What I Wish I Knew Before Growing My Candle Business

#52. We answer the question we get nonstop: what we would do differently if we had to restart our candle business today. From product focus to SEO to wholesale, we lay out the exact moves that save time, cash, and years of trial and error. 

• leading with candles to build cash flow, delaying room sprays and most accessories until demand is proven 
• treating accessories as add-ons, avoiding bulk buys that trap cash in slow-moving inventory 
• starting on Etsy for built-in shoppers while building Shopify early for owned data and long-term growth 
• using SEO basics across Shopify and Google tools, focusing on titles, metadata, and search intent 
• pricing by choosing a clear customer avatar, then working backward from shelf fit and value expectations 
• setting margins that fund ads, promos, and email incentives, avoiding the pain of raising prices later 
• pursuing wholesale early with boutiques that already serve the target buyer, using a seasonal outreach plan 
• avoiding SKU overload at launch, keeping scents and vessel options tight until customers guide expansion 
• learning from a bulk label purchase mistake, validating demand before investing heavily 
• keeping retail staffing lean, paying well to retain talent, and choosing locations built for foot traffic 
• tracking simple business data consistently so scaling becomes repeatable instead of guesswork 

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Transcript

What I Would Do Differently

SPEAKER_00 0:01

You know, I get asked all the time, Sebastian, what would you do if you're starting over? And honestly, it's one of my favorite questions because the answer has changed a lot over the years. The further you get into building something, the more clearly you can see the mistakes that you made at the beginning. Chad and I started this business at our kitchen table, like many of you. No real plan, no mentor, no roadmap. We figured it out as we went. And a lot of those early decisions cost us time and money that we didn't need to lose. Some of them set us back many years because we had to recoup some of those investments that could have gone towards building out our business in other areas. So today I want to flip the script. Instead of telling you what to do, I want to tell you what I would do differently. Because if I could go back and hand my early self at Cheat Sheet, this episode would basically be it. Let's get into this one.

Start With Candles Not Extras

SPEAKER_00 1:02

All right. So the first question would be: would you still start with candles or would you launch with a different product first to build cash flow even faster? Candles are the way to grow the cash flow the fastest because the candles are going to sell the quickest. We do have other products, right? We have room sprays, we have uh wax melt. I would not start with room sprays. I would wait on that. That would be what I would introduce to my customers after my brand is already established and already have buyers that are going to come back and buy everything that I put out and everything I introduce. Candles, absolutely. We are a candle business. So we're going to start with that. That is going to always be our focus. Uh wax melts. Wax melts are definitely a seller for us. I would say that we sell a pack of wax melts for probably every eight candles that we sell. So nearly, or not nearly as much. That's like 13% of what we do to candles. So candles is where I would just focus all of my attention to. Then I would slowly introduce in wax melts when I have an established audience. And then I would move on to room sprays and some other items from there. Also, I know a lot of us like to add on accessories at the beginning. Uh, be cautious with what accessories you want to offer because, again, you are putting money into that. That's an investment. And when you buy those wick trimmers in bulk, even if you're getting them for $253, that's fantastic. But if you're buying 100 of those, you're wrapping up $300 into uh an investment into WIC trimmers. That's going to take you quite some time to recoup. WIC trimmers do not sell for us very well in a weekend. In a weekend, we're probably going to have, let's say, 80 to 100 transactions that we'll do within our shops and online. We'll sell one or two WIC trimmers at the most. At the most, we'll sell one or two of those. Now, USB lighters, those are fantastic. We did not invest in those early because they're more expensive. They cost us landed here. We get them from overseas to get those landed. I believe they cost about $450, which is still a good deal. Could we turn around? We sell them for $20. Uh, we will sell one of those for probably every 45 to 50 transactions. So double the amount of our sales from Wick trimmers to lighters, but also again, you're wrapping up a lot of money into that. So they are always add-on items. So if you don't have anyone buying your candles, you're likely not going to have anyone buying your accessories. So those are some things that I would do differently when I'm launching. Just have the candles. Don't worry about spreading into other products quite yet. Make sure you have an audience figured out. Uh, make sure you have your niche, your target audience, people that are gonna buy from you, giving you money for your main product, and then start introducing other products that they would enjoy.

Etsy Vs Shopify And SEO Basics

SPEAKER_00 3:52

So the next question here is would you have started on Etsy, Shopify, or somewhere else entirely? And why? Okay, so we actually started on both Etsy and Shopify, and I would do that all over again because putting our products out on Etsy, that is putting our product out to an audience that's already looking for something, right? We are putting it in a marketplace that gets millions of shoppers every single day. With Shopify, I also want to start at the very beginning, but that is where I have to send my traffic to. And it's going to take some time. You are not going to open up your Shopify store and get sales right away. It is not going to happen. But you do need to build up that store. You need to work on your titles, your product descriptions, your URL metadata. You need to figure out the SEO for that. And right now, with AI and so many tools out on the market, learning SEO is not hard. You can actually pay some apps to do it for you, though. I would be cautious on that. You want to learn why you do it. Inside of our inner circle, we actually have a SEO workshop where I show you exactly how I build mine from Google Analytics to Google search queries to uh the Search Console, excuse me. And then also to the uh Google Merchant. And that's how we get ranked up at the top of Google. When you see, when you're searching for something on Google, you will see ad at the top. It says sponsored, right? But then right below that, before it actually gets into the text results, it has images of products when someone is shopping for something that Google believes that you may want to buy as a shopper, right? For instance, if you right now go to Google and search for driftwood scented candles, I will be the number one result. That is something I worked on. We are the number one result for driftwood scented candles. Also, if you go to Google and you search for vanilla scented candles, which is a very high search uh search term, you will see that we usually fluctuate between that number six spot and number 10th spot on Google. That brings us quite a few sales. We're trying to get up into the top three spots. That's a golden area for you to get to on Google, is in the top three spots. But uh, back to the question of would I have started on Etsy or Shopify? Again, I would do both. Etsy, you can't rely on it to bring you sales. You just hope that it does. Also, what I have found on Etsy, our number one selling candle on our website. So, for instance, this circuit lemon candle, this is our number one selling candle over all four years. Every year, this is our number one selling candle. I do not sell that on Etsy whatsoever. No one wants one. The shopper is different. The people that are gonna go to Etsy and shop are people that are looking for a unique gift for somebody generally, or for themselves, but generally they're gift shopping for someone. They want something that's unique. So the items that do really well on Etsy are gonna be the things like a wooden bowl candle or a candle that's around a certain theme. I have candles on Etsy that are for back to school and that are for teacher gifts, teacher appreciation. That's this year, it's probably been our number one seller, has been teacher appreciation gift. So, still that idea, go to Etsy, create a teacher gift, see, see how well you can do with that. The other item that does really well for us, last year, uh, you'll see a lot of candles out on Etsy, and you might want to um draw inspiration from them, right? And of course, when we're trying to figure it out, we want to do that. So we had put out a lot of bridal candles for um bachelorette parties, for the bridal parties, like for the maid of honor and all of that, right? Because there's a ton of those out on Etsy. And we thought, oh, maybe this is a niche for us to get into. I don't think we've sold more than maybe 10 of those in the last year. But another niche that we have done well is is in Father's Day candles. You almost wouldn't think, because a lot of times people aren't thinking about buying candles for fathers, uh, but there's not enough uh competition in that space. So our um thank you, dad, uh, happy Father's Day, dad, you're the best dad. Those dad-themed candles for us do better than our mom-themed candles. And it's because we are in a space that isn't as competitive. Mother's Day gifts on Etsy, so hard to break into because there's so much competition from shirts to trinkets to jewelry to candles to perfumes, to you name it, right? Everyone makes things for Mother's Day because Mother's Day is a spendy holiday. People do spend some money on that. But if you go and then search for Father's Day gifts on Etsy, there's gonna be so much less competition. So that's where you want to live. You want to live in that space on Etsy that still has people searching, still has search results, but isn't nearly as competitive, right? So uh that's why my lemon or my lavender scented candles just don't do great on Etsy. People aren't looking for that. There, there's nothing necessarily unique about that, but those do well on my Shopify store. So if you are starting out, I would recommend doing both. Do Etsy, get your product out there, and you're just hoping for sales to come in. I recommend if you're going to do it, to make sure that you read through the entire Etsy seller handbook. You have to know what you're doing on there, or you're just wasting your time putting your stuff out there. You have to know what you're doing. You have to know how they want it done. And you can watch every video on YouTube uh about how to build your Etsy store and how to be successful on Etsy. Honestly, Etsy gives you the answer. Read through the Etsy handbook and you will understand it. Another tip for you if you do like to use AI, uh, one of the things that I teach the people inside of the inner circle is go and take that Etsy handbook, go and put it into your AI software, whether you use you you're using Claude or um, you know, Chat GPT or whatever, download the Etsy handbook, put it into there, and then tell the AI to create the listings of your products. You got to give it your products as well, but give you the listings the way Etsy wants it to do. So it'll read through the handbook, so it'll know exactly how your uh posts should be or your listings should be, and it'll give that to you. So it's not cheating, it's not taking anything that you haven't done. You already have the information about your candles. You're just asking it to format it in the way that's going to make Etsy happy. So hopefully that helps you. Uh, and then on Shopify, you can do the same thing. You can do some research on what is ranking and you can try to get your products to rank. So I would do both. Shopify is a long game, but you own all of that data. That's the that's the key about Shopify. You own the data, you own the people that are uh shopping on that, you own all of that information. Uh, and then you can really analyze what people are doing on your website. And it's a long game to where the more work you put into it, the better the results are going to be. We get sales every single day on our Shopify store now because of the work that we put in two years ago. So start with it early. Start on their very, very, very basic plan. The very basic plan, I know they advertise like $39, I believe, is uh the amount to get in. In fact, I will actually drop a Shopify link in this episode that you can get, I think believe three months free. If you use my affiliate link on there, you can get that completely free uh probably three months. But they should have also a basic plan below that $39 one. Uh that's just very minimal, but that's all you need when you get started.

Pricing Around Your Real Customer

SPEAKER_00 10:54

All right. So the next question here is what would you do differently with your pricing from day one? Actually, this is one of the areas that we did really well with. We did really well with our candles. In fact, this candle that is $26 was $26 four years ago when we started. We really had the business side dialed in on our business as far as the setup goes, as far as the pricing, what's going to make sense? How much do we have for our marketing budget based on those sales? We really had that dialed in just from my experience inside of doing different types of businesses. So that one was okay, but I have lots of uh videos and episodes on our podcast about pricing. But the key is that you have to have your audience figured out because this $26 candle, sugar lemon candle, there's big tons of candles that are lemon scented, same size, relative with the same style, out there on the market. And you can buy these from $5 to $50 to maybe even $100 for some of the luxury brands, right? Why is my candle selling at $26 when there's one that looks almost just like it for $5? It's because I have my customer dialed in. I have to know who my customer is and I have to sell to that customer. So don't assume that when you search for a lavender candle and you see some that are five bucks and you have to sell candles for five bucks. That's a different customer, okay? My customers that I'm, you know, selling my products and marketing and advertising my products to aren't buying $5 candles, right? My customer, which I'll get into here in another question, um, they spend a little bit more on their products, but they're not buying luxury. This is middle class. They are not um buying Gucci candles, they're not buying dipty, they're not buying VolSpa, they're buying $26 candles that they're gonna find at those boutique women wear stores that they shop at for their clothing and their housewares. That's where they're gonna want to find my candle at. So that's who I'm targeting. But make sure you have your pricing dialed in. And to do that, you need to know who your customer is going to be. Pick a customer. Pick a customer, and everything that you do about your brand has to have that customer in mind. That goes for the pricing too. Go to where that customer shops, pick up those products. Does your product belong on the shelves next to those products that they're already buying? If so, if you can compete with them, fantastic. Now make a candle that fits on that shelf and is priced where it fits on that shelf. This candle that's $26 is not going to fit on a shelf at Walmart because no one's buying $26 candles at Walmart. This isn't gonna fit in Saks Fifth Avenue because Saks Fifth Avenue is not selling candles as cheap as $26, right? You have to have your pricing dialed in for where you want to sell your candles. And to know where you want to sell your candles, you have to have a customer in mind. So have your customer avatar figured out, and then you build your pricing out around that. When I figure out what I want to sell this candle for, I then need to work backwards on my pricing. Okay, that customer is gonna spend $26 for a candle. Great. Now that I know that, how can I make a quality candle at $26 with the value that they're expecting for as cheap as possible? It still has to have all the components that they're looking for, from ingredient quality to not having certain things to having other features. It needs to have everything they're looking for, but you want to make it as cheap as possible to and but making sure that you're still providing that value. So keep that in mind. Now, our key so metrics is we will not sell something for less than 4x. If it doesn't make at least 4x the pricing, then it doesn't make sense for us. And the reason why we choose 4x as the base, now again, this is just the this is just the floor. I have my room sprays that are 8x, right? My room sprays cost me about $2 to make. I sell them for $16. This candle here is about $6 to make, and I'm gonna sell this for $26. So I'm getting like 4.25x on that. I have products that range from that 4x to that $8 to 10x based on what the product is. Uh my wax melts, my wax melts cost me just under $2, and I sell them for $9 a piece. So keep that in mind. Your pricing is going to be really critical. You need to go high versus low because you can always run sales. You always want to run incentives on your website for people to give you their email address. You want to be able to offer buy three, get one free. You want to be able to have a marketing budget so that you can run ads on Facebook and Instagram. To do that, you have to be priced right. And if you underprice your products to begin your business with, it's harder to raise your prices. We've been able to not raise our prices in four years because we started at a spot that was comfortable for us. Now we're feeling the squeeze because our this candle used to cost me about four and a quarter, and now it's over six bucks to make. So I'm gonna have to do something with my pricing if inflation and the economy doesn't kind of get in check. But that's a whole nother video right there. The next question that was submitted here is would you have pursued wholesale sooner or focused on direct to consumer longer?

Wholesale Strategy And Timing

SPEAKER_00 17:16

Actually, we focused on wholesale really pretty quick. We launched our business on February 25th. And here in Michigan, it's cold. We can't do markets until May. So as soon as we had the that we rode the wave of our initial buyers, which is our friends and family, supporting us for a couple of weeks. After that, we had to go out and get business because people aren't just finding our website. They they're not going to just discover you. Etsy's not just going to bring in a ton of orders. You've got to get into a sales uh revenue path that is going to bring you in revenue if you're wanting to do this as a business long term. And so for us, it just made sense. Hey, I made this for a customer in mind. Let me go sell this to the boutiques that are uh serving that customer. So I went after every women's boutique that was in that price range of selling my $26 candle. And I just started doing wholesale. And I just learned the ins and outs of wholesale from trial and error. I've gone through a couple of courses online that were fantastic. I, in fact, I have built my own wholesale course now to show you how that we do wholesale from all of our experience. So it took us about four years to where we're at now. We're at about 170, 175 wholesale accounts that we have ordering from us continually. So you're gonna have some drop-off, of course. You're gonna have people that are gonna buy, it's not gonna work out for their store. It is what it is, but you're gonna have reorders. So we have 170 accounts that are reordering from us on average of about every three to five months. So it's not every month like some people will promote that, oh, yeah, I get wholesale orders every month from the same company. If someone's telling you that, that means the company doesn't have enough trust in them as a candle brand to buy for longer periods of time, right? Your wholesale accounts should be probably between every three to five months, your reorders into that. So we do wholesale part-time. I really focus on wholesale during the off season of my retail shops that are very busy during the summer. I'm doing wholesale January through April. That's really my main outreach for new accounts. And then the rest of the year, I'm just following up with those accounts, letting them know of my seasons changing, going into fall, going into Christmas, going into winter, uh, going into summer. If I have a brand new uh collection that comes out, I'm just relying on doing outreach to those customers that I reached out to from January to April, because I don't have time over the summer to keep trying to get new accounts. And honestly, like July is like prime fall buying, which is that's candle season is fall and winter candles, right? Um, and so July is when most boutiques are at that's the end of when they're getting all their fall stuff, right? You're still gonna get some throughout the rest of the year, but that's prime time for me. So I'm focusing on selling to the customers I already have or the people that are already on my email list wholesale uh during those months. You know, starting a wholesale in November, that's not gonna work. Like no one's in November's buying Christmas candles. Like they've already got a few other things. They are at the beginning of November because they're probably store owners like myself as a store owner that we're all busy. And so we'll buy some stuff late. But I wouldn't kick off my entire um business plan of wholesale uh in November. I would do it right at the beginning of the year, January, um, when people are financing their uh budget for the entire year. And so January um through July, that's really a great time to get new accounts. And then July to December, you're just following up with them and then serving the people that you already have inside of your wholesale account. So that's kind of how I do it. Again, you can learn more about our wholesale course and I can work with you on that if you'd like. You can get that in the notes below, I'm sure. All right. So the next question here is what's one money mistake you made early on that you would avoid completely? Great

The Early Trap Of Too Many SKUs

SPEAKER_00 20:58

question. All right, when we are first starting out, we are excited. We want our candles everywhere. We want to keep growing, and we feel that when people aren't buying our initial candles, that we just need to create more products. Create more products, put more products out there, right? When we first started, we've we've made a couple big mistakes. The first big mistake that we made was before we launched our brand, we assumed that we were gonna flip the switch on Shopify and all these orders are gonna come in. It's not like that. That's not the reality. But we anticipated that. And so what we did was we created, we have our, this is our standard candle, our 10-ounce candle. We have a five-ounce candle and a tin. We have a 12-ounce ceramic that we had. We had that ceramic in three different colors. They were the candle science Nordic jars, the ceramic vessels that they came in black, gray, and white. And we thought that those were going to be just bangers for us and do super well. So we when we first started, so we had our wax melt, we had our room spray, we had our five-ounce candle, we had our 10-ounce candle, we had our 12-ounce candle. And that 12-ounce candle was in three different um variants, right? So we had seven different products essentially. When you have seven different products that you're trying to sell, and we had that in for 10 different cents. So that's 70 different SKUs that we started our business with. Well, some of those initial scents were complete busts. Nobody wanted that. I don't know why no one wanted my spring blossom candle. It was a blend of lilac. It was very heavy lilac. I think I had my my grandmother, my mother, someone in mind when we were blending. I I don't know who I thought was going to buy that candle, but nobody bought that candle. Nobody wanted that candle. People would smell it out of markets. We knew really quick. Nobody wants that candle. And then our fresh linen candle. I love fresh linen. I love fresh linen. We had the fresh linen scent, and we blended it with something else that's very slightly. Uh, it was from Candle Science, and it's like four years ago. Nobody liked it. And in fact, Candle Science doesn't even have it anymore. They've they've reformulated it. They have a new version of it. What they had four years ago, they don't. It was it was very uh sour. Is that the word to say? Very sour, lemony um, in that I I loved fresh linen. So like I'm not hating on it, but my customers didn't want it. So we've really Reformulated that we got rid of our freshland candle completely, except for we have a um one of our pet odor eliminating candles. We have it in a freshland set. But back to what the question was. So I started with 70 different skews, 70 different products when we first started, right? Seven different skews and 10 different cents. If I was to start all over again, I would not have more than six cents. Six cents and I would have no more than two skews of each of those. I would have my standard candle. And if you wanted to do wax melts, or if you wanted to have that candle in two different sizes, don't do all three. Just do six cents and do it in two different options because you're gonna have people that aren't gonna like something. And now what are you gonna do? When you just made all of this product in a sense that no one's going to like, you're gonna learn that when you discover who your customer is. And you're not gonna know who your customer is until you start trying to serve that customer that you had in mind, right? We have to have that customer in mind of who we want to sell to. Now you make products, then you try to sell to that customer, and then you got to pivot based on, oh, that customer actually, I still want to serve them, but they don't like these particular products. They don't like these cents, they don't like my branding, they don't like my marketing. I'm not communicating with them the way it's it's not hitting with them. You're gonna learn so much after you launch. So scale back on the products that you're trying to sell. Keep it tight. I know very, very successful candle makers. They have five cents. Five cents that they've had for several years now. They haven't added anything. They have die hard customers that buy anything they put out. So they'll put out limited drops, they'll put out a candle of the month, but they just have their five cents they're known for. And they haven't found a reason to add on uh, you know, beyond that. Keep that in mind. Adding more products is not going to bring you more sales until you have what I like to call superfans. Those are the people that are going to buy everything that you put out there. That's gonna take some time to get that built up. I talk a lot about the super fans inside of our inner circle, but again, that is for another episode. Okay, and the second money mistake that we made early on that I'll share for you is we created this line of candles that we

The $3,500 Bulk Label Mistake

SPEAKER_00 25:40

thought was going to crush it. It was in a particular niche that we thought was going to be great. So what we did was we went ahead, so we created all these different like it wasn't a customizable label, but it was a label that would speak to in different kinds of people, right? Different people that they're gonna relate to that quote, they're gonna relate to that saying. And we thought this whole line, it was like an inspirational affirmation line of candles. And we had over a hundred different designs. So what we thought was we were gonna create this whole brand around these sayings. And we didn't go deep enough into the branding on it. Um, we kept it kind of basic, and that's why I'm really kind of hesitant when I see some people's labels and labeling and things because I I it takes me back to this mistake that we made, right? So we had like a hundred different labels. But what we did, because we thought we were going to crush it with this brand. It was a completely different brand that we started to different website and everything for people to buy these candles from. We went ahead and bought to get the pricing down, we went ahead and bought all the labels in bulk. So we have thousands of these labels. It's my $3,500 mistake. It was $3,500 to buy all of these labels. Uh, and it seems like a lot. And it is a lot, but it was, oh yeah, if we can buy this label in bulk, if I can buy a hundred of this label, it's only 35 cents. So for this label, this one label, $35. But I've got a hundred labels to do, right? For this brand that we did. And I should have looking back, I should have launched that brand with six, with ten. I was so confident that the people that I hadn't even sold to yet, because this is a whole different audience than who I'm selling to, uh, was going to love this. That we went and bought all these candle labels in bulk. And we still have them. And now in our stores, we actually have them because they have nice things on them. There's a better register and they're free. People can just take them from us. We've cut them all up off of the rolls that they came on, and now they're just something free that people can just get whenever they're in there and uh visiting our shops. So that is my second money mistake that we made. And that was being super confident, so investing heavy until we have um results coming in to prove that our idea is going to be successful. All right, and the last question that we have submitted for this is knowing what you know now about building a team, retail locations,

Team Retail Locations And Tracking Data

SPEAKER_00 28:16

and scaling, what would you tell yourself at those kitchen table days? Great question. I would tell myself that it's not easy. I think that often people see that, oh, we're doing, uh, we have the inner circle and we have a community of people that has made our candle business for us. We learn from each other and that has helped them, but it also helps us because we have a couple hundred people that we can learn from and we can trade ideas with. We didn't have that beginning. When we first started our business, it's pretty lonely. Being an entrepreneur, starting a business, it's going to be lonely. So find your tribe, find the people you can hang out with. And I'm not saying that you have to come and join us inside the inner circle. I'm saying find one or two candlemakers in a community that maybe they're in your in your physical community, maybe they are local to you. That could open up some doors and opportunities. And we all just need those people that we can relate to. And they can relate to us, they can understand the struggles that we're going through, and they will be there to support us. So you need to have your tribe. You got to have the support there. As far as building out a team, we we did this pretty well because we we didn't know what to expect when we opened up our first retail location. So we only hired three people to start. Chad and I are both working there. Chad went in full-time to it, and I was working part-time. So we did that pretty well. I did not quit my day job. My day job was to support us in case the store didn't do well or didn't get business. And also, when you first start a brick and mortar store, money coming in is going right back into the business. For the first year of your business, so much of the revenue coming in, we're not really taking money from that to live on. And you could, um, but we wanted to grow our business. We needed more shelves, we needed a bigger melter, right? We opened our retail storefront using a digiboil. I hated that digib boil. I still we have that digiboil. We use it for when we're testing out brand new waxes from different suppliers. We have that digital boil, but every time I see it, it just reminds me of the times we use that full time. We're actually big supporters of Tu Auto now. That's what we'd start with, but they weren't around when we had our digital boil. But so you're gonna upgrade some stuff. That's what I'm getting at. So we went from our digital boil to actually to a big cougar melter. That cost us quite a bit of money. We needed to buy tables for the stores. Uh, that cost us money. We needed to buy other stuff to carry in our stores, like those Wick trimmers, uh, candle coasters, all the different accessories that we carry. So, your first year opening a brick and mortar store, you got to keep it lean. And so he worked there full-time. I worked there part-time. We kept our staff at a minimum because overhead, meaning the payroll and your rent and your utilities, that's what generally does a small business in. People don't realize what the expense on employees is going to be. Not just the time and effort to train them, but of course you have to pay them a competitive wage. If you're going to be teaching them how to make candles and they're going to be making products for you, you really don't want them leaving your business. So you got to invest in them. You've got to pay them above average. And I would recommend all of us do that because the the average out there of $15 an hour or whatnot that people are advertising that they're paying, no one's living on that. Um, I want my staff to be satisfied in their job. I want them to make a living wage. So we're going to pay uh a decent amount above that. And that also keeps them from wanting to leave and go elsewhere because they feel appreciated. And they're also earning a living that they can actually live on. So making sure that when you build out a team, that you are building out a team that makes sense. So I want to pay someone well enough that they're going to stay. And to do that, I might not be able to hire as many people. I keep my team small, I keep it lean, but I keep them satisfied. I keep them happy. Uh, and that's what's really helped us inside of that. But my background and my experience is in building out teams. So that was something that we were able to do really well on that side. Uh, retail locations was the next part of that uh question there. For retail locations, if you are only going to be selling products, meaning you don't have candle making, you don't have experiences, you don't have activities, you are just a retail location, completely fine. But you have to be in a prime location. And a prime location for that is put traffic. It is gonna be very, I'm not gonna say you can't, but it's gonna be very, very hard for you to have a location that people have to drive to every time they want to come and buy a candle. Because in reality, people can buy candles in just about every retail store and just about any shopping district across the country. Every gift shop, every women's wear store, um, any general store, all kinds of stores sell candles, right? So to compete with that, you need to be in that kind of location where you can get foot traffic. And so that is what we did really well with our first and third location. Our second location, not quite so much. And that's where we learned of this because people aren't getting off of the main road a block away. Even a block away, people are not coming to visit us necessarily, right? We're getting the foot driver that comes by, they walk in and see us. Now, the other thing that does do okay, where you don't have to be in that prime location, is if you are offering an activities. If you are doing a pour your own, if you have table set up, people can make an appointment, they can come in and pour candles with you, you're doing activities. That is something worth driving for, to where people will drive to you for those locations. So just keep that in mind. If you open up a retail store and you're only selling candles, you've got to be in a prime foot traffic location. And that's with anything, right? That is just about with anything that you're selling. People want to go where the amount of stores is very dense, where there's a lot of them in a small area, right? When I think about going close shopping, am I gonna go to a shopping center or mall that I have five or six different options within it? Or am I gonna go to that one randomly, you know, outside of town a mile or two to shop at that one store? Unless I'm super obsessed with that one store, I'm gonna go to that mall or that place that's gonna have several options all in one. So something to something to think about there. But again, if you have activities, we all of our act, all of our pour your own, that's all done through our website. People are booking, they don't even know where we're at until they book. Oftentimes they were looking for candle making near me, um, or they want to set up a mobile pouring party uh somewhere. They go, they find us, they go to our website, they book it, and then they worry about where we are to come and see us. So keep that in mind. A couple different ways to approach that. Lastly, the question um uh asked about scaling. So scaling is just going from one level to the next, right? We're just trying to get bigger, trying to get better every single day, every single month, every single year. We're trying to get better. When it comes to wholesale, uh, I was doing it year-round all the time. I know earlier uh in this episode, I talked about my plan of when I do it. Having a strategy is very, very important. That's one of the reasons why I built out that wholesale course was to share that strategy ins and out of exactly how we figured it out. And it also keeps us accountable. It keeps us accountable to stick to what we teach because it's exactly what we do to continue to grow. So have a strategy with every aspect of your business. That's not just wholesale, but every aspect of it. If you're gonna run Facebook ads, Facebook ads is a way you can grow your candle business, but you have to know what you're doing. So make sure you're doing plenty of research on that and you have to track results. You have to track results in everything that you do. If you run Facebook ads and you aren't getting good results, it's costing you money. You need to know why it's costing you money. So you have to track results. Or when something's working, you also have to know why is this working? What have I done to make this candle so popular? Is it because of the locations that I'm selling this in? Is it because of it's on the front page of my website? Is it because I have done SEO to get this to rank on the first page of Google? What have I done to make this a quality candle that's selling really, really well for us? If I don't know that, then I don't know how to do it again with my next product and do it again with my next product. So data is something that I am super passionate about because if you don't understand the data in your business, you're not gonna understand how to scale. You're not gonna understand how to grow. Even the very, very simple data. For instance, when you're doing markets, you at the end of the day, at the end of the market, you have a total. When you do that market again, what are you gonna do to decide on how many candles to bring? You're gonna look at last year's market data. You're gonna look at the date in your Shopify POS or whatever your year square, whatever you're using to uh keep track of all your sales out of the market. Now I know, okay, so this is a $500 market for me. I don't need to take as many or oh, I did $2,000 at that market last year. I need to bring more candles. What did I sell? What did well out there? What didn't? Every market has different customers, and looking at the data will tell you what they're buying. Oh, you know what? That market, um, we only sold a lot of wax melts in our $18 tens. We didn't do very well in our $26 candle or my $36 ceramic candle. So let me focus on that. That's all data. So looking at all of this information is going to help you scale your business. Often I talk to makers and say, hey, how much did you do last month? Oh, I don't, I don't know, like $1,000 to $2,000, something like that. It's like you don't know what you did for the month. Like, that's something that we should know. Whether that's just $100, $1,000, $10,000, you should know your data pretty well. And that's going to grow with you, of course. And you you've got to train yourself. If you're if you're not a data person, that's okay. It's completely okay. Inside the inner circle, we actually do a lot of workshops on data. I give you all of my, I give you all my spreadsheets. I give you um all the the numbers or crunch and I show you how to do it the way we do it. But some people are just like, I don't like the data. If you're using AI, that can help you with a lot of things now. Shopify is making things a lot easier uh to use as well now. For the last year and a half, the way Shopify had changed their data, I've hated it. But now it's actually really easy because anything I need, I can just type it in inside of Shopify and with their little AI widget. I don't even, I forget what the guy's name is. He has a name. Uh, you see this little picture of this random guy in the top right corner in your Shopify store now. Type in what you want to know. What were my sales last month? How much did I do last year? What's my top selling candle? You can now ask the questions and get the results versus actually trying to figure out how to run those reports because the way they changed up the reporting system is very wonky now. I'm getting way off topic. So I am going to wrap this episode up for you. Hopefully, you have found this valuable. Hopefully, this is giving you some things to think about if

Final Takeaways And Subscribe

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you are starting or launching, or even if you're just looking back on the business that you've built and you've thought, hey, well, you know, what where should I look at maybe improving or maybe scaling, maybe doing some things different going forward to kind of get unstuck. So hopefully this has helped. If it has, I would love it if you wanted to hit that like, subscribe button. We are doing some live videos coming up, so you'll want to be subscribed for that so that you get notified when we go live. Thank you so much for watching today. Have a fantastic rest of your week. And I'll talk to you soon. Bye.