Candle Business Answers You've Been Waiting For

#045. We answer listener questions on how to grow a candle business without getting swallowed by competition, and we explain how to choose sales channels that match your strengths and your life. We also share practical steps for wholesale outreach, safe candle shipping, and a testing plan that helps you dial in a consistently great candle.
• finding your candle business superpower and leaning into it
• choosing sales channels that fit your skills and capacity
• setting realistic part-time income goals and avoiding burnout
• making markets work after fees travel and time costs
• targeting the right wholesale stores based on customer fit
• building a line sheet with close-up label photos
• writing outreach emails that feel personal and explain sell-through
• packing candles with a 6x6x6 box bubble wrap and peanuts
• reducing breakage and worrying less about melting
• burn testing with one variable at a time and documenting results
If you have questions that you would like for me to answer on an upcoming episode, I'd love for you to put those in the comments below here on YouTube.
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Transcript

Welcome And How To Submit Questions

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome back to the Candle Business Pro Podcast. I'm your host, Sebastian Garzent, co-founder of Garzent Beacon Candle Company, and the founder here at Candle Business Pro. Today we are answering questions from viewers like yourself. If you have questions that you would like for me to answer on an upcoming episode, I'd love for you to put those in the comments below here on YouTube. Or if you're listening to this on your podcast player, send us a message over at Candle Business Pro.com. Follow us on Instagram. We are always checking our DMs and helping people out. So submit your questions that way, and we will answer it here on an upcoming episode. Let's dive in to this week's questions.

Standing Out In Heavy Competition

SPEAKER_01 0:46

All right, so to get started this week, we have a question from Adrienne End. And her question is how do I begin a successful candle business when there's so much competition? Completely agree. It is tough when we are first starting, when we start to see, oh wow, there are so many candle brands out there. When you probably first got started in this, you were probably like us, where you thought Yankee Candle, Bath and Body Works, those big name brands out there, and didn't realize there was so many small maker candle businesses. There's lots, thousands and thousands of us. So how do you stick out in a crowded market? To give you some hope, just think about when you are at the grocery store and you see all the different options for, let's say, milk or cereal or candy bars. All of these types of products are out there and there's so much competition. And at the grocery store, they are all right next to each other. So that competition is even tougher because they are all competing for your for your space at the same time. Now, in the candle world, we can look at it a couple different ways. And so this is what I recommend doing. Think about what is your superpower? What is something that you are very good at that is going to help you to sell your candles that you're going to do better than someone else? Are you a TikTok pro? Are you fantastic at social media? Do you understand how Facebook ads work? And do you want to do that? There's so many different strengths that you may already have, and you need to lean into those versus just doing what others are doing. For me, I am really good, I think, at getting wholesale accounts. I have a whole course on teaching exactly how we get our wholesale accounts. We have been in this business for four years now. Uh, we have over 160 wholesale accounts. And that is me focusing on wholesale about three months out of the year. I focus on wholesale mainly January, February, March. And the rest of the year, I'm in my brick and mortar stores almost every day where I don't have the capacity to focus on wholesale as much. So I uh reserve that time uh focusing on wholesale for what I call off season. When it's our off season, I am just doing wholesale. So if you think I have done that many accounts in three months times four years in about a year. So realistically, that is something that I feel I am real strong at. Some people do not like doing wholesale, and I completely understand your business has to be set up for it. You have to be able to take a 50% haircut off of your retail price to even be profitable inside of wholesale. People also don't like to send out so many cold emails to different businesses trying to get them to buy from you. But for me, I have gone through it. I understand it. I enjoy it. I kind of have different angles that I approach different kinds of stores with. I have different types of wholesale catalogs. I have ones that is focusing on pet boutiques, I have ones that are uh focusing on women's clothing boutiques. Then I also have one that's more of a general gift shop, right? So I am targeting these stores. So I'm sticking out from the competition in my approach to wholesale. What is the way that you want to sell your candles and focus on sticking out from that competition? There are some, what I personally, uh no offense here, uh meant. I personally think are candles that they don't stick out, they're not wow, but the person behind those candles sells the heck out of those candles. You may have seen some. There are TikTok lives or Facebook group lives where people are hawking candles every night live for an hour and selling hundreds of candles. That is a person that is very, very comfortable on camera, and they are able to make candles and sell them very quickly that way. And that is their strength. And they're they do fantastic. Good for them. I wish I kind of had that because sometimes I have plenty of extra inventory. I would love to be able to go live on a group and be able to sell those really quick. So think about what you are really good at. How, what, what is your real good at? Is it is it just branding? Branding, marketing, are are those things that you really stick out in? Are your candles the most beautiful candles out there? Because you're a graphic designer, you understand how to connect your product with who your buyer is going to be, and you're going to stick out that way. What are your strengths? What are you really good at? And lean into that. Don't just do or feel like you have to do what someone else is doing. We have seen inside of our inner circle group, we have members that are fantastic on TikTok. And they can make and sell their candles through TikTok. They make incredible fun videos. They know how to do all the editing. They know how to do all the angles. The stuff that I don't know how to do, I wish I knew how to do that. I don't know how to do it. They can sell those candles that way. Um, or you can be very good at doing Facebook ads. We are getting our footing in Facebook ads and growing on that. But that's another way where you have to understand the cost to play that game. So, some of the ways that you can sell candles there, hopefully that'll help you out. We need to know what's going to be good. And don't look around and just see what others are doing and think that you have to do it that way. There are so many other ways. In fact, the episode after this, the next episode, I'll give you a teaser, is going to be an episode on over 60 different ways to sell your candles. Over 60 different ways to sell your candles. So subscribe to this channel now, and you'll be the first one to get alerted to that episode coming out. But that should be coming out after this episode. All right, let's go on to the next question here.

What Part Time Income Looks Like

SPEAKER_01 6:35

So the question here is from Heather Crohn. And Heather's question is what is the average income for a part-time candle business? Okay, great question. Fair question. We often, when we're first starting, think about what I can do with this business? How much can I make? What is the potential out there? For us, when me and Chad started this, this was a hobby uh during the pandemic that started for Chad, and we kind of grew it into a business. And we thought, but we can sell enough of these candles online where it's not taking up a lot of our time. Um, it's not taking up a lot of our capacity because we still had our nine to five jobs, of course. We have dogs, we we have a kind of an active lifestyle at the time. I was in softball, you know, a couple of nights a week. Uh, so we did a lot of stuff. So we needed to make sure that our business wasn't going to take over that. This was, of course, before we decided to go all in. So when we first started, our goal was let's make a couple hundred dollars a month in profit so that we can have a couple extra date nights, so that we can just go out to a nice restaurant a couple nights a month. Um, and that would be fulfilling for us. We've definitely changed that. And now we are all in on our candle business. We have multiple stores and we do a lot of wholesale and we're selling a lot of different ways. But when we were part-time, we started with just making a little bit of money. And it was okay because it was something to supplement our income. But then we started doing markets on the weekend. And when you start doing markets on the weekend, though, that's chunks of cash that can come in for a successful market. Then you start growing into doing other things. We were doing wholesale while while we were part-time. While we still had our nine to five jobs, we were starting to do our wholesale accounts. So, as far as what is the average part-time income, it's really going to be a matter of how many different sales channels can you take on. And what's part-time for us, say at 10 hours a week, uh, might be part-time for someone else who would be 20 hours a week, or might just be five hours a week. You can make your candles, you can do it without having a website, without having any social media, and just on the weekends, say twice a month, go out and do a market and profit $500. And now you're making $1,000 a month. And the only thing you have to do is make a candle and get accepted into different vendor markets and craft shows to sell them at. You don't have to do social media. You don't have to do any kind of advertising. You don't have to do marketing. You just have to show up. Is that the business you want to run? There's a lot of different ways to go about your business. We actually started getting burnt out on markets after doing them for two years, that it was where we could cut some cost. Um, because we had three stores and Chad was definitely in a store every single weekend. We had hired staff at the other one, so I was out doing markets by myself, and it gets to being a little overwhelming when it was just me. It was just me. And say we would sell on average, let's say we did a $750 market. Okay. So when you take out our cost of goods out of there, you take out the uh fees associated with that market, right? The application fee, uh, you know, you have to make sure that you have a tent and you have to make sure you have all the stuff. You have to drive there. Some of the markets we uh were two days and they were a few hours away. So I would have to get a hotel. I'd stay the night there. If at the end of that market we're making, say three, four hundred dollars, right? Um, when we were doing it part-time, that was fantastic. We had our nine to five jobs, we did those markets on the weekends a couple times a month, and we had an extra three or four hundred bucks. That's fantastic. But as our business grew, when we have our brick and mortar stores, we have other areas that we can focus on. That's not gonna have such a physical lift on me to do. We we scaled back on markets. We still do markets every year. We do about once a month, once every six weeks. Um, I would say there's five. There's a five a year that we do between May and October. Uh, and then we do like one winter, the second Saturday uh of December. We always do one at uh Michigan State University, which is a fantastic one to do. Uh, and we'll do about five in this summer. And we had to justify it by it bringing in enough revenue because if I'm not in a store, we're paying someone else to be in a store, right? But also, what's the energy lift on that? Um, what's the preparation that's gonna go into that? Uh, what's the time commitment? You know, when Chad is working 10 hours on a Saturday in a store and I am out of town in a market, we need to have a dog sitter go to our house, right? So it's gonna be different for um for everyone to uh for what's gonna be part-time. But you can absolutely do this business part-time and open up a Shopify store so you can send your repeat traffic to that. You can promote on social media. As long as you are managing your time well, you can absolutely do this part-time. Just don't get to a point where you're burning yourself out. That's when people will start to give up. And it's understandable because it is a lot of a commitment. So find the avenues of selling that we just talked about previously that you're good at, but also that you enjoy, that you enjoy selling that way. Hopefully that helps you out, Heather.

Getting Wholesale Accounts With Fit

SPEAKER_01 11:42

All right, so the next question here is from Lisa Pennett, and her question is how to get wholesale sales. Great question. We actually do a long episode on YouTube, and it is my entire strategy for getting wholesale sales. It's a little over an hour long, I believe, but I give you a lot of information. I walk you through step by step exactly how we do it. We also have our mastering wholesale course. If you are interested in learning my exact strategy, but also getting my templates as far as my spreadsheet that I do all my tracking on for all my outreach, if you want my email templates, my not only my initial emails to all of the stores, but my follow-up emails. Also, and what most people sign up for is to get my catalogs, to get my editable catalogs that you can edit inside of Canva as your own and then turn around and start sending it out to people. You can grab our wholesale course at candlebusinesspro.com slash wholesale. You can also find that link in the notes below. But that is my exact strategy laid out for you. But to answer your question for uh the time allowed for this episode to get wholesale sales, what I recommend doing is making sure that you focus on where your candles fit. Who did you make your candles for? Where are they shopping at? For us, we made our candles for women of a certain age or in an age bracket that generally have a little bit more money to spend because they are gonna be a little bit older to where their kids are already out of school. So they're not that they're they don't have the dependence that they are supporting. So they have a little bit of extra money to spend. So where is that person shopping at? Because we want to price our candles. Our candles are, they start at $26, right? So the $26 to $35 is what we are wholesaling mostly. And so we need to sell candles to people that will spend that on candles. You're not gonna find our candles at a local uh gas station, right? You could you can buy candles at a gas station, right? You can buy candles at some more discount type of souvenir type of gift shops where the candles are gonna have a location on there and they're gonna be, say, 10, 15, 18. Our candles are more expensive than that. So you have to define where do your candles fit? Where do they belong? So what we did is we went into those stores where we wanted to have our candles at. We went and we looked at the candles they were selling. And we have to, you really have to have a gut check of hey, do my candles fit on that shelf alongside those brands that they are currently carrying? And we thought, yes, we do. Is it the size? Is it the styling? Um, you know, your styling can can definitely be different, right? Uh, in fact, we went for bright, colorful labels versus those white, minimalistic, cursive uh font type of candles. We wanted to stick out in that market. So we go into these stores and we we make sure our prices align. Because if our prices are too high or too low, the stores aren't gonna want to carry them, right? Because the stores already know who their customer is. So we need to give them something that is gonna work for their customer. So go and define, go and uh decide on where you're going to hold stuff because you don't want to spend your time reaching out to every single possible store when 10% of those are gonna fit. And so you want to put all your energy into those stores where your candles are gonna fit, or you're just doing a lot of wasted outreach. So reach out to the stores that you feel that your candles are gonna be a great fit for. Make sure that you have a really, really good line sheet that is a catalog that is very easy to understand. Make sure that you can, your photos are fantastic. Also, one of the things that I notice that people do about their catalogs that I review, they have a beautiful image on there, but it's a lifestyle image where you can't actually like read the label. You don't exactly know what it says in small print on the label. Make sure your images are close up of your candles because as a shop owner myself, I own three brick and mortar stores, and people we wholesale stuff in our stores that are not candle related. I want to know exactly what writing says if there's writing, because I want to make sure it's going to align with what my brand is. For instance, you might reach out to a uh a higher-end beautiful uh women's boutique that is selling all like editorial tile um or editorial style of clothing. Let's say black and white uh dress up uh, you know, for that daily women's wear. Okay. Weird example of that, but you you got what I'm saying, right? If my brand of candles is Garznet uh Country Cottage, right? And it's a beautiful candle. So the store would think, yeah, that's a beautiful candle. That would be great inside of my store, but they can't read what it says. And it says Garznet uh country cottage. Country cottage is not going to fit in that store. And so they would not want that in our store. If they were to buy my products based on beautiful images, but they weren't up close, they get these. They're gonna think, oh, wait, these belong in a farmhouse, in a uh home interior type of shop, not in this editorial type of women's wear store. So that is one of the reasons why it's one of the things that I think is over overlooked is being sure that whatever label is on your candle. Now, not every photo can have that, you can have plenty of lifestyle photos inside of your catalog, but somewhere in your catalog needs to have some close-ups of your labels. They want to know what they're putting into their store. Also, these days, in the climate of the world in general, people want to spend money with brands that completely align with them. They want to align with their mission and uh and their values. So making sure that when you're reaching out to places that you are calling out what your mission and your values are. Uh, if they don't align with the store that you're reaching out to, that's okay. Uh go on to the next one, right? But you want to be a little bit louder about your mission uh of your candles, I think. That's what works well for us. When you reach out to stores, and this is one of the keys, when you reach out to stores, we have all, I definitely get all the time because of our brick and mortar stores. We get people that will uh say, Hey, I would love to, you know, uh for you to carry my perfumes or my soaps or my t-shirts or whatever the product might be, right? And they are sending me the exact email that they are sending to probably every single person they reach out to, to hundreds, thousands of people. It's very cold. Uh, dear, dear owner, dear store manager, they they don't have my name. They can easily find out who owns my brick and mortar store. They can easily find out who we are, right? You go to my website, you click on about us, it has my name right there, it has Chad's name right there. You should be able to address in an email the person you are trying to reach out to. So if you are trying to reach out to, let's say, Women's Wear Store, go to Women's Wear Store's website, go to the About Us, see if you can figure out who the owner or manager of that boutique is, go to their social media then. And this is what I like to do. And so here's kind of one of our tricks. You want to be able to connect with the store. You want to be able to connect with them so they don't feel like the email that they just got is the same one that you just sent out to 10,000 people, right? So go to their Instagram page or their Facebook page, see something that they just posted. And if they are a boutique, if they're a retail store, they're going to be posting pretty often about brand new products that they receive in, right? So go to their website, see what they just posted. Let's say, hey, it's we're going into spring and they have all these uh beautiful tea towels that they just got in to start promoting, right? So in my email to them, I'm gonna say, hey, dear shop owner, but I'm gonna put their name. Hey, dear shop owner, uh, Sebastian Garza here of Garza Beacon Candle Company. I wanted to say, I love your shop and I love those new tea towels that you just got in. Put something in your email to them that is gonna connect you and to them. And for them to know, oh, they actually either know us and shop here, or they actually spend some time to actually understand who we are. That is gonna help to connect. Also, your email, and again, my templates inside of our wholesale course goes into all of this. And I actually help you out. We we have some uh back and forth uh here is you want to connect with them, not only on the products, but on what is going to be the reason why they can sell your candles. Telling the shop owner that your candles are made of all soy wax or clean fragrances or sustainable or eco-friendly, all of those things, store manager, store owner, they don't care about that honestly. They really don't. They care about their customers liking your product and buying your product. You need to tell that owner of that shop why your candles are going to sell to that customer of theirs. Tell them these candles are gonna be fantastic for your customers because your customers love bright, fun, uh traditional or contemporary or modern designs. And my candles fit that aesthetic, right? The vibe of my candles is uh closely related to who your customers are, right? Or if you're reaching out to a store, say that like natural market or a whole foods type, something that is all about sustainability and eco-friendly, then lean into those uh features of your candle. But most often, shop owners don't care about those features of your candle. They care about am I gonna be able to sell this to my customer? Why am I going to be able to sell this? So if you are making candles that are, if you are doing all the trendy scents. For instance, three years ago, it was grapefruit. Two years ago, it was Santal. Last year, vanilla kind of came back pretty strong. So if you are up on all of the trends of the scents, let the shop owner or store manager that you're reaching out to know hey, Santal is the hottest scent for this year. These candles will sell really well to your customer because your customer is one that is all about the latest trends and all. Our candles fit that. Okay. Hopefully you see where I'm talking about connecting with them in a way that is going to sell the product to their customer. Hopefully that helps you there. So once you know how to connect with them, send them emails and then keep following up. So I go over, again, our entire strategy inside of our wholesale course or go onto YouTube and you can search uh wholesale under uh Candle Business Pro and you should be able to find that episode where we have uh it's about an hour long. In fact, I'm gonna link that uh show, uh that episode in the show notes below. So you can just click on that. So don't worry about going and searching for it. It'll be in the show notes below for you to go and watch that. That'll lay out our strategy um even more. And then if you want to go even deeper with that, you can come and join our course. And if you join our course, what we do is we offer a bonus to where at the end of the course, when you have your line seats ready to go out to all of these different stores, you're gonna send it over to me. And I'm personally going to record a page-by-page walkthrough of your wholesale catalog to give you some critiques and some feedback. And so before you start sending it out to hopefully hundreds of stores, um, you will be really confident that you are going to be putting your best foot forward on your outreach. All right, well, let's move on to the next question here.

Packing Candles For Safe Shipping

SPEAKER_01 23:17

Question here from Dina Dixon. And Dina's question is what is the best method for packing and shipping candles from online orders? Okay, so for us, if for a 10-ounce candle, it's a three, uh, three and a quarter uh diameter across and it's uh three and a half inches tall for this candle. This is gonna be for any typical candle, right? It could be a seven-ounce candle, nine-ounce candle, twelve-ounce candle, um, fifteen ounce candle. In fact, um, any of those type of glass candles, um, or you know, ceramic, any kind of container candle that you are selling within that size range, we're gonna put those in a six by six by six box. Six by six by six box is our standard box that we send out individual candles. And our goal is to always have the width of a packing peanut. So about an inch. A width of a packing peanut on the bottom and on all sides. Okay. So on the bottom and on all four walls of the box and at the top as well. And that's all you need. You only need about an inch of packing peanut all the way around. Now, with our candle, we are going to wrap it in a sheet of tissue. We like to put it in a sheet of tissue uh that we roll it up in, and we put one of our branded stickers on there. It's just a nice presentation when they take it out. Then we are going to wrap it in a 12-inch by 12-inch perforated um bubble wrap. So we buy our bubble wrap at staples uh once a month. It seems like it seems like every other week. They have buy two get one free on all of their like different supplies and just like rotate you on the store. So a couple of times a month, they will have their bubble wrap and they come on these big rolls that have, I think, a hundred, maybe three hundred um 12 inch long. They're perforated. So you can easily just rip them off. And then we just we uh we have the big stacks of them, right? So we just grab one of these, and so it's 12 inch by 12 inch sheet uh bubble wrap that we are going to wrap our candles in individually, and before we put them into that box. And then we have you know the the the inch of uh packing peanuts all the way around. And the box itself, we get them on Uine. It is uh 25-28 cents a box that we get those for. Now, shipping on those boxes that does bring that up about another 15 cents a box because it is expensive to ship boxes, but the box we're using is a six by six by six. Uh, as long as we have that inch uh padding all the way around, we never have issues. The sheet of tissue paper is a layer, and then the bubble wrap is a layer, and then all of the packing peanuts is a layer. Now, people often will talk, and I know this wasn't your question, uh, or this might actually be part of the part of your question. You were just asked how to package and ship them. But often we will see makers talk about they're concerned about melting candles, right? Our candles have never melted. We have people that we mail out on the first of every month, we have our subscription box and we mail out to people in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Louisiana. We have people that we send out to every single month. We do not care what day of the week it is. We do see often makers will talk about, oh, I only ship on specific dates because they're trying to like time it to get to certain places. But we all know based on where it's going in the country, it might from here to uh Illinois or Indiana, they're gonna eat it tomorrow. California might be five or six days, right? I we can't predict exactly when it's going to get there. It's just so it's not realistic for us, and I think honestly for many people to try and decipher when to mail something so that it's not just like sitting somewhere, sitting on a truck. But in reality, is it's a postal service. We don't like, once it's out of our hand, we don't know where it's going to go. It might sit locally here for a couple of days. It might move to Chicago and then out of Texas for a couple of days before it goes to California. We just don't know. If you are wrapping up your candles, putting enough uh padding around it, and then you're putting it in the cardboard box, the sun at 110 degrees is not penetrating that box all the way through the packing peanuts, through the bubble wrap, through our tissue paper, through our glass to melt our candle. It just hasn't happened to us. Um, and we also sell on Amazon. And on Amazon, you know how they are. Two days later, right? Two days later it shows up, and we can't regulate when Amazon or when someone places an order. We never had an issue with we've had we've had issues with candles breaking on Amazon. Don't get me wrong. We had a horror story when we first started because they were putting our candles inside of a manila envelope, basically, is what they put our candles in. And you know how the Amazon delivery just like tosses stuff, right? Uh so we had a lot of break-ins, but we learned from it. Now you put everything in boxes, uh, also to Amazon as well, uh, before they send it off to people. We we have to put it in boxes for them uh to ship out of. So that is how we package all of our stuff, is in those type of boxes. Uh, some people don't like to use uh packing peanuts. There's other alternatives out there. I don't know if it's going to prevent the absorption of heat as much as packing peanuts does. Also, with packing peanuts, we're just reusing what we get for a lot of it. Uh, Candle Science, um, Fillmore, some of these suppliers love to give away packing peanuts when they ship something. They we will get tons of packing peanuts. So we save all this, and they're just going right back into a box out to someone else. And then, of course, um, busier times we are having to just go and buy a distal packing peanuts. We like to get the eco-friendly ones uh that come out to uh that come out with now. They're not the cyberphone ones. That's our personal preference, but that's that stays eco-friendly um and sustainable to for the majority uh of people who would be okay with

How To Make A Better Candle

SPEAKER_01 28:48

that. Last question here. This one is from Ms. Queen Johnson. And it says, How long did it take to make the perfect candle? All right, first of all, I love your name, Ms. Queen Johnson. Fantastic name. Absolutely love that. We used to be friends. How long did it take to make the perfect candle? Okay, when we first started, this was just a hobby for us. Chad bought a candle making kit on maybe from candle science or from Amazon uh at first. We we get the kit and you get the candy thermometer and you're making it on the stove and you're heating it up. They were a disaster. They really were. They were a complete disaster. And then we started being in Facebook group and watching YouTube videos, and people talking about, oh, like add in a teaspoon of coconut into your soy wax, and that's going to help. It was a disaster. And we then we went and we we hired someone that was like a candle coach, uh, is what they they proclaimed. We ended up finding out they actually didn't even sell candles, they just did a lot of YouTube videos, uh, but they don't really sell candles. Uh so we were kind of disappointed in that. There was lots of different ways we were trying to figure it out, but we don't know what we don't know, right? We and that's understandable. We don't know what we don't know. So we stopped making candles. Like we we we tried for a couple months, miserable, and then we moved. So we stopped making candles. We moved from Indiana to Michigan, where we live now, and we had our nine to five jobs. And we got it, got our house together and things, and you know, moving to a new town and what goes along with that. And a few months later, Chad he got the itch again. He's like, you know, I really would love to figure this candle thing out. Well, and then it's like, okay, let's do it. But we have to have a plan now because we've spent a lot of money. We've tried all different things. We got random different coconut stuff that you use for baking, like laying around that we can put into our it was just it was a mess. We were all over the place. And you might be experiencing a little bit of this. So when we said we are going to get serious about this, we had to have a plan. It was test one variable at a time. And this is what we teach inside of our candle making course. We teach our exact status strategy for it. Now, if you have a strategy, if you have a course that gets you from A to Z, you're gonna understand candle making and get there very quickly. Now, I'm not saying you have to go out and get our course or any other ones, but have a plan.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

And what I would recommend is test one variable at a time. One vessel, one wick, one oil, and one wax. Only test that.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

When those candles don't burn correctly, which they're not going to at first. You're gonna have to make some adjustments to figure it out. Make one adjustment at a time to test another candle. Make one adjustment at a time, test another candle. Because what happened was we made a candle, it didn't burn. We thought, oh, maybe it was it didn't have enough oil in it, or maybe it had too much oil in it. Oh, you know what, maybe we need to add some coconut into this wax or something else. Um, maybe we need to do a different kind of wick. So let's try a different kind of wick, right? If I am going to share what I would teach you inside of our course, start with one vessel, one wax, one wick, one fragrance oil. Don't blend things together quite yet. We'll teach you that, and we want you to do that. But stick with just one oil. There's so many good oils that's right out of the bottle. There's no need to get fancy right away. Test that. Use the wick that the wax uh supplier recommends. That's generally gonna be the w the right wick because they want you to get the right wick so they can keep selling you more so that you're happy with them, right? But they probably are recommending be accurate in the most useful wick for that wax. If it doesn't burn correctly, if it tunnels, or if it's too hot, then you just make an adjustment on the wick size is what it's gonna come down to. But having a strategy of burn testing, understanding the intervals that you're going to burn at, have a plan. Have an entire plan of this is what I'm going to do. And if these results come out, whether it tunnels, whether it's too hot, whether I don't have any fragrance throw, um, if I need to make any adjustments there, based on the result of that burn, I will adjust one thing. Adjust that one thing and test all over again. Once you make a perfect candle, the rest of your brand is just gonna come together because now you understand testing in and out. You understand why this is gonna work or it's not gonna work, why it's gonna pass or it's going to fail. You're gonna understand that. And then everything you do going forward is gonna be super easy when it comes to testing candles now. So we teach all this inside of our course. If you are interested in that, you can grab that at candle businesspro uh.com. Um, you you'll you'll see all the links there. Of course, we have the links in the notes below. We will teach you how to make perfect candles in 28 days. That's kind of the name of our course is Oran Candle Making in 28 days, and it goes through our entire process. But again, you don't have to do you don't have to do that. You can do what you're doing now, but document everything and adjust one variable at a time, and you're gonna be successful on that. Also, surround yourself with people that you trust because if I have an issue with this candle and I post it in the Facebook group of about 200,000 people are in there, I'm gonna get a hundred thousand different reasons on why this failed. So, what I would like to what I would recommend doing is give you a little try. Get to a group of some people that you trust in the candle space. Uh, our candle business pro Facebook group is really good. We monitor that. We are in there, it's completely free. Myself and Chad are in there every day, trying to give feedback when we can. Um, and surround yourself with some people that you trust are doing it the right way or doing it the way that you want to do it yourself, and and reach out to them and put yourself out there and ask for help. And you know, most people are very, very happy to uh to assist

Closing Advice And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 34:37

you. That is it for this episode. Thank you all so much for tuning in. If you want to get that episode that we're going to be releasing soon that talks about the more than 60 different ways to sell your candles, make sure you hit that subscribe button. If you could like and comment this as well, that would boost this up a little bit for us. Completely free to support us that way. And we would greatly, greatly appreciate it. Again, there are always free resources for you in the notes below as well. Have a great rest of your week. Take care of yourself. Talk to you soon.