongside my husband Chad and the founder of Candle Business Pro, where we help candle makers go pro. You can visit us at candle businesspro.com to download some free resources. You can also grab some in the show notes below. Also, stick around to the end. I actually have a brand new download for you of lots of different sales channels for you to try out to promote and grow your candle business. So let's get into this. Okay, so as many of you probably know, if you have visited our website at Garza Beacon or you have been following Candle Business Pro for a while, you know that we have brick and mortar stores. We opened our first brick and mortar store six months after we sold our first candle. We sold our first candle in February, and on August 1st of that year, we opened up our very first brick and mortar store. A year and two months later, we opened up our second, and then about seven months later, we opened up our third. Now, I'm not saying go out and open up a brick and mortar store tomorrow, and that's the way to grow your business. It's just one avenue that we have explored and we've done well with. To be honest with you, I don't want any more stores. I actually probably want to maybe shrink that a little bit. Uh, we are now becoming retail employees again. Uh so that's one of the downsides of opening a brick and mortar store. We opened up our first brick and mortar store just to get the candle making out of our house. Or rather, that was one of the driving factors, one of the biggest driving factors, because we started making candles. And when we were selling candles at the very beginning, we were making these, it started in our kitchen, and then it went from our kitchen to the dining room, and then from the dining room to the office that we were working in our nine to five jobs in. Uh, we I was literally taking calls and working on that podcast uh for the previous company I was with. Chad was doing like real estate title work transactions, and as we could around our jobs, we're labeling candles. He's pouring candles, we're heat gunning things on our lunch break. So we're doing all of this while we're working our nine to five jobs. We needed to get this out of the house. As we started to get revenue coming in, it made sense for us to go ahead and take that leap. It's going to be different for everyone. For us, of course, we had two incomes. We had Chad's income, we had my income. So if you are the only income uh for your household, it you know, is going to be tough and even riskier to take the leap. But we had two incomes. It wasn't going to be easy to survive on one income, but this was our dream. We wanted to get this candle business up and running. It was a good opportunity, and it was Chad's dream to open a store. And so that's what we did. And for me, it allowed me to get the candles out of the house uh to where we would still enjoy the candle making. So we had a place to go. I highly recommend that even if you're just still making candles at home in your kitchen or in your office or your bedroom or wherever you're making your candles at, I recommend having a curtain. Have something to separate your candles from you. Because what ends up happening is even when we weren't making candles, we had a folding six-foot table in the living room with candles on there. And there's just no separation. And you almost get burnt out, even if you're not even making candles for a couple of days. You just have all these candles laying out. You're just in the business all the time. It's kind of, it would be like if you were sleeping where you worked, right? Instead of when you clock out at five o'clock instead of going home, you just you just stayed there. Which some people may enjoy that, depending on what you do. But it would be, you know, you're you're still there uh living in it, uh, even though you might not actually be doing your actual job. So I recommended that. That allowed us to have some space. We swapped our office, which was the smallest bedroom in the house. So this is where my office was. We actually made that our bedroom. And because our bedroom was the largest room. And so we swapped my office, uh, then and the bedroom swapped, so then we could then take the largest room in the house, which became the candle making room. So we downsize our sleeping quarters to upsize, you know, the the passion of making candles and all of that. But it's nice to have a door to close. So just something to think about. If you can have a separate space, that's great. Uh and so then we moved into the retail store. And we talk about the retail store almost every week inside uh Candle Business Pro, uh the inner circle, where we uh share some numbers and we talk about what's up, what's down, traffic, things like that, um, retailer sentiment and all of that. So uh retail store. So that is one of the driving factors of how we are getting sales every single day. The second one is going to be our online Shopify store. So our online Shopify store is what we started our business with, right? So when we first said, hey, we are open for business, uh, that was the way for people to make purchases was through our Shopify store. Uh making sure you do a few things with your Shopify store to set you up for success. Uh, to be very honest, uh candle making business is a very it's a saturated market, right? It's a saturated market uh because the bar to get into candle making is very low. You just need the resources, the funds to buy the supplies. You don't have to go to college for it. You don't have to. There's no roadblocks for the majority of people, uh, especially if you are like stateside or in the UK, Canada, Australia, those places where you can get all the supplies. Some countries, it's gonna be a little harder to get the supplies. Uh, it's not as quick. Um, so those would be some challenges that some may face, but all the education is out there. Uh, in fact, people say, why should I join the inner circle or take our candle making course? Well, you can certainly learn other ways. We just get you from A to Z much quicker. And some people like to have that. Some people like to have uh the hand holding, the community feeling of others around them uh helping to support them. And so that that's what we offer and why candle businesses pro has been as successful as it has been is uh is for that reason. But uh the bar to get into candle making is low. To succeed is pretty high. You just have to outwork everyone else in the space, or the majority of everyone else in the space. And so it's really about how much do you really want this to work? One of the things is going to be to have the Shopify store. You have to have an online presence where people can buy your candles. They have to be able to buy them day and night. It's not like a retail store where you have set hours that people you want to be over 24 hours a day. That's what your online Shopify store is going to do for you. But your store has to be good. Your photography has to be good. Your checkout system has to be really good. Your automations have to be really good. Uh, one of the tips is if you don't have a pop-up on your website that is collecting email addresses, go do that today. Do that today, collect those email addresses. I pulled up our numbers in the last week. We have, or actually, this is since the beginning of the month. So it's a little over two weeks, actually. We've added 130 email addresses to our email list from people visiting our website and giving us their email address. Um, so that's 130 extra people that I now can promote to every single month. Have a pop-up. Uh, also, the pop-up you have to have, and this is all free within having a Shopify store, um, by the way. Um, I do have a link for a Shopify uh in the show notes below. It's gonna give you the best deal that Shopify has currently. Uh sometimes you can just get like the first month for a dollar just to try it out if you want. So you can get that in the notes below. Um, but to get someone's email address, people aren't just giving away their email address. Just like people aren't giving away their phone number for you to text them deals, you have to give them a reason to. So the the welcome pop-up discount needs to be significant. I would recommend the lowest amount being 25%. You can go up to like 50%. You think if you are pricing your candles correctly, then you're getting at least 4x of a return. So if you're getting at least 4x of a return over your cost of goods, offering 25% should be very easy for you to um absorb. Uh, you know, taking that 25% off. It's a brand new customer because this is going to just be for their first time that they sign up. So I highly, highly recommend that. You also need to have your email sequences set up. And we'll talk about that a little bit more here uh in just a moment. So uh uh that's our second way that we are driving sales every day is having our Shopify store. You have to make sure that your SEO that it's optimized correctly. People talk about SEO, but are they actually doing it? We actually have an SEO workshop inside of the inner circle uh that's included. If you join the inner circle, you can go through that. You actually you can build out your entire Shopify store. We have a three-part workshop. It's about four hours, it's intense, but you can build your entire Shopify store to replicate how ours operates in a day, in a weekend. Uh, the only thing that would take longer than that is the photography, making sure that you have photos and things that are needed to actually build it out. Um, but you can, in the inner circle, you can do that workshop and build out your entire website in a day. Um, we have members that are doing that every single week. People come in, they they sign up just for that. You can hire someone to build your Shopify store out. Absolutely. Here's the problem with that, though. So you're gonna spend$1,500,$2,000. You might find someone to do it for five,$700 on Fiverr, Upwork, or some other website. But generally it's gonna cost you$1,500 plus to get your website built out. The problem with doing that is as soon as you need to make changes, as soon as you need to run a sale, as soon as you need to add more products, change out some photos, or do the SEO that we we talk about uh a lot. You have to hire someone to go do that if you don't know how to do it. So I recommend building your own Shopify store, even if it's just the back end of it, to where you understand how your products work, how your navigation menus work, all the separate different tags so you can easily throw an entire collection on sale. That's what I teach inside of our Shopify workshop. Uh, it's very easy. I walk through, we actually built out an entirely new brand. So it's not just like showing you how our store operates. I actually built out an entirely new brand. So uh just a tip for you there. If you want to pay someone to build out a Shopify store, totally fine. But be sure that you're learning the way that it operates on the backside so that you can make those changes. So you don't have to go and pay that person again to make small little edits because that's when it's gonna start to get pricey for you. Um, the other thing is we have Amazon. So we sell on Amazon as well. We don't put a lot of effort into it. It's really a um marketing and advertising play for us for people to know we exist. Uh, it helps us when people are searching, they will find our products out there, purchase from us. Um, but then we really encourage them to come and buy from us directly afterwards. Amazon's fees are really high. Uh you're paying shipping. Um, you are paying for them to fulfill. Uh if you're doing there's there's FBM and FBA. So FBM is uh fulfilled by merchant, FBA is fulfilled by Amazon, which means we send our products to Amazon. You're on Amazon's website, you buy, Amazon gets that delivered to you. That's how Prime, you know, two-day delivery and all that works. Fulfilled by merchant FBM on Amazon is they find your product on their website or on Amazon and they buy it, and then they send you the notification and saying, hey, they bought this, send it to them. Problem is you it'll show the days of like five days out. So if you've ever been on Amazon buying something and if you're a Prime member, you see that it's going to deliver like tomorrow or the next day. But then there's gonna be some items that take a week. It's gonna say that you know the the shipping is going to arrive like in a week. That means that Amazon's probably not fulfilling that, the merchants fulfilling that directly. And so we actually do both on there. Um one of the reasons, and here's a tip if you do get on Amazon, is the reason we have both is if the fulfilled by Amazon stuff sells out, then we can still show up in the search results with our FBM. So then you can buy it from us. So if the fulfilled by Amazon is available, they will fulfill that order for you. If they run out, then they will send you a notification. And then so you're not missing out on those sales. But uh an Amazon will tell you that fulfilled by Amazon is going to be over 90% of their business, um, which is which is very true. So if you're gonna be on Amazon, to make it work for you, you're gonna need to have fulfilled by Amazon, not just the fulfilled by merchant. Even though the fees are less, all of us that have Amazon accounts and we buy from Amazon, we expect to get the products in two days. We don't want the products that are gonna be here in five days. Uh, if your listing shows that it's going to take a week, I'm just going to select something different. I just bought some vitamins online, and one of them, the delivery was like three days. And, but then these other ones were like tomorrow morning between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. Like, which one do I want to go with? You know, sometimes it might not matter, uh, but usually for me, I'm stopping on Amazon when I forgot something or I ran out of something. So I wanted as quick as possible. And that's the you know, people are on there to buy gifts and things like that. So they want to get it quick. Uh, but once these deliveries go to the buyer, uh, I am trying to encourage them to come and shop with us directly um next time, um, incentivizing them with some coupons and stuff. So uh number two of the ways that we are selling candles every single day is going to be online. Um, making sure that your SEO is optimized and your stores optimized, your photography is on point, you have that pop-up that has a welcome uh message um and a discount for people to give you their email address. Okay. And I and as I mentioned, inside the inner circle, there's actually separate, there is a Shopify workshop and there's also an SEO workshop. So if you're if your SEO isn't um up to date or you're not understanding how to do it, you can hop into the inner circle and we can teach you uh very quickly on how to do that. Uh number three of the ways that we are selling candles is wholesale. So we have now crossed 150 uh wholesale accounts um in three years, which is pretty good for us. I spend from January first, first week of January uh through about April, really ramping up our wholesale. Um, because the way our retail stores work, those are the slowest times of the year. We're in tourist towns. So uh starting in May um is when we ramp up, and I just don't have as much time to put towards wholesale. But starting January through April, that is when wholesale is great. Also, people are buying for, you know, the consumer spends the most money uh at in the summer, and then at the holidays season. Uh candle season is October, November, December. People that are putting those candles in their stores are buying those in July, um, maybe August, but June, July. Um, and then people that all the stores are stocking up their summer stuff in January, February. So you want to be ready and set up for wholesale. Obviously, do it as soon as possible, but January, February is an optimal time. That's why you'll see like the big trade shows happen in January, like the Dallas Mart. Um, there's different cities that have all these big trade shows that all these boutique owners go and shop at. Um, and those are at the beginning of the year because they're buying stuff that they're not gonna plan on receiving for four or five months for you know the summer season. Uh, so you want to have candles available. Um, it's the beginning of the year. So a lot of businesses have their spending account um numbers set. Um people aren't wanting to spend money in December. They're trying to close out their books, they're trying to see where they're at. And then in January, they balance their books, um, getting their taxes ready. They look at the revenue from the previous year, and now they know how much they can spend next year or the or the year that they're in. So January is a good time. Uh, that is when uh if you're doing wholesale, you can really focus on that and get a lot of really good accounts. That is wholesale. So uh we have a wholesale course. I talk about wholesale all the time. Uh, you can reach out to me as well or in our free Facebook group. Uh, we talk about wholesale quite a bit, and I'm happy to share all the knowledge that we have there. Uh, number four, and this is one of the best ways when you're getting started, and that's to do markets, doing markets and vendor events. Uh, for us in Michigan, that is gonna be like May through October. Uh, you can do a market every single weekend here. There are so many markets to do. It's a great way to get your candles in front of potential customers. And those customers that buy from you may end up being customers that buy from you every single month. And in fact, some of them do, and I'll talk about that here in just a moment. Markets are fantastic, not just for creating revenue and bringing in sales, but also just to get proof of concept. Doing some markets, I would highly encourage every candle maker to do markets when you're first starting out. They will get tiring after a couple of years of doing markets. In fact, after we opened up our brick and mortar store, I had to do the markets by myself because Chad was in the store on the weekend. Setting up and doing markets by yourself is not fun. All the heavy candles, if you have to park a quarter mile away and you're bringing uh a hand truck, one of those carts to move your stuff, you got to set up a tent. And like I'm five foot eleven, and it's hard for me to set up the tent by myself. So if you're shorter than that, you have to ask one of the neighbors next to you to help you with your tent. Uh, they're just they can be a lot of work, but they're good. Uh, my threshold, and I would I would encourage you to learn from every single market that you do. My threshold for a successful market was to get lots of people to smell our products and to at least earn our vendor feedback, um, plus earn enough money to buy me a a really good lunch afterwards or a dinner afterwards for some of those that go later. That would be a success for me because even if we're not paying our mortgage and our car payment off of that off that market, did we get customer feedback? And that's really, really what I want, especially now that we've gone through it. Sure, at the time when we're doing markets, it might be like, oh gosh, that was kind of a bust. That wasn't that great. Um, it's not worth it. But now that we've been into this, you know, over three years, looking back, I'm so thankful for those markets, even for those days that weren't so great, because you get so much really good customer feedback. When a customer picks up their candle and smells it, you'll know right away the expression on their face. Do they like that? And now, sure, every customer and every candle aren't going to match well, but you'll start to see trends and you'll start to see patterns. And that's where you'll you'll be able to know after doing markets for a summer, like what products are our top sellers? Which ones do people really like, and which ones do people not like? It's hard to gauge that by what you sell online because what you sell online is gonna be based on your product descriptions, your titles, all the SGO that you do. At markets, you're getting real noses in your candles. What do people want? What are people asking for? Uh, when you are on a website or or behind a website, you people aren't aren't asking you many questions as a shop owner, but at markets are asking you. And two years ago, it was, hey, do you have a grapefruit? Hey, do you have a grafruit? Hey, do you have a grapefruit? And I'm like, no, no, no. It's like, oh, why is grapefruit so popular? We know what the trend is now. We're looking it up. Oh, it's because this perfume came out that has all these grapefruit notes. And so people want grapefruit. Uh, and then last year it was Santal. Everyone's asking for a Santal because of the Leilabo brand. And and that very, very uh popular Santal 33, which I absolutely love, but it's$300 for this perfume. No way. Um, but that's what was popular last year. And you know this by people at markets, just the public asking you questions. Uh, you'll also be able to see uh about price point. Uh just a tip for you when we do markets, we are always the most expensive. We just are. Uh our candles, our classic line of candles. Uh, they are$26. You're gonna have mark, you're gonna have makers right next to you that are gonna sell candles for$15. That's not you. Uh, that's not your brand. You have to make sure that you're making revenue. This is this whole channel is about making money and running a business. You got to price yourself right. Don't be concerned. No one is going for markets and are like, oh, let me find the least expensive candle. They're gonna connect with one. Um, so making sure that you have your niche in your market, uh, your target audience dialed in is going to help as well. All right. So uh that's with markets. Also, if you do use Shopify, you can just use your Shopify POS system to do your markets with um to collect payment and all of that. So just a tip there that's free with Shopify. The POS, the app to is free. You have to buy the um, I have one right here. You have to buy the chip reader, right? So these are like$50 for a chip reader uh on their website, and you can take this anywhere you want. You can actually now, with most uh iPhones, you can actually just take payment like through the phone, like there's something inside of your phone that will allow payment. Uh, I always think it's kind of weird because I feel like the information seems like it's going into there. We make a little bit of a nicer, I would say, presentation. We use an iPad out there, like on a little stance, or it looks like a register, and then we add this for them to put their card again. So it just looks like maybe more of a professional transaction, but by no means spend extra money to get all that set up. The next way we are making money in our candle business is by candle pouring parties. Now, before we had a brick and mortar store which people can come and pour candles at, we were doing mobile pouring parties. If you're just wanting to do candle making kind of part-time, um, but bring in a good amount of revenue, I would recommend candle pouring parties. Again, inside the inner circle, I actually have a workshop of how we do these. So with a candle, with a mobile candle pouring party, you are going to people's homes. You may be hosting them in your own home. You are going to corporate uh conference rooms. Um, we have done all kinds of things. We have done retirement parties at works, we have done team building events at the bank. We have done uh in home, we've done birthday parties, uh, retirement parties, bathtor parties, all kinds of things. Any reason for a gathering, this is just a uh add-on that people can do to make whatever event they're having even better. We have also done church camps. We have done church camps with 150 uh campers or students that are there in one day, uh 150 kids coming through and making candles with us. So pouring parties is a fantastic way of doing it. When we go and here's a tip for you if you are doing a pouring party uh in someone's home uh with someone, they're hosting a birthday party, something like that, I highly, highly recommend that you charge the host. When the host books with you, collect payment from the host, and make it the host requirement um or responsibility to collect all of the individual payments from their guests. Showing up at a mobile pouring party in someone's house where there's supposed to be eight people for us, it's a$400 minimum,$50 a person. So$400 is what we make. So generally that's it's eight people making a single$50 candle. You could also do like two$25 candles. However, you want to do that is fine. My minimum is uh$400 to do a pouring party. So you think doing a two uh or three pouring parties a month, you're making quite a bit of money. If you were to do one every single weekend, you're making over$20,000 a year uh by doing one. One pouring party that's gonna take you about three hours of your time, two hours at the party, uh, and you know, half hour prior and after uh for um just your own transportation and all of that. So pretty good money uh that you can do just creating a mobile candle pouring party. Um but I recommend the$400 minimum or whatever minimum you set, charge the host, make it the host responsibility to collect all the fans. But what happens is you're gonna show up, and where you thought eight people were gonna be paying you$50 each, one person's sick, one person didn't show up, um, and now you're doing a party for four people. And so then there goes half of your revenue. So I always put it on the host. Put it on the host to uh collect payment and pay you. And um, so that's what I'd recommend. I go into a lot more tips inside of that workshop uh if that's something that you're interested in. All right. The next way that we are making money in our candle business is fundraisers. Fundraisers are huge for us. In the last three and a half, almost four years now, we have raised over$75,000 for nonprofits. Uh most of them locally, some of them nationally. Um, and here's the thing that seems like a lot of money for us to be giving away. But we're giving away on average 25% of sales. So for us to be able to give away$75,000 in sales, you can do the math. That's about$300,000 in revenue coming in to our business and us being able to give away that much money. Uh, so think about that. How do you do this? This is fantastic when you're just starting out. We didn't have a brick and mortar store. We were, we only had a few wholesale accounts. We were brand new, and I reached out to the local humane society, said, Hey, I would love to do a fundraiser for you. Um, people love animals, people love to support animals. Every animal shelter is underfunded and overworked. So we partnered with them, did a fundraiser. Here's the key to fundraisers: you need to partner with organizations that have a following because ultimately, as us as business owners, what we're gonna get out of doing a fundraiser is going to be um new eyes on our business. That's what we want. We want people to visit our website, we want them to buy from us, uh, we want them to them to give us their email address. That's what we want as a business owner. So you need to have the nonprofits uh that you partner with, they need to have an email list that they're gonna be emailing this fundraiser to. Uh, they need to have a social media that they're gonna be promoting it on. It's not you our responsibility to promote this. This is all on them to promote. And so you need to be clear in this partnership with them of what the expectations are. Again, we do have a workshop on exactly how we do uh fundraisers if you want to go uh deeper with that. But that's huge for us. It's huge when you're first starting out, you're just trying to get your name in your community out there. How do you do that? Get it in front of several um fundraisers. Some that you might think about would be obviously the animal shelters, the human societies. Um, nonprofit theaters are really popular as well. Before they do like live music where they may have uh shows on the weekend, uh, those are, you know, and every single community has a nonprofit theater. Uh, partnering with those are great uh as well. There's there's a lot, there's plenty of nonprofits that would love to partner with you. Next way we're making business uh or making money on our candle business is having our candle of the month subscription. This is our subscription box. I won't spend a lot of time with it. There's lots of different ways to set it up, but this is a way for you every single month to get recurring revenue from your candle business. It is something that has done us really well. And circling back to the markets, when we first launched our subscription box, the majority of subscribers that signed up are people that we met out at the markets. People that we met out at markets that we didn't have a storefront, uh, they loved our candles. They signed up for our candle of the month. And so they've been with us ever since. And building out your subscription box is really easy. When I say a box, I don't mean a whole collection. We do a single candle. We have a single candle that we mail out on the first of every month to all of our subscribers. And then whatever is left over, whether it's a dozen or 18 or 24, 36, depending on the month, we'll make extra um based on how busy our stores might be or how online traffic is going. And when we sell out, we sell out. So we give out the candle of the month, uh, candle to all the subscribers. Whatever's left goes onto our website, and we send out an email to our list saying, Hey, here is the limited edition candle, you know, buy it today. And they know. Know that if they wait, they are going to miss out. So it's also a way of creating urgency in your business. Kindle of the month subscription boxes is a fantastic way to grow your business and having that recurring revenue. Because if you know, hey, I have 20 people on my subscription and I make$25 each time. And so you know right away how much revenue you're bringing in. And that's really nice to have. The next way that we are bringing in customers and making daily sales in our business is through private label and custom orders. So private label is going to be making candles for someone else to then turn around and sell, or just for them to do something with that's not going to be branded with just you, right? For instance, so here is a candle of ours. And if I'm going to private label, they're not going to get the candle how it is here, right? So they are going to get a candle that is going to have some labeling on it of their own or just a custom order of theirs, right? So we do this for a lot of women's boutiques, especially uh close by where we live here in Holland, Michigan and in Grand Rapids. We are making a lot of candles for other retailers. So it doesn't have Garznet Beacon blasted all over it. It's going to be in a unique vessel for that store. Um, and it's going to have some of their branding on it if they've chosen. Or a lot of them will just go with a nice vessel that it doesn't have to have anything on it. But then on the warning sticker on the bottom, it still says manufactured by Garznet Beacon Candle Company, because you need to have that on there for legal reasons. People need to know where they can get a hold of the manufacturer, which that's who we are. But it's also a branding play. The you know, a customer buys this candle. Gosh, I love this candle. Where is it from? On the bottom, it says manufactured by Gardens Beacon Candle Company. People can then find us on our website just by a quick, you know, internet search. So we have done private label for uh several different bands, uh, national bands. Um, we actually just did um a actually probably shouldn't share the artist of who we just did it for, but um, inside of our community, I'll definitely tell you. Um, we are working with a large peanut butter uh manufacturer, one of the top peanut butter manufacturers in the country. We are working on a private label for them to go out this Christmas season that they're going to be selling through their brand. Um, pretty exciting uh to be partnering with things like this. So this is a great way to uh take the business that you have and do other things with it. Once you know how to make candles and sell candles, you can do it a lot of different ways. And private label is a great way. We do a lot of wedding favors. Wedding favors are easy to do. Partner with some wedding vendors in your city and say, hey, this is what it would cost, you know, and whatever they want to trim around and sell it to their, you know, wedding uh parties or their their the people that are getting married, it is up to them. But they might be able to actually make a little bit of money by promoting your brand. So we do a lot of weddings, we do a lot of corporate gifts. Um, and as far as that goes, we in fact just did one with uh quality car wash. Depending on where you are in the country, uh they have Tommy's car wash or quality car wash, we do their candles. And so at the end of the year, they have a box that they send out to all their franchisees. So it's over 350 of them now that they have it all across the country. So they're all like independently owned. Um, and so what they do is at the end of the year, they put a nice box together. It has a nice bottle of wine, it has their annual report. Um, and then it had uh has a candle from us. And so the candle, we recreated that scent. And when I say we actually Chad, Chad recreated the scent of when you drive through the car wash, that smell that you uh get. He captured that scent, turned it into a candle for them. And so this just went to 350 locations across the country as a gift. To now they are calling and saying, hey, we want to sell those candles in our car wash facility. Of course, they're not selling a lot of candles, but it's just another revenue stream for us. We have partnered with it's called Cornerstone here, where we live. It is a assisted living uh facility, um, you know, where they help and nurse people in need. I might be saying some of that wrong. Uh, but what they do is they want to do, they wanted to give candles as a nice gift to their staff that are working really hard. And so the uh district manager reached out to us. We put their branding on it, they gave it out, they loved it. And then on one of his team calls we have other district managers across the country, he said, Hey, this is what I'm doing for my team. I just had this candle created and branded, saying, you know, we appreciate you and all this. And this is what I did. Now we have people that own that are district managers in Wichita, Kansas, and Lexington, Kentucky, all these other places, same company, same brand. So we don't have to do anything different. We already had the label created and all of that, and they're buying us, buying candles from us to then give to their staff. So just one more way that you can do private labeling. We have two left here. So the next one is email. So email is the foundation of growing our business. Every sell we get, every opportunity we get, we are capturing the emails of our customers or people visiting our website so that we can turn it around and sell to them. Um, we want to uh have make sure that we have our email sequences set up. You should have a welcome email, you should have an abandoned cart email, you should have a post-purchase email, uh, and then you should have re-engagement email. So a lot of different opportunities for you to connect with them. If you are part of the inner circle, we actually have a workshop on setting all of that up for you. Uh so something for you to maybe take advantage of there. Uh, you don't have to always be selling. Um, you can visit uh Kindle Business Pro.com slash social media, and you can get a completely free download that has our four different content pillars. We use those content pillars also in our emails where it's not always about selling, um, it's always about uh giving them some uh information and letting them uh see behind the scenes uh as you're going your business. It makes them really feel more part of your brand. So email is huge for us. Anyone that is wanting to turn this into a business, start capturing emails. One tip though, do not set up a giveaway out of markets where people fill out their a name and email and drop it into a container and then you're gonna give away something. Don't do it. We've done it. All of those emails that came from people filling out those slips that did not buy from us out of that market, they just wanted to win something, which is totally understandable. But none of those people ever became customers, ever. And if you're using an email uh software such as Clavio, you are paying based on how many email addresses you have. So you don't want to just have a thousand dead email addresses, right? You only want to have people on your email address or your email um list that have intent, that want to get your emails, that want to buy from you at some point. Don't feel bad when you send out an email and you don't get any sales when you're first starting. You're staying top of mind. It's just like social media. You're staying top of mind for someone. Right now I don't need a candle, but if I'm seeing your post every single week and I'm getting your emails, when I need a candle, I need a gift. Oh, let me go to them. Let me check my email. I know I just got an email from them, right? I get an email air, I get multiple emails every week from CVS, right? CVS Walgreens. I know when I need to go to the farm, I don't even open, I never even open up those emails, but I know when I need to go to CVS, hey, let me revert back to those emails. I know I got an email with a 40% off coupon. We've all got those. So let me go and find that coupon that I know is just sitting in my inbox somewhere. Same thing when someone needs to buy a candle. Hey, let me go and see what they got going on at Garden Beacon. Is there anything exclusive? Is there any discounts? Let me go find that email. Email all the time. Now, you're gonna get to a point like with us. If I need to pay a bill today, if I if rent's due and for some reason we just had a really bad month or something, I need to drive income. I'm gonna send an email today. I'm gonna send an email today because I know I'm gonna get a dozen sales when I send out that email. So you're gonna keep growing. But there was plenty of times when we were sitting on emails or it was crickets. But you're doing in that, you're you're getting in the reps, you're building your list, you're building that relationship with your customer. Eventually they're going to buy from you. The last thing is press and social visibility. We, I in a previous episode, uh go back two or three episodes, you are going to uh find an episode where we talked all about how to get press, how to get eyes on your business. We were doing that way before we had our brick and mortar stores. We have gotten into Oprah Daily magazine. We have got into Parade Magazine, uh, MSN, Yahoo Finance. We have been in all of those with articles, and it all started with being in our local newspaper and our on our local TV. The way you start out is by pitching your local media. You pitch them on a compelling story. Um, you can go back and check out some of the stories that we've used uh if you go and check out that episode of how to pitch them, um, and you can kind of get our framework for what you do there. That's a great way because when they post an article, such as when Oprah Daily posted an article about us or a snippet about us, people obviously saw it right then, but it's it lives out there, it's on the internet. And so it's going to people are going to continuously find that. Uh, so it's not just about today, it's not like Instagram where or TikTok or even Facebook, really, where you see a post and then it goes away and people never find it again. When you get published on websites, uh newspapers, articles, things like that that live out there, people are searching for an article or something, and then yours comes up and they find this. So it lives out there much, much longer than uh just social media. So I would recommend doing that. If you want a list of all the different ways that we are selling our candles, go to candle businesspro.com slash daily. And I'm gonna have a free download uh for you there. It's gonna have a list of all of the ways that we talked about today, plus a lot more ways of selling your candles as well that we weren't able to cover today. So again, that's candlebusinesspro.com slash daily, or check the show notes below for that direct link, a completely free download for you uh to get this list of ways that you can start selling your candles if you aren't already. I hope this episode has been helpful for you. Let me know in the comments below of ways that you're selling your candles that I didn't mention here today. That would really help the other uh viewers and listeners uh to know. And let's think of some creative ways of getting our candles out there. Don't just rely on one way or one channel to sell your products. Try multiple different ways, and then you can start to be choosy about how and when you want to do that. For instance, with our wholesale, there are times of years where we ramp it up, and then there's other times where we ramp it down based on another sales channel starting to get busier. So hopefully this helped you out today. Let me know in the comments below. Have a fantastic rest of your day, and I'll talk to you next week. Take care.