You'll Never Succeed at Wholesale Until You Know This

#057. We break down what it really takes to get your candles into retail stores through wholesale without wrecking your schedule or your margins. We walk through readiness, the exact assets buyers expect, simple wholesale math, and the follow-up system that turns first orders into steady reorders. 
• checking wholesale readiness by planning for a 100-candle order and a realistic turnaround time 
• setting shipping expectations and learning constraints like USPS weight limits and box planning 
• deciding how to approach stores and why emailing can be cleaner than walking in unannounced 
• building a wholesale catalog that answers buyer questions fast without overexplaining 
• defining minimum opening orders, reorder minimums, and product quantity multiples that protect production 
• pricing for wholesale using the 4x retail rule and keystone wholesale terms to avoid losing money 
• reducing costs by consolidating supply orders and managing shipping fees 
• tracking true cost of goods and margins with tools that factor in shipping and supplier changes 
• driving reorders with a nurture sequence plus merchandising tips, promos, and seasonal deadlines 

Grab those free resources in the notes below. You can also check out more information about our wholesale course if that's of interest to you. Um, but just grabbing that free download at uh candle businesspro.com slash wholesale. 
The other thing I recommend is our software, which is makersmanager.com. I have a free trial if you want. Uh, you can get that in the show notes below as well. 
If you have any questions, comments, definitely drop them in the notes below. DM me on Instagram if you would like, just at Candle Business Pro. 

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Transcript

Dream Stores And Wholesale Goals

SPEAKER_00 0:01

What is that dream store that you would just love to see your candles in? Where do you want your candles on the shelves of? Anytime anyone starts a business where we are potentially selling products, whether it's candles, soaps, anything, we want to see it somewhere, right? And so we probably all shared the dream of having our candles in a specific store in our city or town. I know we definitely did. There was one store we did get into uh called apothecary gift shop that was just it's the gift shop in our town. It's the place. And so we wanted our candles in there. And that was our goal when we first started in wholesale. So today I'm gonna answer five questions that have been submitted all about wholesale. And so hopefully this will help kind of get the uh the wheels turning on your wholesale business if you haven't started yet, or if you have, maybe it'll be some ideas that you need to dial in a little bit. But this is gonna be all about wholesale and how we can get you into stores.

The Wholesale Readiness Gut Check

SPEAKER_00 1:10

So the first question that came in was how do I even know if I'm ready for wholesale? Okay, so this is the gut check. This is the if an order comes in, can you fulfill it? If someone ordered a hundred candles from you today, can you fulfill it? Now here's the key. You do not need to have all the supplies to fulfill that order. You need to be set up and ready. So when that order comes in, you can turn around right away and place an order with your suppliers, and that your suppliers are gonna be able to get you the product right away so that you can turn around and get the product out. For us, we set the expectation that we're gonna ship out someone's order in a week. So if today is Monday, I want to ship out that product to them by next Monday. If I get that order from them today, I'm gonna turn around and place a supply order with my suppliers today. Hopefully, I will get that in within three days, four days at the latest for that to get to me. If I get it in four days, the supplies, that gives me three days to make those candles. I can make a hundred candles in a day. That's not a problem at all. So are you set up for that though? You might be working in a space that's extremely tight and you only have a half hour a day to make candles. If that's your situation, then you can't necessarily take on a week timeline. So maybe it's gonna take you two weeks. You can absolutely still do wholesale and give a two-week uh turnaround time, but there might be some accounts that you won't get because that timeline is isn't short enough for people. Realistically, most people, even though we would like to think that they're planning ahead for seasonality, you know, they're planning ahead for fall and winter. A lot of times the orders are going to come in and they want that as soon as possible. And so when I tell them it's gonna take us a week, that's usually never a problem for anyone there. Uh now, locally, for private label and events that we do candles and things for, sometimes it's even shorter than that. And so we need to have stuff on hand for that. But we don't specifically stock back stock of stuff that's just like on hold, waiting for a wholesale order to come in. Usually a week is gonna be plenty of time. So are you ready for it? Do you have everything dialed in that's gonna come along with wholesale? Do you understand how to ship wholesale? Do you have uh have you tested the means of how many are you, how many candles can you put into a box to where you're not gonna exceed that 50-pound weight limit that the USPS has. Things like this are gonna be, you have to go through the experience. So don't feel like you're not ready because you don't know. You're gonna learn a lot of stuff as you start getting those wholesale orders. So ultimately, for me, you're gonna be ready if you can take on an order of, say, 100 candles in a week. That means you have the time. That means you have the time to not just get your supplies, but you also have the time to physically make, uh, inspect, and get your candles out the door uh as well. And I know a lot of us uh get into candle making and it's just very, very, very part-time. And if that's the case, you might not have the capacity there. Also, there's a lot of people that are very busy and they travel with their work. If you're traveling a lot, you have too many weekend commitments. Are you gonna be able to fulfill that order and get it out the door? Um, so just those are some things to keep in mind, but I don't want you to overthink it. Worst case scenario, you start getting some wholesale orders in, and then you realize, hey, wholesale is not for me. I don't like doing this. I don't like discounting my products, giving them away for half off, and all the extra work that's going into this when I could potentially just focus on selling direct to consumers where I'm getting all of the profit that comes in, you know, minus my cost of goods. Uh, and I don't have to sell as many. So there's a lot of different avenues to go into when it comes to selling our products. We sell, in fact, I have a uh a video and an episode out called 60 plus ways that we sell candles. Check that out if you if you would like. You can also at candle businesspro.com slash 60 ways, 60 ways, you can download that that list I have, and it has a whole checklist for you to go through to see kind of what you're ready to, what category that you're ready to sell more into. Because I break that 60 into 12 different categories for you to kind of work with in. So don't feel like wholesale has to be the way to get to the next level. Because quite frankly, we push on the pedal of wholesale and then we scale back on it. We release it a little bit based on seasonality. Um, I will go heavy into wholesale until I get into holiday. When I get into holiday, I let off the gas on wholesale and I go all in with direct consumers because that's when I have customers ready to buy, and they're that's where I make the most profit per sale. So that's question one. Are you ready for wholesale? Um, and hopefully you're you're not don't you're not holding yourself back from

What You Need Before Emailing

SPEAKER_00 6:03

there. So, question two that we get is what do I actually need before I email a store? Now, some people think that they need to go into stores. I actually would frown upon that, or I would it that it doesn't work for me. It doesn't work for my lifestyle. And because I have brick and mortar stores, I have people that come into my store and trying to get us to buy wholesale their products. Uh, we just had someone last week that came in um and gave us samples of their key chains that they make. And they really wanted us to start selling or buying from them wholesale these keychains. It puts me in an awkward situation as a shop owner in that time. I'm also busy. All shop owners are busy, whether it's the shop owner or the store manager. If they're working in retail, they are busy. If you worked in retail, you know it's always busy. I'm doing payroll, I am making the schedule, I am checking in orders, all kinds of stuff. So just showing up unannounced, that's just not my uh way of doing business when it comes to wholesale. I wouldn't do that to someone else because I don't like that done to me. But that does not mean that you can't do that. In fact, I know people that do pretty well with that. So um that's just a matter of opinion on which way to go. But for me, what do I actually need before I start emailing the store, uh the store? So I need to have kind of my toolkit together, right? I need to have my catalog together. Inside of that catalog, what needs to be on there? It's gonna need to have, it needs to be, it needs to be robust in making sure that we carry uh or cover all areas of wholesale, but you don't want it to be a, you know, an encyclopedia. You want it to be to the point. You don't want to elaborate too much. If they do end up having more questions about your product, they're gonna just email you back and ask you those questions. But ideally, we want to answer most of the big questions. So the big questions are gonna be what are their products that you offer? Of course, that's going to be uh the first thing you're gonna do when you build out your catalog is put your products in there. They're gonna want to know the cost. They're gonna want to know the minimum order quantity, two different things. They're gonna need to know the pricing quantity. So for us, $300, $350 is where ours is at. And then we'll raise it up to like $400 uh occasionally, whenever we're busier. Um, so that what that's our initial opening order um dollar amount, and then a reorder dollar amount. The reorders are gonna be less than that. Ours is at $250. So that means regardless of how much you spend with us when you first open your account, when you want to place any future orders, you just have to hit $250. That's the minimum order. So I'm not gonna wholesale five candles, right? Uh so $250 is that order uh minimum. Also, uh, what is a minimum per product? So we don't allow someone to buy like one of this candle, three of another, and seven of this one, five of that one. We have them buy in quantities of six. Quantities of six is what we settled on because it's easy for us to make because in this is like this is our standard size candle, right? This is a 10-ounce candle for us. With that, we can make six six at a time in a pitcher. Uh, also, most of our vessels come to us in packs of 12. So a quantity of six will generally fill up and it'll end up being that pack of 12. If not, it I don't have any like random stragglers out there. Uh, and another example would be uh if so if if someone orders 50 candles from you, that's a weird number, even though it seems like it's an easy number. Uh it's a weird number because when I put those candles into a box to ship to you, I'm gonna put those in packs of 12, because that's what we get our vessels in. So that's gonna be four boxes, it's gonna be 48 candles. Then I have two random candles that I got to get into this box. That's gonna be complicated because now it's I gotta have another box just to ship out two candles or another layer within a box, which is adding to the shipping because the dimensions are now bigger. So, because the way we ship out our candles is we put the candles right back in the boxes that they came to us in, the vessel boxes, and then we pack those inside a bigger shipping box. So you need to have your uh line sheet, your catalog uh dialed in. Uh, you need to have what your minimum quantities are gonna be, your terms and conditions. It needs to have the way that you're gonna people are gonna order from you, um, all of that listed in there. So if you are interested in wholesale, you can just go to candlebusinesspro.com/slash wholesale. I actually have a guide that I put together for you and it covers a lot of these topics a little bit more in depth. Um, so you may want to check that out as well. Uh, that's something that could definitely help you out if you want to know more about those terms and conditions there. So,

Wholesale Pricing Without Losing Money

SPEAKER_00 10:38

third question that came in regarding wholesale that I put together for us today is how do I price for wholesale without losing money? Great question. You have to be selling your candles at a minimum of four X. Minimum of 4x. So you figure out your cost of goods on this product and then multiply that times four. That's the minimum you should be selling your product to the public for. Let me just do a simple explanation or an example of that. If this candle cost me $5 to make it, five dollars is what it cost me to make this product. The minimum that I should be selling this to the public, direct to consumer, would be $20. That's four. That's the minimum. That's that's not the most, that's the minimum. Reason for that is when you sell wholesale, wholesale pricing is going to be 50% off of retail. So if I'm selling to customers for $20, wholesale is going to be $10. No one is going to want, and I'm just I don't I want to say no one, very few shops will buy from you wholesale if they are not able to turn around and market up 100%. If they buy this candle from me from 10 for $10, they want to sell it for $20. So if I sell this to the public for $20, that means I have to sell it to that store for $10. If I'm selling this to the store for $10, I want to make at least 100% on what this cost me. It cost me $5. 100% markup of $5 is that $10. That's why pricing is so key in our candle business. If this candle is $5 to make, I sell this to the public for $15, that's only $3x. At $15, I'm wholesaling this for $7.50. That means I'm only making $2.50 when I wholesale this. That is not sustainable for a wholesale business. So making sure your pricing is dialed in is key to getting a wholesale. If you're not priced for wholesale, you're not priced for wholesale. That's just, it's just how it is. And so you need to make some adjustments there. Now, a couple of things you can do here. So when you first start, you might be buying in very minimum quantities. So your cost of goods are higher than what they would be once you start doing a little bit more business. So with that in mind, if this candle say cost me $6 instead of five, but I know that if I start buying my wax in more quantities, the shipping is going to go way down and I'll get it for less of the my cost of goods is going to go down. If that's something I can see within the trajectory of my business, then I might be able to not get a 100% markup when I first start out and wholesale. But I tell you, it's going to be really tough to get your prices down a lot more than probably what they already are. You can buy your wax in bulk. Oils, buying them in bulk does not save you much money. Your vessels in bulk does not save you in much money. Wax will save you a little bit. Ultimately, where you save the most money in your candle business when it comes to ordering in more bulk is simply not ordering as many times, consolidating your orders, only paying that shipping fee once, because the shipping is what kills us. If I need to make 12 candles today for someone and I don't have the oil, so I got to buy one pound of oil from someone, that pound of oil cost me $30. It probably cost me like another $15 just to ship that to me, right? Where I could buy five pounds of oil and that shipping cost of $15 probably only went up to say $20, right? Or I might have hit a free shipping threshold. Shipping is what kills all of us as small business owners when it comes to making candles and ordering all these supplies. So you can predict that your cost might come down a little bit as your business grows and you're not having to order as many little things at a time. But just keep that in mind, you've got to get your pricing right. The other thing I recommend is our software, which is makersmanager.com. Um, makersmanager is a software toolkit that we use that I'm a co-founder of that calculates all of your pricing. It calculates your cost of goods down to the penny. And that factors in all the shipping from the different locations and suppliers that you're buying from. So the way makers managers works is you put all of your suppliers in there, all your supply orders, you can actually just import them, and AI will actually read your receipts and it'll do all the work for you there. Um, but you put all of your supplies in there and it calculates to the penny what it costs to make every single one of your products. And then when you order more of, say, the wax, um, it's going to always keep recalculating based on your latest trends and the latest orders so that you know precisely exactly what your cost of every item is. And then it gives you retail suggestions and wholesale suggested pricing based on whatever keystone metrics you're using. So for us, we start at 4x. So you can use the X multiplier, or you can also talk in terms of margin. People will talk about a 75% margin being like the equivalent to a 4X, right? Um, our software allows you to do either of those. And it'll actually calculate and show you exactly what your profit margin is going to be for not just retail, but also for wholesale. Something for you to check out. Uh again, that's makersmanager.com. I have a free trial if you want. Uh, you can get that in the show notes below as well. You can come and check out for free uh and see all the good stuff that's uh happening on that side there. But making sure your pricing is set up correctly is going to be huge when you get into wholesale. And if you're not set up right now for wholesale, that's okay. Keep focusing on the avenues that you are doing well in. If your customer will not spend more money for your product, if you've kind of maxed out and you can't raise your prices up to accommodate wholesale, that's okay. Just lean more into uh your direct to consumer and your other uh avenues of selling. Again, wholesale sounds great. We want to see our candles on those store shelves, but I don't want to push you into doing wholesale and saying, oh, it's easy or oh, it's great, if your margins aren't there. Because if you just made a hundred candles, that's a lot of work. And if you're only making $2 a candle because the math isn't math and right, to make a hundred candles and walk away with 200 bucks, that's pretty tough. That's pretty tough. Now, when we first start, I would be happy with that. But once you get into this business more full time and you start getting more and more orders, which you will, then you're just gonna say, wow, I have a pricing issue. I got to make more money on this to make sure I'm getting enough uh juice out of the squeeze, right? Uh lastly, uh the question here, number five, is I got into stores. Now, how do I get them to reorder? So reordering is a pain point that a lot of wholesale um candle businesses have because someone's gonna place that order with me. I'm gonna get that order out the door, and then I'm just gonna sit back and wait. That's what a lot of businesses are doing. They're sitting back waiting for that next order to come in, waiting to see uh when they're gonna reorder from us again. You cannot wait on them. You have to have a very, very good wholesale strategy to do outreach to get these accounts. Don't just get on fair and just wait for orders to come in. It's not going to happen. It does not work like that. Uh fair's oversaturated. We're on fair. Uh, we stay on fair because we've gotten some very lucrative accounts through fair. But those orders came around fair because those big accounts that we have were in 45 locations of a company in the U.S. here called Rally House. And um, they they found us on Fair, but then they reached out to us directly because they're not set up to actually purchase for 45 different stores through the way Fair is set up, right? So, but they found us on there and then they ordered from us directly. That's how we got in some of the airports as well was being on Fair but then coming around us. So, yes, get on Fair. Um, if you need reach out to me directly. If you need a referral, I'll give you our referral so you can get on to Fair right away instead of them putting you onto a waiting list. Send me a message, uh, DM me on Instagram, uh, however you want. I will drop you that link and that'll get you on there much quicker than the waiting list that they currently

How To Drive Reorders Consistently

SPEAKER_00 20:00

have on there. Um, but to get reorders, getting the accounts is hard enough. And it's what we teach in our wholesale course as far as as far as how to get those cold accounts. Once you have that system down, it becomes a lot easier to get those initial accounts. But the key to success is getting companies to reorder from you. So when you have that first wholesale account, you need to reach out to them. You need to cater to them, you need to nurture them on an ongoing basis. So when I send out my first initial wholesale order to a company, a week later, I send them an email. It's a personalized email saying, hey, I just want to make sure the order arrives safely, everything looked good, you're happy with it. That that confirms right there that they are or they aren't. Um, or if there is a problem, that gives them the opportunity to let you know about that problem right away because I don't want them coming back to me in a month saying, hey, there was a problem with my order. I want to know right away. So we can just we can see like, was it really a was it, where was it, where was the problem? If if something arrived broken, I need to handle that with a post office right away or UPS right away. Um, so I send them an email right away. That gives us peace of mind that our product arrived safely, they're happy with it, but also it lets them know that you care. And that's what we're trying to do now. We now have this account. Let's nurture this account. I'm gonna send them an email after a week. Make sure the product arrives safely, that they're happy with it. Then 30 days later, a month out, I'm gonna send them another follow-up. Hey, I want to see how sales are going. If they if they respond back and say, hey, they're not going great, I'm gonna respond back and say, Hey, well, here's some here's some displaying tips, here's some merchandising tips. This is what works really well in some of these stores, right? And you can proactively give them some of this information of, hey, in our best selling stores, this is what they're doing, right? In my initial outreach emails to these stores, I also tell them what my best sellers are because I want them to carry my best sellers because I want them to sell well for them so that they turn around and buy more from us. So keep nurturing them. So a week after you deliver the order to them, a week later, check out, make sure everything's okay. And then a month later, and then they go on to my nurture list that I email every single month. And that email list is just checking in. Hey, I want to see how things are going. I want to let you know about X. What's X? X is, hey, we are running a promotion. So if you do a wholesale order of $1,000 or more, I'm gonna ship it to you for free. Hey, here's the deadline for you to put in your fall orders to get them by August 1st, if that's a concern for you. Or, hey, we are now producing our winter and Christmas candles. Order now. I'm just staying top of mind. It's just like in any emails that we send out to our direct-to-consumer customers through our website. We just want to stay top of mind. So when they're ready, they think of us instantly. Hopefully, this has helped you out. Grab those free resources in the notes below. You can also check out more information about our wholesale course if that's of interest to you. Um, but just grabbing that free download at uh candle businesspro.com slash wholesale. That is a completely free guide for you that goes a little bit deeper into some of the terms and conditions, which are gonna be really important if you uh don't have your wholesale catalog built yet. If you want to build a uh wholesale catalog, you don't have that. Inside of our course, I have actually give you all three of our versions. We have our evergreen one that we can send out any time of day, any time of year. Uh, then I also have one that's more boutique focused. And then I also have one that we actually use for us getting into like pet boutiques. Uh, I I I created it so it's like a magazine cover in a way. It's it's really, I think it's really cute, uh, if I say so myself. But it's for those candles that are for super niche audiences, like a pet shop, right? A pet shop isn't going to want this candle of mine, right? So I create another catalog that is specific for the type of shop I'm getting into, if it is different. For instance, uh, another one besides pet shops would be if I'm wanting to get into, say, bakeries. If I have a whole gourmod uh line of candles, which we do, uh, that includes like, you know, uh coffee scented to get in like coffee shops and things like that. You could create one that's very niche for them where they're not going to necessarily want a catalog full of these candles because it's not gonna fit for their brand. But hopefully this episode has helped you out. If you have any questions, comments,

Free Guides Catalog Options And Wrap

SPEAKER_00 24:25

definitely drop them in the notes below. DM me on Instagram if you would like, just at Candle Business Pro. I'm always there uh trying to help out as well. Um, we're gonna come out with us inside of the inner circle. Have a great rest of your day. Talk to you soon.