Stop Competing on Price — The Candle Business Strategy Nobody Talks About

#042. We answer five real questions from candle makers and break down what actually drives profit, from sales channels to wholesale outreach. We share practical guidance on supplies, startup cost, wax selection, and pricing so you can build a candle business that fits a clear niche and grows with intention.
• why a candle business is not profitable at the beginning without a clear selling plan
• choosing sales channels beyond only a website, including wholesale, private label, markets, and fundraisers
• where to get candle making supplies and why you do not need every tool right away
• how to approach wholesale outreach by focusing on the store’s customer and price point
• realistic startup costs, staying lean, and avoiding expensive testing spirals
• why we recommend Golden Brands 464 soy wax and how to avoid supplier lock-in
• pricing candles by calculating cost of goods and using a minimum 4x markup
• defining your niche and refusing to compete with discount candle pricing
Feel free to hop into the Facebook group, ask questions. You can ask questions down below. Everyone else here that is watching or listening today, come hang out with us inside of our Facebook group. It's Candle Business Pro on Facebook. Follow us on Instagram if you would like. I post daily business tips out there for you. And come hang out with us at Candle Business Pro.com.

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Transcript

Welcome And Community Q And A

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Sebastian Garzon. Today we're going to be answering five questions from community members, just like yourselves. Anytime you have questions, don't hesitate to put those in the comments below, and I will answer those on an upcoming episode or come and hang out with us inside of our Facebook group where you can ask questions in there. I also start threads to collect questions to answer on an upcoming episode. So let's dive into this.

unknown 0:34

All right.

Where To Buy Starter Supplies

Getting Candles Into Retail Stores

Realistic Startup Supply Costs

Wax Choice That Will Not Trap You

Pricing With Margin And Niche

Where To Ask Questions Next

SPEAKER_00 0:34

So the first question here today comes from Cassandra Griffin. And her question is: is it profitable to start a candle business? Okay. At the beginning, no, it's not profitable to start a candle business at the beginning. It's going to take a little bit of work. You're going to have to find customers. And so that's going to be depending on how you're going to sell your candles. Now, if you plan on starting right away with doing markets, getting into wholesale, going direct to consumer, doing some private label. There's so many different ways to sell candles. So it really depends on how you're going to sell. If you're looking to make candles and then just put them right on your website, and that's the only way you plan to sell, then it's going to take a while to start getting traction because your website has to be built at a high level. You also need to have SEO done, which is a search search engine optimization done on that. And it takes a while for Google to recognize your website as a destination for specific products. But there's a lot of other ways of selling candles. We do lots of fundraisers, and that's a it's a win-win situation where they're getting a percentage of the proceeds and we're also making money. We're also expanding our network that way. So it is definitely profitable. I mean, we just crossed over$2 million in candle sales. That's what we've done so far in almost almost four years. It'll be four years next week at the time of this recording, middle of February, will be four years for us in our candle business. And we just crossed over$2 million in sales. Um, so it can definitely be a profitable business. Now, do when I do say$2 million in sales, that's sales. That's not profit. So just keep that in mind. I'm not saying we've already made$2 million. Um, that's not the case. So uh it is profitable, but you have to have a strategy behind it. It's something we talk about with our members inside of the inner circle all the time, which you can get more information at candlebusinesspro.com if you'd like or in the notes below. But the inner circle is all about us growing our business and helping others grow their business as well. And we do monthly workshops, we have weekly live calls, but it's really about the different strategies and kind of opening ourselves up to selling different ways, besides just throwing them on a website or just throwing them on social media. We sell so many different ways. Next question here from Sue Brunson is where to get all the stock to get started from? So that's a great question. I have a free resource in the notes below. It's our supply list. It'll say checklist and supply list of all the tools and resources that we use uh inside of our Kindle business. And it is just a download for you that has the links to every single thing that we use. It also has some recommended suppliers, and there's also some discounts for some suppliers in there as well that we've partnered with to just offer you some discounts as they're getting started. So I would recommend checking that out. Be mindful that you don't need everything and you don't need to shop a bunch of places. Kind of have a focus of the direction you're wanting to go. Uh, we give you on that supply list everything that we use, but you don't necessarily need all of them. For instance, or as an example, we have two different scales on there. One of the scales we use for wax, and then we have one that we use for our fragrance oil. It's a smaller, it's a very much more precise scale. But when you're first starting out, you don't need to have both of those. You can just have the larger one that you can put your pouring pitcher on top of. We have our recommended wax melters on that list. If you're brand new, you haven't made your first candle yet, you can make it on your stove by, you know, melting uh the double boiler method of melting wax. You don't need to go out and invest in a wax melter. If you do need a wax melter, uh, we definitely recommend the Tu Auto, like I have here behind me in my homework space here. Uh, and we have a link for an extra discount for you in the notes below for that as well. So some opportunities for you there. But check out that list, it'll have the place that we're recommending to get your supplies from. And we're very transparent about that. And we take people off that list when they're not performing. The supplier is having issues either with supply or getting um fulfillment done to you, we're not gonna recommend them and we're gonna take them off of our list. So we are consistently updating that and emailing that out. So hop on our email list if you if you want to get that, it's completely free. Next question here is from uh Michelle uh Nowak. And your question, Michelle, is what is the best method to get my candles into existing stores? Okay, so it's that's wholesale. And to do wholesale, you got to have a good strategy. We do have a course. I'm not gonna talk too much about it right now. We have a course on our website, candle businesspro.com slash wholesale. Um, I think it's fantastic. It is a combination of all of the courses and strategies I had learned um in previous roles and also in my candle business. And I turned around and built our own course with it. And it's the exact framework that we use to scale our wholesale. So we're now at 160, at the time of this recording, 163 accounts in our wholesale um business. And so that's completely separate from the business I'm telling you about when I say we've crossed over the 2 million with our selling our candles. That's that's to consumers and private label. Our wholesale business, we have it separate. We have a different operation structure for it. But to get into stores, uh, you need to have a really good outreach system in place. I would recommend going into stores that you would potentially like to be in. And what you should do is go and in and compare yourself to them, to come to compare yourself to the candles that are already selling. When I go into a store, I'm thinking, does this candle belong on that shelf? Is the price point in the same range? Um, because that's really important. Because if I have a$26 candle and the store I go into only has$15 candles, I'm likely going to be too expensive. And on the flip side, there's a lot of stores I'll go into that has$50,$60,$70 candles. My candles are probably too inexpensive to be in there because those stores have a specific customer they're selling to that spends a specific amount on different things from clothing to uh self-care candles, sew products, um, and then just home decor in general, right? You'll go into some home decor stores and you may shop there. And then you'll go into some other ones and you're like, gosh, this stuff is really expensive, but it seems like it's from the other store too. Like it's the stuff's not much different, but the prices can be vastly different. So making sure that your pricing aligns with the stores that you're reaching out to is going to be important. And then for us, we have email templates. And I have an email that will go out to the store and it will compliment them on something their store has done. So I'll look at their Instagram, their Facebook, see what's new. Or if it's a store locally, it's probably a store that I've shopped into. But we're doing wholesale across all across the country now. So it's not realistic for me to travel that much to get an account uh anymore. But I can see on their Instagram, oh, they just got these brand new, beautiful tea towels in. So in my email, I'm gonna compliment them on something that shows that I paid attention to them. I would say, hey, I love those new tea towels that you just started carrying. They look fantastic. Hopefully you're doing well selling those. And then I want to introduce myself. I want to introduce myself and my business to them and explain why my candles would be good in their store. You're not selling the store your candle. You're explaining to the store why they're going to be able to sell your candle to their customer. Keep that in mind. You're not promoting your candle to the store owner. You want to tell the store owner how they're going to make money on your candle because why their customers are going to love your candle. So it's all about how you're framing your messaging to them. If you reach out to a store and say, hey, you're going to love our candles because they're eco-friendly, they're made with soy wax, uh, people just love them. I hand pour every single one of them. They don't care about that. They really, really don't care about that. They want to know how many are they going to be able to sell to their customers, why it's going to be a good fit for their customers. So saying, hey, this candle fits in with the aesthetics of your shop. So your customers are going to gravitate towards this candle as they do the rest of the products that you offer to them. This candle is going to fit into the vibe of your shop. Your customers that appreciate the elevated products in your store are going to appreciate the elevated candles that aren't just like what they will typically buy at another retailer. You sell elevated things. I make elevated candles. This is a win-win for you and your customers. Get them excited about the opportunity that they're going to make money when they sell your candles to their customers. That is going to be the key differentiator between saying, oh, hey, like buy these candles. They're made with all soy, all clean fragrances, cotton wicks. Um, you know, and I hand poured each own of these myself. The store owners don't care about that. They want to know how they're going to make money because they're in the business of making money. You can find my wholesale guide that's completely free at candlebusinesspro.com forward slash wholesale 101. There's a guide there that's completely free to have 10 steps of getting into wholesale. So just to share that with you there, or it'll be in the link below as well. Next question here uh from uh Carrie Perez. Your question here is how much do supplies cost to start? So I actually have an episode. If you go back onto our channel and just uh type in startup cost, there's there'll be an episode that will pop up. And for us, it was about$1,200. That was enough to get us through testing and to have an initial batch of inventory to start selling. So$1,200 is what it took us. You'll meet some makers that have spent five, ten thousand dollars. And generally, they are just spinning their wheels, going in different directions. That's what happens with a lot. Uh people, they will start switching waxes. Waxes are real expensive. They'll start switching oils. Oils are really expensive. That's why we try to teach, stick with simple formulas that people are going to love. We talk all about that in our candle course. Just stick with something small. Let your customers, once you build your fan base up, you want to have a niche, you want to have a target audience. Then allow them, those initial customers, to dictate the direction that your business goes and what direction of what you need to keep building next. So don't overproduce, don't make way too many things at the beginning. Start pretty lean. Don't buy things that you don't necessarily need right away. Um, so but for us, it was about$1,200. And I think that's a practical starting point to have. And you don't need all of that today. You only need a couple hundred bucks to get a bunch of good supplies and start testing. But as we're going on the journey, you're gonna need to kind of put some more money into it to get that initial inventory to start selling your candles. All right. Last question here today is gonna be from Tamara Brownlee. And her question here is how to price my products? And then what wax do you recommend? Okay, so that's definitely two completely different kinds of questions. So the first one I'm gonna answer is about wax. What wax do we recommend? For us, we rec we always recommend Golden Brands 464 soy wax. That's what we teach in our candle making course. Um, it's finicky. There's a lot of things that you need to understand about wax. But what's really nice is once you can master that wax, you can use just about any other wax and you'll know the ins and outs of it. Another reason why I love 464 is many suppliers carry it. There's what I call designer wax out there on the market that a supplier comes out with and it's like exclusive to them. What's scary about that is if they end up not carrying it anymore, which happens all the time, all the time, suppliers with a designer wax end up stop carrying it, right? Be very cautious of building your brand around a wax that you can only get from one place. Because they go away, you have to start all over. All of your testing has to be completed all over again. So I would recommend when I'm starting a business and what I would recommend for you, start with something that is common. And you don't have to do just soy. You can do coconut soy, you can do paraffin, you can do a type of blend that's out there on the market. Just keep in mind that you'll want to get a wax that you can get from multiple suppliers. So just check some of the brands. There's brands like uh Golden Brand, there's Titan, um, IGI, there's lots of different wax manufacturers that sell to the suppliers that then can sell to us. So I would recommend going with the wax that you can get if one goes away. And I would recommend soy. When customers come into our store, they say, what are your candles made with? And when we say soy, they say, okay, great. And then they shop. That's not me saying that it's better than a paraffin. There's the science and the environmental side of candles that I don't get into all of that. I make products that my customers want. And when customers come into the store that don't know anything about me or my business, and they just randomly ask, what are your candles made out of? When I tell them soy, they're okay, great. They never say, oh, that's bad. I'm not gonna want to buy these candles. But they will say, Oh, good, I don't want that bad stuff in my candles. So they have been trained or marketed to that one might be better than the other. And again, we're running a business, and so I want to sell what people are going to buy. And that is gonna be soy for us. Now, that's about 80% of our candles. We now are making candles with coconut soy. We have a more elevated line, the scents are a little bit more elevated, and we've really enjoyed using coconut soy. Um, it's been fantastic. I love it, but it's gonna be more expensive. So while we're when we're first starting out, going with soy that you know, like the 464 is popular and you can get it everywhere, and it's gonna be one of the less expensive waxes uh for you. The other question that you had was how to price a product. So that's a great question. I would always recommend you you need to calculate your cost of goods first. That's going to be the cost of the wax, the oil, the wick, the wick sticker, the vessel, the label on the front, the label on the bottom, any um packaging that you're putting on that, that is going to be your cost of goods. That's the cost of this product. I would never recommend going less than 4x what that cost was. So if this cost you$5 to make, the minimum you should start out at would be$20. Because that$5, that's not going to include you're going to need to have some margin built in for labor, for the the expense of you actually making the candles. Then you also are going to need to market your candles. You might need to get some softwares. You might you might need to have Canva to design some labels. You might need a Shopify store. So there's going to be other costs involved. So that's why we can't just do a 3X markup, is because there's other expenses that are going to go along with your business. But calculate where your cost of good is and multiply that by four. That would be the minimum. I have lots of episodes that we talk about pricing. So you can use the search function uh on your podcast player or right here on YouTube if you're watching this and just type in pricing candles on my channel, and you'll see more uh in-depth, detailed um ways that we go about it. But in general, you out you want to start at at least uh 4x the cost. So hopefully that helps you there. Keep in mind that your cost of goods will go down as you grow. Um, but you still don't want to sell yourself short by not pricing high enough. If you're trying to make a candle for a customer that is only spending$12 or$15 for a candle, then you might have to go back to the drawing board of who you're making candles for. And it might not be that person. You might need to find a different niche to be in and a different target audience to sell those candles to. I can't compete with candles that are being sold at Walmart or any other discount retailers. You can go to Dollar General or Family Dollar or one of those Dollar Tree. I think there's so many at five belows, so many of them. Uh you can go to one of those and you can find a candle of this size that is two bucks, three bucks, right? How can you compete with that? Well, it's simple. You don't, you don't. You don't compete with that. You go after a different customer. Someone that's buying customers at those discount retailers, they're not my customer, and that's okay. Right? That is okay. And I want them to be my customer. If they but if they're routinely spending five dollars or less on a candle, they're not gonna want my candle that's close to 30 bucks. They're just not, and that's all right. Define what niche you're in. That means like what section of the candle space you want to be in. Where what shelves do you want your candles on? Do you want them to be in a discount retailer? Do you want them to be in a women's boutique? Do you want them to be in an apothecary gift shop? Where do you want your candles to be at? Find the prices of those candles. Go and make that candle that you can charge that amount for and make that for as least of a cost as possible. That's how you win in this game. You also need to have at least a 4X markup if you plan on going down the wholesale route, because we're wholesale, you're going to be selling them to that reseller to that boutique for half of your retail price. So just keep that in mind. So hopefully that helps you out with that Tamara. Feel free to hop into the Facebook group, ask questions. You can ask questions down below. Everyone else here that is watching or listening today, come hang out with us inside of our Facebook group. It's Candle Business Pro on Facebook. Follow us on Instagram if you would like. I post daily business tips out there for you. And come hang out with us at Candle Business Pro.com. We have lots of free and paid resources for you. You can get the links to all of that in the notes below. Have a fantastic rest of your week, and we'll see you next time. Bye.