Your product line is a reflection of your candle business, but where do you even start?

This article covers seven of the best steps to take when starting your business so you can safely transform your passion into profit, enjoyment, and deep-rooted satisfaction.

Let’s dive in!

Don’t sell candles you don’t know how to make

One of the core struggles with starting a candle business is that too many people think CANDLE SKILLS easily become BUSINESS SKILLS.

Unfortunately this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Starting a candle business requires a completely different set of skills than candle making.  To name a few:

• marketing & sales
• branding & logo design
• digital presence
• customer experience design
• sales copy
• business planning

…and the list goes on!

Becoming the CEO of your business requires more than basic candle making skills.  Although there are many candle influencers that have successfully built small kingdoms in our niche, you can learn business and entrepreneurial skills from a lot of non-candle sources.

But there’s a huge difference between the two skill sets.

You can start a candle business without knowing much about business (you’ll learn the skills as you go), but you absolutely cannot go in without knowing how to make candles.

Don’t think about building a candle business until you really understand how to make candles.

Learning the fundamentals of any skill is necessary for success, candles are no exception.  If you want to accelerate your learning, consider checking out the Armatage Candle Company fundamentals online course.

Not ready to invest in yourself?

Peruse the blog or check out Erica Boucher’s YouTube channel for more candle making insights.  

Become a specialist, not a generalist

It’s easy to be a people pleaser.  And when you’re starting a business?  You get desperate.

Losing-your-identity desperate.

One temptation is to “be everything for everyone”, but this will set you back.

In fact, if you start making every candle with every color in every size, shape, and scent, you’ll burn out fast.

Scaling outward is important, but timing is everything.

Choose to focus on a small number of designs for your initial product offering.

More on that later.

You only have so much bandwidth, and your future success depends on your early wins.  If you spread yourself too thin with inventory, testing, and other workshop overhead you’re unnecessarily setting yourself up for burnout.

Not to mention if you try to sell to everybody you’re really selling to nobody.

Make it special.  Keep it small.

Grow your product line from one base

Your first priority is simplicity.

This means building your initial offering from one “base” of materials.

More specifically, your early products will come from the same wax blend and candle type.

Using a common base follows the best practices for candle design.  Adding too many variables to the foundation of the design (multiple waxes, or different sizes) makes troubleshooting difficult and scaling inventory more complicated.

Adding complexity to your supply chain so early will slow down your ability to navigate the murky waters of an early adventure.

Think about it this way: if you start a container candle store with one wax type and a single sized container, you only have to worry about sourcing a single wax and container.

Simple = Speed.

More “stuff”  adds at least two different risks to your new business:

• Financial investment in twice as many supplies
• Time investment because you need to wick test the naked wax (no fragrance oil or dye) for two different bases

When you can afford the financial and time investments required, scaling into more options makes sense.  Before that moment, simplicity will keep you agile.

In practice, sharing a single “base” means your product line will all have the same container and wax, but have different fragrance oil, wick series/size, and colors.

Target every major fragrance category

Every fragrance oil falls into one of four categories:

• Floral
• Oriental
• Woody
• Fresh

This idea comes from Michael Edwards’s The Fragrance Manual which highlights these categories (and is still widely used in the fragrance industry today).

Your early business should offer no more than one scent across the spectrum of fragrance categories.

Remember the “base” you’re using?

Fragrance oil, dye and wick types/sizes are the only difference – meaning you will spend time iterating through different fragrance combinations to find which you want to offer first to your customers.

Refer to the table below to have an idea of what each fragrance category includes.

This isn’t an exhaustive or definitive list.  Many fragrance oils combine aspects of each for a more complicated scent profile.

Floral	Oriental	Woody	Fresh
Rose	Cinnamon	Sandalwood	Citrus
Lilac	Vanilla	Patchouli	Berry
Jasmine	Musk	Cedar	Linen
Magnolia	Cardamom	Leather	Lemon

There’s a fifth category of fragrance, fougère, which categorizes fragrances not found in nature.  Proceed into this at your own leisure or risk.

Track your analytics to tune your work

One of the “business skills” is reflection, analysis, and reaction to how your work impacts the market.

Ultimately you want to produce MORE of what people want and LESS of what they don’t want.  Your marketplace of choice makes a huge difference too because the right audience might not even hear your message or see your work.

Finding your people is a large but necessarily part of running a successful business.  The other part is identifying the most important metrics for your success and tying it back to your product line.

Should you create more of that one candle?  Is your workshop throughput keeping up with demand?  Are you sitting on too much inventory at once?

Consider measuring the following analytics to help you figure out what to do with your work (not an exhaustive list):

Metric	Units	Description
Finished Goods per Batch	Candles	How many candles you can make in a single batch(part of measuring throughput)
Time per Single Batch	Minutes	How fast you can make a single batch of candles(part of measuring throughput)
Throughput	Candles per Hour	Rate at which you can create candles.  Calculate by:(Finished Good per Batch) ÷ (Time per Single Batch) x 60
Profit Margin	% or $	Amount you make after paying for materials and overhead.  Learn more about pricing candles.
Monthly Sales	Units	Number of actual candles you sold in a given month
Inventory	Consumption Rate,Shelf Life,Lead Time,Buffer Supplies,	Supply management is a critical skill for building your empire and finding what works.

With all these numbers tracked, you can:

• Find out which designs don’t make enough money
• Optimize your workshop for supply management
• Budget
• Determine how popular every product is
• Intelligently change parts of your process that aren’t working, and invest in processes that are

Analytics can be hard to track, but they almost always give you great information on how well your business is producing.

Gather an insane amount of feedback

Feedback gives you clarity into how good your candles really are.

Let’s face it – we have a hard time honestly evaluating our work.  Learning to gather feedback is a critical step for removing bias from the equation as much as possible.

Not to suggest you should be creating a commodity.  After all, candles are your art.  Rather you should learn from your audience.  Here’s a few ideas (partially inspired by suggestions from Forbes):

Samples

Everyone loves samples.

Knock two birds out with one stone by giving generously during your research and development phase to others.  Armatage Candle Company recommends the BLO Test for gathering feedback, which means giving away candles that have passed a safety test and your own performance (scent throw) criteria.

Samples used this way only work if you get feedback, so don’t forget to follow-up with anyone who receives one.  Encourage honesty, even if it hurts, then aggregate all the opinions together for a final analysis.

Ugly Testing

Giving products to people you trust for free in exchange for their feedback is easy to do, but if the candle you’re giving them is sparkling with an awesome label design and your final packaging they probably won’t feel as comfortable giving you negative feedback.

For this reason, provide them a rough version of the final product to burn.

Ugly versions, though viable, don’t come with as much psychological pressure to give gentler feedback.  Just make sure you don’t change the functional aspects of the candle – only the cosmetics.

Interpreting Feedback

The worst thing you could do during this stage is to take any opinion too seriously or be too cavalier about it.

Gather feedback en masse and look at it holistically, and evaluate it at 1,000-feet.  Respond appropriately when you notice common themes among your feedback groups.

Just remember everyone has preferences when it comes to scent – your judgement is key to discerning good feedback from bad!