Candle Maker Digital Recommendations for 2021
Successful candle making requires use and expertise of several different tools.
Heat guns, for smoothing out tops, preheating containers, and cleaning equipment. Double boilers and Presto Pots, for melting down wax. The craft even requires skills in building strange wick-holding systems from chopsticks and clothespins at times for containers with weird shape or wick requirements.
However, behind the scenes at a candle makers shop are tools that never meet the oily side of wax: digital tools.
Digital tools help accelerate your candle making technique and business in hundreds of ways. From staying organized to securing your passwords, the backbone of your overhead needs attention and investment to help you succeed even more in your wax-blend journey.
This article features the digital toolbox employed by Armatage Candle Company in 2020, with reviews and considerations for you to take back to your candle operation!
This post contains affiliate links to one or more of our advertisers which may result in compensation for Armatage Candle Company when you sign up or buy those products. All opinions expressed in this article belong to us and don’t necessarily reflect the companies or products mentioned.
Task Management - Trello
Staying on task is imperative for producing results and meeting goals. Trello simplifies the act of defining and organizing your work into cards and columns:
We chose Trello for managing our tasks for one reason: simplicity.
Some task management tools come with robust features for coordinating work across different teams. Others build on a robust system of tags and notifications and workflows. These all have their place, but ACC is minimally staffed (read: 1).
In Trello, the smallest unit is a card which represents some amount of work to be done. You can put whatever you want into a card:
- Pour candle
- Send email
- Buy supplies
However granular you want to get is possible. Writing cards to fit your workflow and style is always better. Sometimes a happy balance of detail and big-picture titles two works better.
Every card has an area for descriptions and organizational tagging, too:
All cards live in a List. The list is titled however you want, but we’ve found that keeping it to the basics works well: To Do, In Progress, and Done. Litter it with as many other categories as you want, especially if it compliments the Board it’s on.
Boards are separate spaces in the app. If you put cards on one Board (technically a list on the Board), you won’t see it on another Board. Again, you can be as creative and detailed as you like. Some people create Boards for the different areas of their business:
- Research & Development
- Customer Service
- Marketing
- Internal Business Operations
- Production Line
…which helps distinguish the different areas of work.
Trello makes it easy to bring team members on to help, too. If you’re using a virtual assistant or just expanding your team, multiple people can collaborate on your work and you can use Trello as a central hub for all the planned work of the week, month, or quarter.
Every card has an area for noting Activity so you can track touchpoints and assignments across the entire team.
Remember, the purpose of a tool like this is to help define your short term and long term roadmap. If you feel burdened by having to fill out your Trello app, maybe consider shifting away from it. You want this to accelerate your work, not become your work.
Whiteboards are pretty dope.
Content Creation & Photo Editing - Canva Pro
For some people, Adobe Photoshop is life. For the rest of us, Canva comes to the rescue.
And what’s not to love? Canva makes it super easy to edit photos and create graphics. Almost everything you see by Armatage Candle Company went through Canva at one point or another.
Building an incredible digital presence online is one of the key strategies for sticking out in a saturated candle market. The central focus of your digital presence is content creation, and you need a tool that works for you and not against you.
For most of us, candle making is a strength, but graphic creation and photo editing isn’t. If you’re blessed enough with the ability and financial flexibility to use Photoshop, it’s the superior tool, but it’s complicated and expensive.
Enter: Canva.
Canva offers over 8,000 different templates to start you out with access to hundreds of thousands of pictures in their library. You can create new graphics in any dimension, edit your own photos with some super neat filters, generate multi-page Instagram carousels, and more. And that’s just the free version.
Not to sound like a sales person, but (accidentally) upgrading to Canva Pro changed the entire course of Armatage Candle Company’s content strategy. With the ability to access Pro-only templates, elements, photos, and features, Canva Pro unlocked a new ceiling of capabilities for the business.
At roughly half the monthly cost of Photoshop, and about the same cost as a streaming service, Canva Pro keeps your overhead low while giving you freedom to craft and create content for your brand. Armatage Candle Company uses Canva Pro for:
- Instagram carousel creation
- YouTube thumbnails
- Editing graphics for the main website
- Creating candle labels for use in other programs or printing services
- Designing the Armatage Candle Company logo (yup)
- Pinterest pin design
- Facebook banners and posts
- IGTV thumbnails and some Instagram story posts
Anytime we need branded, specifically sized, beautiful (as possible) graphics we use Canva. Their Pro plan has a 30-day free trial, but you should always start with their normal free plan to see if it fits well with your workflow. If you’re interested and sign up with our affiliate link you’ll support this site – we may receive compensation and it helps keep candle making content churning!
Website Hosting - Bluehost
Okay, a lot of us don’t really understand technology. That’s okay – let’s clear some of that up now.
Often times you’ll pay a company to “borrow” one of their computers for a period of time. That computer kind of runs an app called WordPress that happens to look a lot like a website. We call the computer a server and the website a… website, I guess.
The website URL you use to access it is called a domain. You’re currently on the armatagecandlecompany.com domain, which makes the computer we’re “borrowing” from Bluehost talk to your phone or laptop.
This idea is called hosting, and it looks different depending on who you talk to or buy from. Companies like Bluehost allow you to pay them a fee and they include the server, an installation of WordPress, and a domain in the offer.
Other companies, like Shopify, include the server fees in their offer to you and allow you to host on their platform as part of the service. You can even buy your own domain and bring it to them to use, which would point your own URL at the store that secretly runs on their servers.
If you run your own website or want to, ACC recommends starting with Bluehost.
They are a phenomenal company well regarded for their technology and customer service. Just about anything you want to accomplish can happen with WordPress installed on your hosted server (which is included in their plans).
While not as naturally tuned for selling without other tools, WordPress is super flexible to meet your needs. The learning curve is higher with this if you do it yourself, but between YouTube and Bluehost support you can accomplish anything without being an expert.
Why host your own site? It warrants an entire article of its own, but here are some benefits versus the alternative:
- You control how your content and listings appear
- Hundreds of thousands of plugins to accomplish anything you envision for your site
- Having a place for a blog (on a platform built for blogging) gives your brand a digital voice in a place your customers will easily find
- Hosting your own store puts you in full control of branding, writing, and organizing (if you’re into that)
- Running a hosted solution allows you to easily integrate with known email providers, like Mailchimp or ConvertKit. Having an email list allows you to connect with your audience and customers without worrying about how the algorithm affects you.
Running your business this way isn’t for everyone, but if you use our affiliate link you’ll support this site and get an incredible discount on your first year or so with Bluehost. No pressure, and no worries. Don’t do this if you aren’t sure enough what it is.
Documentation - Google Sheets & Docs
No offense, Microsoft, but Google is killing it with their free apps.
Anyone running Android on their phone almost certainly uses Gmail. If you have a Google account, you automatically have access to their entire suite of free products.
If you’re a one-person operation, there’s no reason you shouldn’t take advantage of Google’s tools or something similar. Here’s why: you could break your computer or laptop or lose a flash drive at any point in time potentially losing all your information! Why risk that?
Think right now – what would happen if your device shipped the bed and you lost everything stored in it? If the answer is a catastrophe, we can’t recommend enough that you look towards using a cloud hosted solution for your digital peace of mind.
Our choice is Google Drive, which integrates with any files (probably .png files from Canva), but also plays super nice with Docs, Sheets, and a host of other services. If a computer decides to prematurely retire, gaining access to all the Armatage Candle Company data is a password and phone verification away on literally any internet connected device in the entire world.
Here’s a few of the main uses employed by Armatage Candle Company with the Google products:
- Test data (Sheets)
- Price models and forecasting (Sheets)
- Temporary accounting (Sheets)
- General design notes (Docs)
- Customer record keeping (Docs)
- Business plan (Docs)
- Product descriptions and listings (Docs)
- Candle Facts master list (Docs)
- Storing photography and created content (Drive)
Think of it as a hard drive that never goes bad and remains accessible as long as Google stays in business (you can always download it to an external hard drive though).
Conclusion
Some notable mentions:
- Email Hosting – Mailchimp. Create automations and sign-up forms to build, maintain, and interact with your audience. Works well with any website solution you have, and starts out free with a decent set of features available.
- Social Media – Instagram & Pinterest. To date, we’ve never found anything more effective than Pinterest for driving traffic to the blog. Instagram is hot social media, but playing around in Tik Tok may benefit your brand as well depending on your target audience.
- Financial Transactions – PayPal. An industry leader that makes it easy to collect money. Also consider using Venmo, but PayPal gives you a free device customers can swipe their credit card through to pay you if you sell in person. Using PayPal also means you have a clear area for transactions that interfaces well and isn’t a bank.
2020 is/was a year unlike any other. Armatage Candle Company exists to accelerate your candle making technique and business – a digital presence is only part of your strategy as a business.
Don’t under or overdo it in this space, but remember how crucial it is to stay competitive and relevant in a niche as saturated as candles. Establishing a branded, magnificent digital presence requires time and patience, which you should be great at if you make candles!
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