The Candle Making Questions Nobody Answers (Until Now)

#044. We answer rapid-fire candle making questions with the exact choices and testing habits that support a real candle business. We keep it practical: pick reliable wax, simplify your testing, and build inventory only after customers show you what they’ll buy. 

• why we use Golden Brands 464 soy wax and when coconut soy makes sense 
• how to avoid “designer waxes” that can disappear 
• a simple Q-tip and jar method for fragrance oil blending ratios 
• how to think about best-selling candle scents by niche and target audience 
• a starter scent lineup built around non-offensive crowd pleasers 
• how long it can take to feel confident selling a candle and why documentation matters 
• beginner candle making setup with one vessel, one wax, one wick line, one oil 
• why supplier-recommended wicks are usually the right starting point 
• the three key temperatures for heating, mixing, and pouring 
• how many candles to make per scent at launch and how to market the journey 

If you have candle making questions definitely drop them in the comments below I’ll happily answer those on an upcoming episode. 
If you enjoyed this video I’d love for you to like and subscribe share with another maker if you’d like to do that as well. 

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Transcript

Welcome And Candle Making Q And A

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Sebastian Garzett. Today I'm answering questions that I generally don't spend a lot of time on, and that is on the candle making side. Generally, with this channel, as it is appropriately named, Candle Business Pro. I don't answer too many questions about making, but of course, I am making candles every single week inside of our brick and mortar stores and getting of our wholesale out. So I do have a little bit of experience. And so today I wanted to just have a little bit of fun and answer questions that we have received from people about the candle making side. And so we're going to do that here today. All right. So

Choosing Wax Without Supply Risk

SPEAKER_00 0:46

the for the first question that we have here is from Holly Key. And her question is, what kind of wax do you use? Great question. So we started with, and we still make about 80% of our candles with Golden Brands 464. It's a soy wax. It is readily available. You can get it from multiple suppliers. And so it is one that we started with. Now, when we first started, we tested a bunch of different waxes. Don't get me wrong, but it was affordable and it was soy. And we wanted to do soy candles just because that is what is marketed as a very popular wax. It's not necessarily about personal preference for us when it comes to what the wax is made out of. It's about customer preference. And we've thought about trying other waxes and getting away from that just for simplicity, for hot throw, for other reasons that sometimes 464 might not be the best option. But customers that come into our store, customers that buy from us online, they continuously would ask, what is their candles made out of? When we say it's made out of soy, they say, okay, great. And then they want to buy those candles. Again, we don't get into the debate on what kind of wax is better, more sustainable, better for the environment, toxic, non-toxic. There's a lot of opinions out there. So I stay out of that. But I do want to offer my customers a product they want to buy and they want to buy soy candles. And that's what I'm making them. So for us, I went with 464 because it's readily available from multiple suppliers. One of the things that I always like to say to people when they're asking about the wax direction, it doesn't matter what wax you want to use. That is a personal preference, personal choice. Now, one of the things I will caution you on is what I call designer waxes. And these are waxes that uh the suppliers will promote and market as an exclusive wax to them. That sounds fancy. That sounds great for them, not necessarily for you. Because what happens if that supplier goes out of business? Or they stay in business, but that wax does not sell as much as they would have hoped, and therefore they discontinue it. What are you going to do if you build your entire brand and you did all of the testing for that one specific wax? Now you got to start all over again. And that to me sounds miserable. That's why we started and we still use 464 wax. Now, sure, 464 golden brands could go out of business, but I trusted them. They've been around for quite some time. And like I said, multiple suppliers use them. So I'm confident it's it's not going to be an issue of uh not selling enough. Uh, and when one supplier may run out, I have another supplier I can go and get it from. So that is why we use 464. The other wax that we use is a coconut soy. We use a coconut soy uh blended wax that our customers really, really like. Um, and we sell probably 20% of our candles are with that. It's more expensive. So that's why we don't do our entire brand with that because we want to be price sensitive to our customers and what they are going to spend. And so we have to we have to budget for that. But we do have a couple of collections in our brand that we make with uh the coconut soy. And I enjoy, I do, I enjoy the uh hot throw that comes from it. One of the downsides of the coconut soy is it doesn't have that cold throw like uh the 464 does, which is interesting because the hot throw is a lot stronger. Um, but the it's it's really trapped inside of the wax, and you're not really just smelling it by putting it to your nodes on the coconut soy, but it burns fantastic. So test around and see what uh options are out there. But regardless of the direction you want to go, I just recommend going with waxes that multiple suppliers will offer to you in case one of them um ends up uh going out of business or something, or they pivot go a different direction and stop carrying that.

Blending Fragrances With Q Tips

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Next question here is from Watassa Chris. Uh Watassa's question is how do you blend fragrances? Okay, we have a very simple way of creating our own blends. So 98% of the candles that we sell are our own custom blends that Chad or the staff uh he works with, our managers in the shop, have come up with. They are all unique, they're fun. You don't have to do that. There are so there are plenty, plenty of fantastic single oils that you can buy directly from our suppliers. And you just take them out of their bottle and pour them into your candles, and they're fantastic. We like to do it, we like to stay creative. That is Chad's passion. That's why we got into candle making was the fun of uh being able to create something of our own. And so that's why we continue to do it. Uh, it's not necessarily, I know a lot of makers will they'll want to do it so that they can be unique in the market. But honestly, like your customers that are gonna buy your candles, they don't know if you did or didn't create that blend. They don't know what goes into it. They don't, they don't have that appreciation uh that uh that we all will as as the creators of our products and of our candles. It's an ego thing for ourselves. Your customers aren't gonna care. Your customers want a good smelling candle, whether that's directly from the manufacturer or something you came up with, they just want a candle that smells good. That's what they care about. They don't know the backstory of it, they don't know if what all went into it. I think about the the candles that I burnt before we made our own. Did the company I bought from create that scent, or was it basically a dupe of something else? Or you do did they did they blend five or six different oil? I don't know. I didn't know and I I don't care. I just wanted to smell good. I wanted my bedroom or my office or my kitchen to smell good. So I wouldn't get too in-depth into candle blending, but I do want to tell you how we do it. So we do it just with q-tips. Q-tips and a jar. That's it. What we will do is it smells okay still. This one has been sitting for quite some time on my on my display um uh shelf back there. But what we'll do is we will take a empty jar. We will put a drop of oil on a q-tip and we'll drop it in there. And then we will take a drop of a different oil and put on the q-tip and drop it in there. And we are going to then have a 50-50 blend. One drop of each on here, that's a 50-50 blend. I'm gonna put the lid on here. You can shake it up. You don't need to, it's not gonna do anything necessarily. It's all just a little bit of air in there. Uh, after about a minute or two, I'm gonna open this up and I'm gonna smell it. What does it smell like? Do I like it? Do I not like it? Is it something that's way overpowering than the other? For let's just as an example, let's do a let's think about an apple cinnamon fall blend, right? Apple cinnamon, that's an easy blend to do. You can create your own with it. If you put a drop of apple on a Q-tip and a drop of cinnamon on a Q-tip and pop them in this jar, and once you take the lid off, you're gonna smell cinnamon. That's all you're gonna smell. You're gonna smell a little bit of apple, possibly, but you're gonna smell just a lot of cinnamon because it's gonna be, even though it's 50-50, the cinnamon is gonna be way overpowering. So, what I would do is I would take that apple and I would put it on another Q-tip, another drop, but put it in there. Now I have two apple q-tips and I have one cinnamon Q-tip in there. I'm gonna let that sit for a couple of minutes. I'm gonna take the lid off and smell it. Okay, now that apple is coming through. Do I like that blend? If I like that blend, I know it's two to one. Two parts of apple, one part cinnamon. That's how I can create a cross and blend. Do I want to add a third scent in there? You know, maybe I need some fallen leaves or something else that's going to add a little bit of that fall to that apple cinnamon. So there's a little bit more than just those two. You know, try a drop on there and see. And then once I have that fragrance blend, that's when I'm going to now put it into a candle. Because putting it in a candle from right away is going to, you're going to go through a lot of cheering and then testing and getting that throw. I want to be pretty comfortable with what that blend ratio is going to be before I put it into a candle. Now, sometimes you put it into a candle and oh gosh, now I can smell only apple. I can't smell that cinnamon coming through. Maybe it's not as powerful of an oil. Now, with an apple cinnamon, that's not necessarily gonna be the case. The cinnamon's going to come through. But you're gonna have some oils that you're going to burn that are very light compared to its counterpart. And if you do something 50-50, you might not be able to smell one of those. So just keep that in mind. You're gonna have to find that bound out. Hopefully that answers a little bit of that. And it's a simple way. We've sold over $2 million worth of candle sales, two and a half million dollars almost now. And this is how we blend our candles. So don't overthink it. Next question here is from Michelle Brooks. Michelle's

Best Scents Depend On Niche

SPEAKER_00 9:40

question is what are the best cents and the worst cents for candles? It's gonna be what uh what niche and who is your target audience? Who are you making candles for? If you are making candles in the gourmand foodie space, then of course that's the direction you're going to go with your scents. Now, some people are gonna say those are the worst scents possible, but it all depends on who you're making candles for. If you are making candles in, let's say, the metaphysical space or something similar to that, you might be leaning more towards those incense and those patchoulees and those types of scents. And others are gonna say, oh, those are terrible. I don't like those, right? So it really is gonna come down to what niche you're in. I would find scents that are going to make sense to fit inside of that niche. If your niche is not going to have a scent specifics, then I would lean heavily towards, if we were gonna start all over again with our brand, uh, we started with 10 cents, but I would start over again with just six. And what I would do is I would have two citrus scents. Citrus is just a best-selling candle scent. They they just are the best-selling candle scents. So I'd have two of those. I would have one that's gonna be more spa-like, thinking like sandalwood type of uh scent. Um, I would have a masculine woodsy type of scent, those mahogany's, the palasantos, the ones that are gonna be heavier on the woodsy masculinity side. Uh, and then I'm also gonna have one that is going to be like that. I call it the green candle, like from Bath and Body Works back in the day, right? It's gonna be that mint, eucalyptus, uh verbanum type of blend. That's what I would recommend there. And then I also for the last two one, the sixth one, I would have a floral, but I wouldn't have a heavy flowery floral. I would do something in the lavender space, uh, something that is going to be recognizable to something that um people know the name, and they they relate it to uh scent uh inside of the home a lot. Just think about like all the there's there's room sprays that are in lavender, there's nighttime um lotions, and there's even like uh there's this temple, it's from Lush. There's this like temple balm that you can put on your head when you go to bed that is lavender. So there's a lot of calm and comforting around a lavender. So do a floral, and it doesn't have to be lavender, but I wouldn't do like a lilac. Uh I wouldn't do something that's like low, very strong, florally. Whatever scent you choose, what I say is don't choose scents that are offensive. And what I mean by offensive is like a patchouli scent, some people are going to hate that. Some people's favorites might not be citrus, but they're not going to hate citrus scent, right? So that's kind of where I say pick non-offensive uh, you know, I wouldn't do like a beer scent or a wine scent or a whiskey scent. Any of those like in in the foodie space. If you were gonna be in the foodie space and you want to create what I what I uh have always said is like create a happy hour line of candles, right? Um, but I wouldn't have whiskey necessarily in in a founding uh scent of a candle. You know, I would have a strawberry daiquiri if I can do like a happy hour line, right? Or a hurricane or something that's gonna be tropical, something that you're not going to be like, oh, I hate that, right? Unless, again, of course, your niche is very specific. If it's very specific, then you're gonna want to get specific and you're gonna want to get into those type of scents. But um, best scents, citrus, spa light. Um, I think the scents that you would want to smell when you go in to get your hair cut, right? Uh, things like that at a salon. Those type of scents are gonna do pretty well pretty well for you. Next question here is from Ms.

How Long To Perfect A Candle

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Queen Johnson, which I love your name. Uh, your question is how long did it take to make a perfect candle? So for us, it took about a month to six weeks. Now, that's gonna sound short to a lot of people, but we started documenting right away because we knew how complex it was going to get, because we had seen in a lot of the Facebook groups and a lot of the YouTube videos that we had been watching years ago when we got into this. And the time frames were all over the place. Six months, three years, two months, you know, eight years, you know, it's gonna take that long to perfect a candle, but we knew we needed to test multiple candles at a time so that we could document and see what was happening across different sizes of Wix. And so we document everything. And this is something we teach inside of our candlemaking course. We have a candle making course at candle businesspro.com that people just absolutely love. Not only do you get to go through the course, but you actually get to reach out to me and Chad with any candle making questions that you have when it pertains to the course. Reach out to us for a lifetime of it as well. So as you're going through there, when you have questions or six months from now, do you have questions? You email us, me and Chad email you back. We don't pass this off to a member of our team or anything like that. We help you out. So in this course, we show you how to document. We document through uh sheets. We also document through uh photos, and we tell you when and where to take photos as they're going through it. So to answer your question, how long did it take you to make a perfect candle? Probably, you know, a little over a month of testing over and over again and testing multiple candles at a time. To give you the full timeline, we said, let's make this into a business. We're gonna go all in, uh, let's let's get this testing down and let's start a business. Because we and the urgency was to get Chad out of his nine to five job. We wanted to start this with having a business in mind. And so that was on November 19th when we said, let's do this. And I went on to the IRS's website and I got an EIN number to make us business official, right? Um, that was kind of the signal to us saying, we're really gonna do this. That was on November 19th. On February 25th, we sold our first candle. So it took a few weeks prior to that February 25th for us to perfect the candles, and then we had to like get our labels printed and get supplies and make those initial inventory. So it took a couple of months, but we were doing you know, 10 different cents. So if I'm just going to, if I'm gonna go off of what we teach and what we do now, and I get a new oil in the melt today, I'm gonna test that. I'm gonna do it in the multiple wicks that we we teach on how to define the right wick. Um, I'm gonna know in less than two weeks which one is the winner, and I can move on from there. But when we're first starting out, it's gonna take multiple tries. You're gonna want to retest because you're not gonna be so confident in our candles at first. So I would give yourself a month, um, even six weeks to perfect it to where you're so confident that you could sell that candle. Next question here is from Patricia Greenway. And

Beginner Testing Wicks And Temperatures

SPEAKER_00 16:48

it says, What are the best tips that you have for candle making for beginners? Okay, great question. Candlemaker for beginners. We talked about scent blending here, but when you first start, don't blend any scents. Just make a candle with one oil in it. You want to keep this as simple as possible. You want one vessel, one wax, one line of wicks, and one oil, one of everything in your candle, and then when you test, you're going to be able to make adjustments based on those test results. So every oil is going to burn at a different temperature. It's going to burn hotter or cooler based on the makeup of those oils. As an example, in our classic wine, we have 10 candles. We have three different size wicks in those 10 candles, okay? If you're testing multiple oils, the testing's going to be confusing. Why is this a CD12? And that one's a C D14. What's the difference there? Well, you know, if you're using a bunch of different oils, you're not going to know. If you're blending multiple oils into a candle, you're not going to know is it the percent of oil that you need to adjust, or was it the oils themselves? Some are burning hotter than others. When you're first starting, just start with the basics. Keep it very simple. To this day, we only make one-wick candles. We made a three-wick candle a couple of years ago. Um, at the holiday time, it was a larger 17-ounce candle. They sold okay, but to make your money back on those, it's it's tough and you got to charge quite a bit. So I know people want to do two wicks, three-wick candles. We keep it simple. We've sold over $2 million in candles, keeping it simple. So that's what I would recommend. Keep it simple. Only test one variable at a time, one line of wicks, test them. If this if this wick size doesn't work, I'm going to go up or down a size based on my test results. I'm not going to switch to a whole nine, a whole other line of wicks. That is another one, uh, another tip that I would give you is when you're first starting out, wherever you buy your wax from. Your wax supplier is going to have a recommended wick. Nine times out of ten, that's the wick that you should be using for that wax. They want to offer and sell the right wick for that wax. If another wick is going to work better from a different supplier manufacturer, they would go get those wicks and they would sell those wicks. They will they want to set you up for success. So what I see happen is I tested CD WIC and I didn't like the way it burned. So then now I'm going to go and test Eco Wix, or now I'm going to go and test LX Wicks or Premiere Wix or Performance Wix or HPSP Wix, all these different wicks out there. Your supplier, based on the wax you're using, is going to give you a recommendation. Make sure that you're testing that wick. If you are not getting a good burn out of that, you most likely have to adjust your wick size or your fragrance load in there. Or you might just not be foundationally making that candle correctly. You might not be pouring at the right temperatures. Uh, remember there's three different temperatures when it comes to candle making. People often will talk about one or two temperatures. There's three different temperatures. There is a temperature that you should heat your uh wax to. And then there's a temperature where you should melt or that you should mix your wax and your oil. Now, people usually only use one number for those. The thing is, is you have to, as soon as your wax comes out of your melter and goes into your pouring pitcher, it's gonna drop in temperature super quick. So you might have to uh raise up the temperature in your melter so that when that oil and that wax hit, it is at a precise temperature. And then you're also gonna have a third temperature of the temperature that you're gonna mix uh, or excuse me, that you're going to pour your wax from the pitcher into your candle. So three temperatures. How much am I gonna heat my wax to? What am I going to mix my oil and that wax together at? And then when am I going to pour that wax into that candle vessel? So three different temperatures there. We dive into this a lot inside of that course I was talking to you about earlier. You can find the links for that in the notes below if you wanted to hop in and take our course there. You can certainly get more information.

Starting Inventory And Launch Strategy

SPEAKER_00 21:14

And the last question here: how many candles should you make per cent when starting? And this question here is from um, it is Dahlia Oraki. Dahlia Oraki. Hopefully I didn't um mess up the pronunciation on your name too much, or you do forgive me. But great question. How many candles should I make per cent when starting? Only enough to fulfill those first initial orders. When you first open up your website, um, if that's the way that you're going to be selling, it's not like you have a uh a door that's going to open and all these customers come rushing in. Unfortunately, that's not going to be how it works. Now, what I do recommend to everyone first starting out is take people on the journey with you. Let your friends, your family, your coworkers, all everyone in your sphere know that you're making. candles and you're going to be launching a candle business. That also kind of gives you the reason to kind of keep pushing you forward. I'm like, you know, I know I I I said I was going to do this. I want to follow through on this. It's going to give you the motivation. Keep people updated on the journey. I just order new supplies. I'm testing new wicks. I'm testing new scents. Here are some designs I'm thinking about for my labeling. Let your followers know how the journey is going. The highs and the lows, when you make a mess, when a candle fails in testing, share that with your people. Because the day that you decide to open your store that you're ready to go, those are the people that are going to support you. And if they haven't gone on the journey with you, they're not going to know what a tote to get there. So I highly recommend that you start promoting right away today. If you're thinking about starting a candle business, go out to Facebook, Instagram, social media, and create those business pages and then go and share those business pages with your your personal sphere, your friends or family, your coworkers, whoever you can share that and let them go on the journey with you. So how many candles are you going to need? It's going to really, you know, I wouldn't do more than a batch worth. And a batch for us in a pitcher, we do six at a time for these 10 ounce candles. We do six at a time. When we first started we did 30. We had 30 of all different scents and all different sizes. It was way too much, especially because a couple of those scents bombed. They did not do well. And so we had them for like two years before we could finally sell the last of them. Start with just as enough that you need to um to open up your store and fulfill an order with uh you'll see real quick what uh is going to sell and what's not going to sell uh right away and they might surprise you of oh gosh I thought this was going to be a number one seller. I didn't sell any on opening weekend but I sold 12 of this one. So just the name of this one must uh connect with people a little bit more. You're not going to know until you really define who your audience is. So I had to scale back. I would only have six of each of your cents made uh you know a batch worth of each. And as soon as you sell, you can turn around make more. And that's what's great. That's that's the exciting part oh great I sold out now I got to make more I just wouldn't invest a lot of money into your inventory and stocking that up until you really know um which ones are going to be popular for you. Hopefully

Questions Course And Closing

SPEAKER_00 24:18

this has helped you out. Hopefully this has answered a few of the questions that uh we think about on the candle making side if you have candle making questions definitely drop them in the comments below I'll happily uh answer those on an upcoming episode I think so I'll actually have Chad come on and answer the next round of candle making um questions. And if you want to do our candle making course that link is also going to be in the notes below. We'd love to have you and again you have lifetime access to that so you can come in depending on where you're at you may already be a seasoned candle maker and you just want to see how others do it. You can come in and see how we do it and we can you know establish that relationship where you are reaching out to us through a private email link to where we will answer all your questions about candle making. If you enjoyed this video I'd love for you to like and subscribe share with another maker if you'd like to do that as well. We appreciate you being here. Have a fantastic rest of your week take care