Candle Business Q&A: Scaling, Email Lists, Markets, Etsy, And More

#027 We answer real maker questions on scaling a candle business with practical tactics: diversify sales channels, build a quality email list, test wicks with confidence, and choose the right places to sell. Clear steps, real numbers, and tools you can use today.

• diversifying beyond social into website, wholesale, private label, and fundraisers
• using email as the primary promotional tool with quality list building
• setting lucrative pop‑ups around 25% to convert site visitors
• wick testing with three‑candle method and half‑inch melt pool rule
• choosing markets over random fairs and when Etsy fits
• standing up Shopify early to build SEO and conversion
• realistic view of Facebook ads for break‑even acquisition
• free calculator for candle math and available courses
• wholesale playbook highlights and local PR flywheel

Come hang out in our free Facebook group and drop your questions. I’ll answer them on a future show.

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Transcript

Welcome And Format: Q&A

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome everyone back to the Candle Business Pro Podcast. I'm your host, Sebastian Garzett. Today I am going to be answering questions from viewers just like yourselves. If you want to submit questions, come and hang out with us inside of our free Facebook group. There's links in the show notes below, and I will answer questions here on an upcoming episode for you. So let's dive into this. All right. So the first question is from Tori Hiller. And Tori's question is What is the easiest change you made to scale? It's not an easy change to scale, but what has worked for us is to diversify and try so many different avenues of selling our candles till we find what sticks for us and what works for us, not just for our customers, but for us personally, of what we like to do versus maybe some sales channels that may work, but may not be something we enjoy doing. I often see uh candlemakers that are starting their business and they are posting on social media, like we should all be doing, but they're not doing anything else. They haven't optimized their website, they're not doing some different channels. One of the things about being inside of the inner circle is we do a monthly workshop, right? And so these monthly workshops oftentimes are different sales channels that we're doing. So, what I would say is work outside of just social media. You need to have your website set up and uh optimized for you. You need to have the SEO on your website optimized. These are two different workshops that we actually do uh inside of the inner circle. Uh, you need to make sure that your email marketing is running um on automation, that they that your customers that you have are continuously hearing from you as well. Uh, fundraisers, we do a fundraising workshop. That has been huge for our success personally uh with Garson at Beacon Candle Company. We do fundraisers all the time. We used to even do more fundraisers when we were first starting. Now that we have a steady stream of sales coming in daily between our online, our stores, our wholesale orders, all of that. We don't do as many fundraisers. Now it's generally companies reaching out to us to do fundraisers because they have seen the success that other local businesses have had with us. Generally, we keep our fundraisers local. We do do some national fundraisers for like the Trevor Project and other big organizations, um, but we usually keep them all small and local, and it helps the local community, but it also brings the local community's eyes to our brand, um, which in turn uh gets us on TV. We do the news. Uh, we've been in the newspaper, uh, the newspaper half a dozen times now. Uh, we get featured in articles from local magazines, things like that. And that just has just blossomed our business. Um, so I would say the easiest change to scaling is to diversify and try different things and then see what sticks for you, right? So there should be fundraisers, you should be looking at doing wholesale. Um, you need to make sure that your website is optimized to get sales when you get that organic traffic that lands on your web page. So many different ways. Uh, we do a lot of private label. Um, these are all workshops together. We do inside the inner circle. Um, so there are different ways to learn all of this. And you don't have to be in the inner circle, of course, to learn how to do these things. We just make it easier to get from A to Z. Uh, but try different things and see what actually works for your personality and see if you know, private label is the way to go, or is wholesale the way to go? What's going to work for you? Not only just for you personally, but also for your lifestyle. Some people don't want to have a brick and mortar store. We have three of those now that we've opened up in the last couple of years. We enjoy that, but we're to the point where we actually enjoy having some of our freedom of time back. Thankfully, we have a great staff in those stores. So we're not in the stores as often. We're still there moving stuff around, um, making sure that the production um is going well, making sure that our shipment and fulfillment is going well, making sure that our supply levels are all where they need to be. So we're in the business, but we're not customer service reps in the business anymore. So hopefully uh giving you a list of different ways that we're selling our candles will help you uh decide which way that you want to scale. But ultimately, you find what works and then you just do that 10 times over. If you find if you've tried multiple things that let's say fundraisers is bringing us the most revenue, then put all your focus on the fundraisers. Or if you're starting to optimize your website and you're starting to get online orders that way, then focus on that even more. So figure out what works for you, your lifestyle, your personality, and what actually works in bringing in revenue, and then just multiply that and just put all your energy into that. All right. So the next question is from Tanya Watts. And her question is what's the best promotional tool that you use? Okay, great question. By far, the best promotional tool for us is gonna be email. Email is the easiest way to stay engaged with our customers. Look, we post on social media every single day, but that's gonna land on the feeds of maybe 10, maybe 12, 13% of people, right? So if you have a thousand people that follow your social media account, you might get a hundred of those people to see your post when you post, right? If you if you're not at a thousand, then of course it's gonna be even less. And if you're above a thousand, it'll be more. But just on average, Facebook and Instagram, meta as a whole, they want you to buy ads. They want you to spend money with them to get your posts in front of more people. That's why whenever you post something, it pops up and says, You want to you want a boost to this. But$5 behind it. They're they want you to start promoting your business. And so if you're not doing that, you have to post even more. Now, email, once you have someone's email address, you're emailing them, you're landing in their inbox. As long as you're not sending spam, as long as you understand how to write those emails, understand how to write those subject lines, they will end up in the right place in their inbox, and you have a connection to all thousand of those people if you had all of their email addresses. Anytime you're at markets selling candles, make sure to collect email addresses. I cannot stress this enough. I talk about email addresses all the time. It works. Anytime we need sales, I am going to send an email out. And I we're guaranteed we get sales every single time we send an email out to our list. And that started back when we probably had a hundred. When we had probably a hundred emails, every single email that went out, at least one percent, at least one person out of that hundred would buy something for uh uh from us. So keep that in mind. Now that we just keep collecting and collecting and collecting email addresses, we just get that much more uh return with conversion to people buying from us when we send an email out. Doing markets is a very easy way to collect emails. Now, here's the thing: don't do like a giveaway to give me your email address and you can be entered into a giveaway. Don't do that. You're just gonna get um bad emails, dead emails. They're gonna be emails for people that just want your free giveaway. They don't want to actually buy from you. Okay, so don't do any giveaways to collect emails. You want it to be a quality list. You want it to be people that are gonna open your emails up and then spend time on them and hopefully click and go to your website. If you collect a thousand dead emails, the emails of people that don't even care about your brand, um, but you collected their emails, when Gmail or whatever service provider you're sending those emails from sees that everyone just deleted those emails and didn't open them, they're gonna lower your quality score of your emails and they're gonna start being sent to the promotional folder or spam folder. So just keep that in mind. You only want quality emails. It's gonna take some time to acquire all those, uh, but that's what you want. You want to set yourself up for future success. One of the best ways of getting emails through e-commerce is, of course, on your website, making sure that you have a pop-up. As soon as someone lands on your website, you need to have a pop-up. And you can't just offer them five, 10%, 15% off to give you uh their email address. It has to be lucrative. You need to offer, I would say, at least 25%. Just think you're still making money as long as you're priced right. You're gonna make money on that. They're gonna fall in love with your candles, save some money. They're gonna buy those candles from you, fall in love with them, hopefully, and then rebuy from you at full price over and over and over again. So don't be hesitant on giving a really good discount up front for those first orders. Just think of that as a marketing dollar, right? That marketing dollar that you're spending on giving a discount on those first orders is still gonna be less than what you're gonna have to spend by when you run Facebook ads or Instagram ads to acquire a brand new customer. 25% is not a lot to spend as far as margin goes to acquire new customers. So people would be running Facebook ads all day long if they could acquire a customer at 25%. So keep that in mind. Have a good discount on your website for them to give up that email address. So even if they don't buy right away, um, they're gonna start getting the emails from you. They're gonna see something that uh makes them kind of pull the trigger on that. Next question here is from uh Vanessa Russo. Uh, hopefully I said that right, uh, Vanessa. Uh, how to know when you are done testing? It seems like there are obvious signs um to tell if you fail, but I'm having a hard time knowing which test result is best, if that makes sense. It does make sense. And there's gonna be a lot of conflicting information out there. Um, and not that any of it is necessarily wrong, but it's just not the way we do things, right? Some people will say that your vessel cannot get above 170 degrees. And some will say it can't get above 140 degrees, and some will say that the flame can't be above an inch and a half, right? We all have different standards of what's going to fail or pass on our candle. Now, inside of our candle making course, we go way into detail with this and explaining how we do it. But essentially, an overview is you are going to want to test multiple candles at once. So we're going to test three candles at once. And this is exactly what we do inside of our course that I'm sharing with you here now. We're going to test three candles at once. We're going to start with the recommended wick. We actually have a wick guide that we created based on all of our testing of all different uh waxes and wicks. Um, and so we we're gonna test starting with the recommended wick and then one size up and one size down so that we can understand the test results live as we are going through the testing phase. Because if you just test one wick and then you size up and then you wait for it to cure, and then you test that one, the differences are usually pretty small to where we can't remember back to two weeks ago or to three weeks ago, right? So we're gonna test three candles all at one time to see what the results are. We want to, you know, make sure that we're getting close to a full melt pool, if not a completely full melt pool. Um, sometimes you don't want to get a completely full melt pool depending on the wax you're using. Um, as we teach, if you're using like a coconut soy or coconut blend, uh you don't necessarily need to get a full um melt pool because as it burns down, all of that um hang up, as we call it, around the side of the vessel, is going to end up melting and coming down. So don't be concerned with that. Now, with soy that has the um much higher uh chance of tunneling, you do want to get a full melt pool when you are testing those. So we are gonna want to make sure that we got a full melt pool, but we want to make sure that where it's not too much to where it's more than a half of an inch thick. So that's the key for you from one of our secrets is a half of an inch melt pool. As long as you keep that melt pool at a half of an inch or less, your candle should be completely safe. We have never in our testing had a broken candle ever. Uh, and we've kept it under a half of an inch every single time. So just keep that in mind. That will hopefully help you at least feel confident in your uh in your candle. Um, but definitely feel free to reach out to us inside of the Facebook group, and I can also give you some more, uh, maybe some photos and things as well to share with you. Uh, next question here is for uh from Brittany. Um, and I might mispronounce this last name as well. Uh Brittany uh McEchern. Hopefully I said that right. Uh if not, definitely correct me. Uh, your question here is the best way, what is the best way to market our candles? Okay, so this is kind of like out of the promotional tool, which is gonna be email. Email is the best way to market your candles because you're gonna have that connection with people. You show up in their inbox, most people are going through their inbox every single day. That's the easiest way, or the best way, I should say, to market your candles. Maybe not the easiest because you might not have those email addresses when we're first starting out. Or if they haven't bought from us before, we don't have those. So social media is, I guess, it's good. Just keep in mind that when you have, say, you know, 100 followers and you make a post and only two people like it, don't get discouraged because when you posted that, probably only 10 people are going to see it. So if you had two out of 10 people like it, that's actually a pretty good conversion rate on getting engagement with that. You just have to have repetition over and over and over again, and you're gonna grow. Our focus isn't necessarily on social media. We do it every day because we need to, and that's just part of marketing, but that's not where we get the most of our sales. That is just another touch point for us to stay in contact with our customers. But you can run Facebook ads, you just have to know how to do it. And that is the key that I'm not an expert at it. We are like at that borderline of we're at that break even when it comes to Facebook ads. So I can spend$1,000 on Facebook ads and I can break even. So I'll sell, you know, maybe$2,000 worth of candles, but it's gonna eat up. There's my cost of goods and my candles, and then there's also the advertising budget. So at the end of the day, I can almost break even. Sometimes I do better than that. Um, not great at it. It's really for when we're gonna scale or we want to add new customers into our ecosystem. I can sell you a candle that essentially doesn't make me any money, but doesn't lose any money. But now you're on my email list. Now you've bought from me. You like my candles, hopefully, and you're gonna keep buying from me in the future. So doing Facebook ads isn't a short-term, quick money maker. It's it's for a long-term gain. And it takes a while to get good at it. So I would stay away from it unless you have like an expert that um, you know, you trust and hire. Be very careful when it comes to hiring an ads expert uh in the candle space or in any e-commerce space. The candle market is saturated. Disregard what other people that might call themselves a myth buster about busting the myth that the candle markets aren't saturated. It's it's very saturated. The way we operate a candle business is sticking out from other people. That's how you become successful. If it wasn't if the candle market wasn't saturated, even more people would be in it, right? We get into it because it's kind of easy to get into. Anyone can do it, but the people that are successful are the people that uh stick with it and they try the different avenues. Okay. So to run Facebook ads and sell candles, they have to be a really, really good ad agency. So just keep that in mind. Don't just hire someone. If you're gonna hire someone, make sure that it's someone that's already running ads for someone else, um, you know, and it that has been successful or is currently running ads for another candle business. That's how you would feel a little bit more confident in hiring them to run the ads for you. The next question here is from Amanda Updike. And her question is I have been making candles to get experience before I start selling. So what's the best way to start selling? Farmers market, Etsy. I would like to start small. Okay, so farmers markets and farmers markets, like an actual farmers markets where they're selling food items right from the farms. Um you might get some tracks in there. It's a way to put yourself out in front of an audience that's fantastic. I would recommend doing other types of markets. I would, you know, the craft shows, art fairs, they're always happening at churches, high schools, um, convention centers. Every city is doing some kind of market, right? I would all I would always recommend, though, when you do those markets, make sure it's one that has been happened a few times, right? That they've done it annually for a couple of years so they have its own following. If it's just a Sebastian's craft show that's happening in two weeks and you can pay 50 bucks and be part of it, but I've never done before and it's in this random parking lot. I don't know. It wouldn't be worth my time to do those now. Um, I would prefer to go after like the bigger shows. Um Zapplication, which is like application with a Z in front of it, um, dot com. Zapplication.com is a great source to find some really good markets. It's actually a software that these market organizers pay um them to use. And these are gonna be your bigger shows. They're gonna be ones that are kind of juried, as they say. So you're gonna have to submit photos of your setup. And if you haven't done any um before, and you're like, well, how am I gonna submit photos if I haven't done before? You got to put the work in. So what you got to do is you got to get your 10-foot by 10-foot tent, you got to put it up in your front yard or your backyard, set up like you are at a market, and then take photos of it. That's we literally did this on a day that was like 28 degrees outside. Thankfully, there was no snow. We set it up in our backyard so we had a display so that we could start um submitting our application for these different shows. Okay. We were clearly freezing. It was totally worth it, though. We started getting into shows and kind of the rest is history when it comes to that. So doing those markets is fantastic. Etsy is also a great place if you have something that's unique. You can't just throw a lavender count candle onto Etsy. People that are buying on Etsy are very gift-minded. They are buying for mom, dad, brother, sister, significant other, uh, partner, anniversary, um, those hard to find or hard to buy for people. So keep that in mind. You have to have something that's pretty unique. You can't just be in the middle of the road when it comes to candles. Um, that's why you see a lot of the candles that do well on Etsy are gonna be like those snarky, funny sayings on the labels that relate to something specific. Like, um, it's your 50th birthday, you're you're over the hill, right? Something like that, where someone is searching a 50-year-old's birthday gift, and then a candle pops up for that, right? Our main classic line of candles with Garz and Beacon, we don't sell, they're on Etsy. We've been on Etsy since day one. Um, and we'll get a sell or two a month. We put zero effort into it. Um, but some of our more unique candles do decent on Etsy, and that's why we're still out there. But I would recommend you're gonna put the effort into Etsy. You always want to put the effort into building a website. Whether you're gonna do farmers markets, you're gonna do fundraisers, you're gonna do Etsy, you want to be able to manage all of your inventory. I always recommend Shopify. I'll actually put the link, our uh affiliate link in the notes below, uh, which will actually save you uh you'll get the best deal, which is like three months free, depending on the time of year uh that you're watching this. Uh, they're always running a better special, uh, a different special, but that link will get you whatever the current best unpublished uh deal is out there right now. I would recommend a Shopify store just because you you want to start building that up because it's gonna take a while. Once you publish your Shopify store, it's gonna take a while for Google to crawl it and for you to start ranking in the search results. So you got to start that early. You don't want to look back in a year from now and be like, man, I really wish I would have started that website because it's gonna take six months or so before you start getting that organic traffic, right? Um, so keep that in mind. Inside of the uh candle business pro inner circle, I actually have a three-part workshop on how to build a Shopify store, which is probably the one workshop out of all the workshops that we have for our members that gets the most um rave reviews. Everyone's saying, Thank you so much. I launched my store today because of your workshop. I walk you through step by step from like connecting it with your bank, going out and buying a domain, how to get your products on there, how we actually tag everything. So you have these collections built. I show you exactly how we build out a website. So that might be something for you uh to check out if you want to join the inner circle at just about your website. That's gonna be what 50 bucks or so versus hiring someone a thousand, fifteen hundred dollars to build a website. Just keep that in mind. Might be something for you. All right. Next question here is uh from Tammy Renee. How to figure out all the math for starting a candle business. Okay, or starting in candles. Okay, if you're talking about just for making candles and the math that goes into that as far as like how many ounces can fit into this vessel or what's the percentage uh or how much fragrance oil do I put into this vessel to be at 8%, right? Uh, I have a free calculator for you. Uh, it's in the show notes below, but go um, or just go visit uh candle businesspro.com slash calculator, and you're gonna find that. Just right on our website uh under free resources, you'll see a drop-down and it'll have the calculator uh link there for you. It is the way we make all of our candles. It's also the way that the big suppliers like uh make C candle science, uh flaming candle, all of them. It's the exact same calculations that they use. And not only just them, because there are a couple of different ways of doing math. And this is in a video about the different uh ways of doing it. My website will explain the way that we do it. It's also the way the big suppliers do it. But not only that, but also the also the manufacturer, golden brands that does like uh Soy Wax 464 that we use in our candles. We are doing our calculations the the way they are telling us to do it. So keep that in mind. It's a good calculator, it's completely free for you to use. Uh, you can grab that at candle businesspro.com. Uh, next question here is from Wendy Lopez. I would love to learn more about the candle making course. Oh, okay, perfect. We kind of touched on this a little bit at the beginning. Um, we do have a few different courses. So we have our candle making course, um, which is just our step-by-step um showing you exactly how we make all the candles that you know that we sell, how we start, how we test. Um, there's it's broken into four different modules. Module one is gonna be the math, the science, the supplies, the background of the candle making, the wax, the wicking, all of that. Uh, module two is gonna be the making of the candles. Module three is the testing of the candles, and then the adjustments that we need to make based on those test results. That's what's key is understanding why something failed and how to make those adjustments. And then module four of our course is the overall uh branding marketing. We actually give you free labels that you can edit right inside of Canva to get started right away with branding. So all kinds of things included in that. You can check out more, of course, at Candle Business Pro.com or in the in the show notes below. I have a link out to that as well. Our other courses, we have the uh wholesale course, which is the step-by-step way of getting your candles in the stores. Uh, I actually um give everyone a completely free recorded video of their wholesale catalog once they are done uh with the course. Once you put your catalog together, which I give you all of that, I give you three versions of our catalog so that you can get started right away with pitching to stores. We give you our email templates that we use. Um it took us two and a half years to get up to where we are now, which we're at. Uh we just crossed over 160 wholesale accounts um that we use, but we are in like the international airports now. We are in Rally House. Um we're in um 45 of their stores across the country. We're hoping to go larger. They have like 320. So we're hoping to expand to go completely nationwide with them. Uh, so that's been pretty exciting. Um, but we show you exactly how we do wholesale um there as well. So those are the two different courses that we have, Wendy. So if you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to reach out. Um, I'll respond back to you uh right away. All right, so that is it for this week. I hope this has been beneficial. Hopefully, that you have gained some um knowledge or gained some insight from us or maybe seen something from a different perspective. Remember, there's so many different ways to be successful in a candle business. You just have to have a little bit of guidance and a little understanding on the direction that uh that you want to go. And we are here to hopefully help you out with that. Thank you so much for tuning in. Again, if you have any questions, come hang out in the Facebook group. You can drop your questions there. You can also comment below, and I'm happy to help you out that way as well. Have a fantastic rest of your week. Talk soon.