5 Reasons People Fail at Candle Making

In the pursuit of happiness, a candle appears.

But then it fades, lost to a whisper of doubt or difficulty.  Is this you?  Have you let the excitement of candle making become a victim of hopelessness?

There are many reasons people quit or give up in anything, not just candle making.  The best piece of advice for this is to stick with it and find solutions.  The only acceptable reason to stop is if making candles continually and permanently impacts your happiness.

Every other “excuse” has a solution.  Something you can do to remove it.  Every day there are doubts and difficulties, but there are also solutions.  Expectations.  Chess pieces in the game of candles you can shift and move to position yourself for success and fulfillment in this amazing trade.

Reason 1 ~ Lack of Proper Goals

Problem

Step-by-step guides are extremely popular because we are inherently lazy creatures. It’s much easier to be told what to do than to learn, research, plan and execute.

It’s a lot to ask, especially when approaching a trade such as candles. Most everyone who gets involved in candles just “likes making candles”. Sometimes you like it enough to turn it into a business, but a lot of people get burned out quickly.

Have you ever seen this?

• “I’m re-launching my business soon”
• “I haven’t touched my candle making equipment in months!”
• “I want to leave my job to do this full time but I just don’t know if I can make enough money to make it worthwhile.”

These are red flags that your effort doesn’t have a robust plan. The good news? It’s a simple solution (not “easy”, but simple).

Solution

Every great venture needs a set of milestones, an ultimate pursuit, and a structured, detailed guide for how to get there. As lazy creatures, we want the obvious path forward into the unknown of “making candles”.

Sure, you got the “making candles” part figured out. Too many jump in without a game plan for how they want to make candles more than a hobby and just needlessly wander towards nothing. Some make it through this foggy void, but most get lost and give up.

Buckle up, it’s time to plan and make the obvious path forward so it’s easier to manage the day-to-day responsibilities of growing full time into candle making. You need a business plan.

There are thousands of great resources for how to build one. All of them share the following attributes:

• A mission statement outlining the purpose and drive behind your work. Humanitarian? Profit? Outreach? Education?
• Market scope you want to compete in (and eventually dominate). Face-to-face? E-commerce? Wholesale? Craft fairs?
• Financial goals at appropriate levels of detail. What are your expected monthly profits? Annual? Event-specific profit?
• Strategies for research & development. Take time to outline how you’ll brand, build, and bolster your product line.
• Customer engagement strategies for how to foster the most important relationship in business. Social media? Word of mouth? Website SEO?

Don’t take this step lightly. Put aside a few hours this week to research and structure your entire approach to candles to make it as easy as possible for you to grow and motivate in the coming days.

Tailor the plan to wherever you are at in your candle making journey and be as descriptive as possible so you can generate detailed milestones to pursue and achieve.

Reason 2 ~ Expecting Perfection

Problem

There are a million and one ways to screw up a candle. Naturally, this feels like failure and you’ll never be good enough – might as well stop.

Even if you watched ALL the videos and read all the books, it feels like nothing you ever create will be as good as what others are doing. The burden of creation is great. Also, the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know about candle making.

On top of everything, you’ve spent more money into this craft than you want to admit. Is it even worth continuing?

Solution

“Failure” is just an interpretation of a moment that didn’t go as planned. The most successful people have more of these moments than anyone who quit ever will.

That’s amazing to think about.

The difference between successful people and quitters is they use those moments to learn exactly what not to do next time. Failure is actually the best time to learn. Experiences sharpen us like no teacher ever could.

Reason 3 ~ Lacking Equipment

Problem

Although it is fairly easy to make candles in your kitchen, sometimes it feels like you’re MacGyver’ing things together and it just gets old.

It’s expensive to have the fancy melt pot, or the beautiful containers. On top of everything, you just don’t feel like your skill level even justifies having those “nice things” to make candles with.

It’s a battle of feeling too inferior to invest in better equipment. Not having better equipment keeps you feeling inferior. It’s a vicious cycle, so how do you escape it?

Solution

Start small.

Practice humility.

If you can’t afford to invest money in what everyone else is doing (Facebook is the worst for this) then take pride in your little corner of the world with your scrappy tools.

Candles are one of the greatest avenues of creativity. A beautiful clash of art and science to produce a small combustion machine that doubles as an interior design feature in a home. The vastness of pathways to a new candle mean it shouldn’t matter how unique your tools are as long as you’re melting wax, adding color and fragrance, and pouring or setting the wax into a solid again.

The quickest way to “better” tools is to start selling candles to anyone you possibly can, and reinvest every penny of those sales directly back into your operation. It always starts out small. Baby steps. But it will grow if you stay persistent.

Reason 4 ~ Fear of Judgement

Problem

Is there anything more crippling than the opinions of others? Doubt and darkness often come from the negative thoughts and opinions of others, even the assumed opinions.

Temptations circle in your mind, all starting with “what if” to discourage or bum you out.

What if they don’t like the color?

What if they don’t like the smell?

What if my packaging isn’t perfect?

What if they never pay me for it?

Many of these manifest in your mind before they actually happen. It’s a deep fear in all of us that something we put so much time, energy, and thought into might not please another person. Is this fair?

Solution

We live in a culture that constantly seeks the approval of others, through “likes”, “shares”, and “views”. Our self-worth can sometimes be defined entirely by how other people value what we do, rather than who we are.

If you make candles because it makes you happy, there isn’t a single opinion in the world that is worth taking that from you.

It can be the most difficult thing we do in a minute-to-minute, social media driven world, but this fear can be conquered by placing your happiness over the opinions of others (which can also include good opinions too).

Reason 5 ~ Lack of Discipline

Problem

Maybe more common than fear is the lack of discipline to finish something you start. It’s easy to get started on something when the “idea” is exciting.

Day 1: “Sure, candles are awesome! Making them looks so fun!”

Day 5: “I made a few, but I stumbled around because I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

Day 15: “I could probably get a lot better at candle making but I just don’t have time.”

Day 25: “It’s just easier to buy a candle. Maybe my niece can take my extra supplies.”

Solution

With few exceptions, almost everyone has enough time. The claim of, “I don’t have time” loses a lot of weight when you graph out how your last week went. How much time did you watch television? How much time did you aimlessly scroll on your phone?

It’s not that we don’t have time. It’s that we don’t make time.

Discipline is built from motivation and continuously driven by consistent behaviors to build incredible momentum. It needs a plan, attention, and can never be ignored. If you want to start finishing, and stop starting, it’s time to build a structure around your habits that enable successful behavior.

It’s time to remove all your excuses and pour. You got this!