The Candle Branding Mistake That Makes You Look Cheap

#056. Thermal printer or full-color label printer? Craft fairs or wholesale? SEO or social? If you’re building a candle business or wax melt business, the “right next step” can feel confusing fast, so we answer six real questions submitted by listeners and lay out what actually works when you’re trying to grow. We start with thermal label printers and get specific about why they’re ideal for shipping labels yet a risky choice for candle jar labels that sit near heat, especially if you care about shelf-ready quality. 

From there, we zoom out to the bigger challenge: getting your name out there when you live in a small town. We talk through website basics and why SEO takes time to build, then share practical ways to sell locally even if your town is small, including craft shows, juried markets, wholesale into local shops, and fundraising partnerships with schools, humane societies, churches, and more. We also cover corporate gifts and private label opportunities, plus a simple mindset shift: you don’t have to rely only on direct-to-consumer sales. 

If online sales are the goal, we dig into search engine optimization, why “message me to order” slows growth, and how to drive every channel back to your website. We name SEO resources like Ahrefs and SEMrush, explain backlinks in plain English, and share a smart approach to blog swaps that can boost your rankings. We also answer a branding question for a 1940s film noir candle theme and wrap with a clear 10-step roadmap, including pricing based on your target store and working backward from what that customer expects. 

Subscribe so you don’t miss future Q&A episodes, share this with a maker who needs a clearer plan, and leave a review to help more candle business owners find the show. What question should we answer next?

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Transcript

Viewer Questions And Free Downloads

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome back to the channel. Today I have six questions that were submitted from viewers just like yourself. You can always submit questions to us through our website, also in our Facebook community, or you can just comment in the notes below. If you have subscribed, we will answer those questions for you on an upcoming episode. So please subscribe to our channel. That would help us out a lot. And I'll also be sure that you'll get the answers to all of your questions. So let me dive in here. I also have a download for you that you can download completely for free on our website. And I'll talk about that one here in just a moment.

Thermal Printers For Shipping Labels

SPEAKER_00 0:33

First question here is from Kimberly Melissa. That first question is what are the best thermal label printers for someone just starting out? Okay, so for a thermal printer, you're really only going to want to use those for your shipping labels. They're not ideal to go on the front of a candle because a thermal label is created with heat. A thermal printer has a head on it that gets really hot, and it is what basically draws the design onto that label. If you put that on the front of a candle, when the candle is burning behind it, that whole label ends up turning black. It's just not a deal. It's not going to have sharp coloring as well. Now, the color is only going to be black on a thermal uh label. Now you can get colorful labels that'll go through your thermal printer. So you can get different colors, say green and blue and yellow and pink and orange. You can get little round stickers and you can print those with a thermal printer, but they're just not ideal for candles, um, especially in a competitive space where you have to have a pretty solid and quality product out there. Putting a thermal printer or a thermal label onto a candle really isn't gonna be competitive. Now, if you're just having fun and you just want to print a label on there, sure, you can do that on a thermal printer. So to answer your question of what are the best thermal label printers, they're really just about all the same, honestly. Munbin, M U N, B Y N, they're really popular on Amazon. They're gonna be a little bit more expensive, um, but they're not gonna be very expensive. The the main difference in cost when it comes to a thermal printer is gonna be its printing capabilities. And that's going to different, uh, be different based on is it wired? Does it have to plug in to your computer? Or can you do it through Bluetooth, or can you do it through Wi-Fi? Those different options are what the price changes are going to be. But honestly, if you are just doing labels for shipping, which is really the only labels I'd recommend doing, I would just get a less than a hundred dollar uh thermal printer for that. Um, so that's just my stance on those. I really just would never do it on the on the front of candles. Again, when there's heat burning close by, so when your candle is burning, it's gonna turn the whole label black. And that's because that's what thermal labels do, because you have a certain kind of label to go on those types of uh go into those types of printers. So a thermal label is gonna turn black pretty easy, uh, and then it's just not gonna

Selling Candles From A Small Town

SPEAKER_00 3:01

look great. So the next question is from Shaylin Owen, and it is what is the best way to get started, especially living in a small town? Okay, so it is tough getting our name out there. What I always recommend is definitely build a website because that's something that's gonna take time. It's gonna take time to develop traffic. It's gonna take time for Google and the other search platforms and especially AI models now to um scrape your website, to crawl it as they as they call it, um, to see what is your website, who is it for, who's clicking on it, um, and to give you like a health rating score for you to start growing higher and higher on the list of returns within Google. So I say go ahead and do that right away just because it takes time. If you build your website today, no matter how great it is, you're not gonna get traffic tomorrow unless you're running ads behind it. But you have to start somewhere. And so I always recommend doing it pretty early on. Then if you're living in a small town, we think of different ways that are pretty universal to selling products. Doing markets in a small town, maybe there's not a lot of markets, so you're gonna have to drive a little ways to do markets. Look on websites such as zapplication.com. It's a great website to find different markets all across the country. Uh so put in your zip code and then give it a mile radius of how far you'd be willing to. The Zapplication markets, um, it's just a small percentage of all markets out there that are available, but they're they're the quality markets because there's usually an application fee, um, because the markets that are on Zapplication are using Zapplication to help them to sort through and to keep their market organized. So um on the market organizer side of his application, it collects all the applications, it has all the photos. They're basically like for juried events um as well. So uh I recommend checking out Zapplication or just doing a uh simple Google search of uh craft shows near me within 50 miles, whatever the distance that you're willing to drive is. But um, besides doing markets, it is a matter of, okay, you have a product. If you can create a product, what ways can you sell it locally? Well, you can wholesale it. You can wholesale it into the local shops in your community, regardless of the size. Uh, you can do fundraisers. Fundraisers is a big part of our business and the way we got a lot of growth when we first started out. You can do fundraisers anywhere. Just about every county in America, at least, probably in Canada and internationally as well, they're going to have their version of an Animal Humane Society. Those are usually pretty easy fundraisers to do. You can also do fundraisers for the local schools, for the, you know, junior highs, high schools. Um, you can do things for Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts. You can do fundraisers for churches, you can do fundraisers for nonprofit theaters. You can do all kinds of fundraiser. So that's an avenue that I would definitely explore when you're first starting out. We do really well with fundraisers. It's actually one of the like many courses or workshops that we have inside the inner circle. So that alone uh is probably worth signing up for the inner circle at least for a month to check out is how we do that. But the other ways of selling is getting into corporate gifts, getting into private label. So these are all ways that aren't direct to consumers. If you don't have a lot of people to directly sell to, there's lots of other ways of selling candles. We sell lots of candles to a car wash that is a fact, they're they're based out of here, that they give them out to their franchisees all across the country. We do room sprays for a hotel. We uh have all different types of businesses um that we partner with. So don't think about just selling direct to a consumer or a customer on the other end. Now, selling to a customer uh directly is to get is the way to get the most profit per item sold because they're paying in retail and they're not getting any discounts that you might, if someone was to order, say, 300 candles at a time, you probably want to give them a discount. And it, you know, it takes some work, uh, more work to get into some of these corporate accounts. But what I recommend doing that direction is joining your chamber of commerce. That way you have the list of all the businesses, and then you can start reaching out to them through all of those emails. Uh, so that's another thing that we teach inside of the inner circle, but that gives you an idea of how to get started with that. So those are just some ways there for you, uh, Shay Win. Uh also uh we did do a recent video uh about 60 different ways of selling candles. And you can get that. Uh I have a worksheet that you can just download right off of our website completely free. Uh go to candle businesspro.com slash 60 Ways, the number 60 W A Y S. Candle Business Pro.com slash 60 Ways, and you can download that completely free. You should be able to get that in the show notes below as well. Um, that's gonna give you a lot of ideas of ways to sell your candles. Next

Local Buzz For Wax Melt Brands

SPEAKER_00 7:55

question here is from Lisa Dingler. And that question is I'm actually trying to start a wax melt business, and I don't really know how to go about getting my name out there. I would like to start out local and then maybe spread more from there. What I just uh mentioned uh for Shaylin, uh the downloading that 60 Ways uh worksheet is gonna give you a bunch of different uh ways of selling your candles. Now, locally, uh, to get yourself out there, doing the fundraisers is a fantastic way. Um, also um doing some cross promotion with other small businesses, right? So if you are so you're a you're a wax melt business, um, look at who's doing soaps in your community. Look who's doing perfumes in your community. See if you can't work together of cross-promoting each other. Put a little package together and see if you can get your followers to follow each uh the other pages and do a simple little giveaway. That can help get your name out in your community. Just a little simple way of doing that there. But partner with other small businesses that you would want to wholesale with uh to get your product into their location. That should definitely help to spread the word about your business. But check out that worksheet, uh, the 60 Ways worksheet uh as

SEO Basics And Backlinks That Work

SPEAKER_00 9:05

well. Question here from uh Bethany um, uh is it Pliasance, I believe. Uh Bethany, uh, I may have totally butchered that. I apologize. But your question here is how can I sell more online? Okay. So when you do build your website, your SEO has to be great. We talk a lot about SEO and what's trending inside of the inner circle, but SEO is always changing. So if I told you exactly what's working right now, next week it might not be working. So just research. Uh, a couple of places that I would recommend getting trusted articles for free to learn about SEO, it's gonna be uh from a website called Hrefs, which is spelled A-H R E F S.com. Hrefs.com, that is my source for all things SEO. They're fantastic. You can actually sign over a free account with them, and they will audit your website and give you some reports back. It's a little bit complicated to learn at first, but it is really, really handy. When I sign in, it shows how many products across Google I have on the first page of Google and it tells me what I'm getting close to, uh, and then tells me how I can make some changes on my website to help get me to rank higher on Google. So check them out. That's hrush.com. The other one is S E M Rush. SEMRush. So S-E-M-R-U-S-H.com. Semrus.com, they are another SEO website that is similar to Hrefs. I prefer Hrefs, but Simrush does have uh some fantastic articles. They're very smart over there as well. And so they've got a lot of free resources for you. The reason why I like hrefs more is just that the layout just kind of fits the way I analyze things. But some people like um SimRust more. Both of them are gonna get you way ahead of maybe where you're at today. So that's gonna help you to sell more. But then everything else you do should just drive traffic to your website. If you have a fundraiser, that fundraiser should be uh driving people to your website to buy from you. Uh everything you can possibly do to get people onto your website. So with social media, when you, if you're trying to sell through social media, don't say message me on Facebook or on Instagram to place your order. Drive them to your website. Also have other articles written on your website, like blog posts on your website. Uh, and then see if you can't do blog swaps with other businesses as well, where you are promoting their business on your website and vice versa. And you can do that through the blog feature inside of Shopify. And that's a great way of creating what's called a backlink. A backlink is uh a place on the internet that is promoting your business. For instance, we have backlinks from Oprah Daily, from Parade Magazine, um, from a lot of real estate businesses that will write articles for them so that they are putting Garznet Beacon on their website and sharing that article, and we get referenced. And the more backlinks you have, the more of a quality of a website uh Google ranks you at. Um, just one of many ways, but that that's one um way of doing it. So seeing if you can't do uh backlink swaps with other small businesses, um, that can help get more traffic to start coming to your website.

Film Noir Branding Without Losing Style

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Next question here is from Cameron Williamson. And Cameron's question is in your video, you say minimalist white labels with black text doesn't cut it. I do say that, but I do say that in a way like we need to stand out or we need to stick out. So just I just want to put a little asterisk in there. You can certainly get by in your business with minimalist labels, um, but there has to be a reason why they are minimalist and not just because that's all the text I thought of to create. I just thought of a candled name and an assent note and putting a location on there. So just a little asterisk there. You can definitely get by with minimalists, but we wanted to stand out in uh competing with them. So that's why we went with a different direction with our labels. But I want to your question, it says, but my theme is 1940s film noir. How should I go about changing my branding without giving up the black and white aesthetic? Okay, so pull in the features of that 1940s film noir, whether that's film itself, like whether it's in the design, whether it is in the names of your candles, you can also, instead of just having a simple white, you know, matte label, you can also go for those elevated, um more like a cardstock type of label, right? I think um, what is it called? Like the textured, the texture labels. So you can go with a white label and black script writing on there, but maybe make that label a little fancier, right? Uh, maybe the the the paper that it's printed on is a little bit more high-end. So there's more options than just going with a glossy and matte label. There's lots of other options out there as far as the texture goes. They're gonna be a little bit more expensive, but that would be a way for you to do that. You could also look at branding and packaging your candle. You can add, you can add a hang tag on the side of your candle. You can put it in a box. Um, there's lots of different things that you can do. So it's not just a simple candle with a black or with a white label with black text on there. There's other features that you can add to your packaging or your candle itself uh to kind of elevate it some. Again, I don't want people to think that they can't do white labels with black minimalist text. That works for a lot of business. Think of like sweet water uh decor. Sure. Uh they, you know, they're a um a candle brain that sells thousands and thousands of candles. They've got a different business model than a lot of us might. They're gonna be able to sell at a lower price than what most of us will want to um because they are producing so many candles, and those are tough to compete with. So usually we have to do something to stick out a little bit more. But in your theme, the 1940s film noir, like there's a lot of directions you can go with that. So I'd be excited to see what you come up with. So circle back and let me know what your website is. I'd love to check it out at some

Ten Steps And Pricing By Market

SPEAKER_00 15:30

point. Last question here is from Allie Murphy. And her question is what are the best steps to have a successful business? All right, so on my website, and I'll put it in the show notes below here. I do have a uh 10 uh steps to starting a candle business. And so I'll just go through some of these steps here. Uh, step one is to define a business idea. So many people will just rush out there and create a candle and they don't have an idea, they don't know who they want to sell for, things like that. So, step one is to define your business idea. Are you gonna have candles? You're gonna have wax melts, room sprays. What are you gonna do? I would say start small. Start with just one thing and expand as you start to get some feedback from the market. So, step two is to conduct your market research. And this is going to help with hey, what what space do I want to be in? What kind of candles are oversaturated to where I can maybe uh compete elsewhere, which is why we went with the colorful labels versus the minimalist ones that were in a lot of the women's boutiques that we wanted to get our candles wholesaled inside of. That's where we were wanting to go with our uh with our business. And so we wanted to see what was already out there. So simple candle market research is just go into the store that you want your candles. What store would you love your candles in? Go in there, see how much those candles cost. Let's not do what we see on Facebook of, hey, here I created a candle. How much did I sell it for? That's not the right way to do it. Figure out where you want your candles, figure out how much those candles are in those locations and say, okay, they're $26 in that store. Now I know I'm gonna charge $26 for my candle. Now I got to go in reverse. I have to make a candle that belongs on the shelves of that store for as cheap as possible, but that's gonna provide the value the shopper of that store requires, right? The way I'm going to make a candle that is $26 or $100 or $5 is going to be very, very different because they're different customers, right? I can get away with a candle that my candle looks just like this for $26 and people love it. Now, if this was a $100 candle, I'd probably need a box. I would probably need to be a little bit more elevated in different areas, whether that's in my marketing, um, whether it's just the language and the communication that I'm having with that customer, um, but I would probably want to have a box around it. I would want to have something that just made it feel super exclusive because only a certain amount of people are going to spend a say $100 on a candle, right? If I'm selling $10 candles that I'm just trying to sell as many as I possibly can, the expectation of that $10 candle is going to be far less than my $26 candle or that $100 candle, right? I don't find $100 candles without lids usually, right? But a $26 candle without a lid is totally fine. And a $10 candle, absolutely, I wouldn't spend the money on a lid because a lid's a buck and a quarter. If I'm selling a candle for $10, I'm already not making very much money on that. I would not have a lid on there, right? So do conductor market research. Go into the locations where you want your product, see what they are, price it out. You'll get a lot of valuable information there. And then you have to turn around and say, can I make a candle for a less expensive of a number to where it makes sense? My $26 candle, this cost me about six bucks to make. So I'm getting like four, four and a half X on this. So that's sustainable for me. But if I could make it for $3, I would. You know, I would, I'm not, I'm not pricing it at $26 based on how much I can make it for. I'm pricing it at $26 based on what the customers that I'm trying to go after are spending. So that's the key when it comes to pricing. So that's conducting your um market research. Uh step three is going to be to create a business plan. Now, if you don't have a business plan, we have a business planner that's phenomenal. It's 200, 210 pages. You can actually download and open it up right inside of your Canva account if you use Canva and you can edit it right there. And you can move pages around and you can print it off. Um, or you can just, if you don't have a Canva account, you can just open it up as a PDF and you can print it off whatever you want. It's like $47 on our website. You can go to Candle BusinessPro.com and you can see business planner there. It's fantastic. Every time we do an update, we um inform anyone that's bought it. We send them an update. So it's basically for a life. You'll get all of the updates there. So again, uh that's it called a candle business planner, and you can grab that at candle businesspro.com. That's step four is uh to uh step three is to have your business plan. Step four, we're gonna think about a business name. Don't stress over business name when you're first starting out. Uh, it'll come to you. So don't uh don't delay moving forward with getting into your testing and your building out your brand by thinking of a name, but you'll need to have a name at some point. Uh step five is you got to source your materials and your equipment. Again, I have lots of free resources for you, Canada Business Pro, but in the show notes below, I also have what's called my supply checklist, and that gives you a list of all the supplies we use. So that is step five is uh sourcing your materials and your equipment, and we can help you out by telling you who we get our stuff from. Uh step six is going to be to develop your product line. Step seven is to design your packaging and your branding. Step eight is set up your business, uh, set up your entity so that you're going to be able to sell these products. You can collect taxes on these products, all of that. So that's step eight. Step nine is to create your marketing plan. And then step 10 is to launch your business. You can actually download what I just read off of here, my guide, by going to candle businessespro.com slash guide. Uh, and I'll also drop that in the notes below. But that is my 10 steps to start a candle business guide, completely free. You can go out and download that and you it'll break it down a little bit further than uh what I had time to do for you here today.

Resources Recap And How To Subscribe

SPEAKER_00 21:26

Thank you so much for uh being here today. If you don't mind, if you haven't already, just hitting that subscribe button. That helps my channel out so much. It'll also let you know every time I put out a new episode for you to view or watch. If you are listening to this on your favorite podcast player, you can also watch this on YouTube and vice versa. If you're watching this on YouTube, did you know you can listen to this on the go on your favorite podcast player? It's a Candle Business Pro podcast. Um, and you can get that on any of the platforms. Thank you all so much for being here today. Have a fantastic rest of your week, and I'll talk to you soon.