Stop reading I’d you want to make money selling candles but haven’t learned candle making fundamentals.

Seriously.

A lot of people jump into candle making too quickly with their eye on “business” before they fully grasp what it takes to craft safe candles that smell amazing too.

However, if you want to know more about how to transform this hobby into a legitimate side hustle then read on!

At the end there’s an actionable checklist for bootstrapping your hobby.

This post IS for anyone who:

• Wants to spend 10 to 20 hours a week making and selling candles
• Welcomes incremental growth
• Views candles as art, not a commodity
• Wants to build a legally legitimate side hustle that could grow into larger opportunities

This post is NOT for anyone who wants to build a million dollar candle business in 6 months or less.

Is a million dollar candle making income even possible?

It’s probably best if we start with some cold hard truth bombs.

The Honest Truth About Running A Candle Business

How many full time candle makers have you heard of?

Brands like P.F. Candle Co., Harlem Candle Company and Otherland may come to mind as success stories, but they’re generally the exception.

Not the rule.

While not a scientifically verified number, the active homemade candle making community is around 100,000 to 150,000 people.

Number of full time homemade brands?

Far less than that.

If your goal is to build a slightly profitable side hustle, candles are probably a good choice.

Want to be a millionaire?

Don’t hold your breath.

Not to suggest it isn’t possible to build wealth, but creating a money-printing machine requires:

• Deep business skills
• Broad understanding of manufacturing at scale
• Significant investment in labor and quality assurance
• Operating capital usually higher than normal for a craft business

The point?

Selling candles from home to the point that it provides a fully sustainable income is a large task.  Especially since most people do it while working another job.

Think of a thriving candle business like a garden: EVERYTHING starts small and EVERYTHING needs water.  Some items can’t be planted in certain areas or during certain times of year, and a few plants even need a special type of skill to successfully grow and harvest.

Candle business is not an overnight adventure.  You’ll need patience, persistence, and a constant yearning for learning.

And time.

The point is this: creating a successful candle business depends on your definition of success and it won’t happen overnight.

It’s not that large incomes are impossible, but when you start putting the math together it’ll be clear why such intense cash flows aren’t immediately in reach for most people.

With that awfully humbling truth out of the way, let’s discuss practical steps to make money selling candles.

Getting Started

Assuming you understand how to create test-driven candles with safety, your new candle business needs to figure out the following items:

• Identity
• Target Customers
• Outfit Your Workshop
• Product Line
• Insurance
• Budget
• Plan

This works best if you’re taking notes, so grab a notepad!

How To Create Your Identity

You can categorize your identity as a candle maker from the following factors:

• Name
• Mission Statement

Let’s start with finding a name.

Picking A Name

Names are overrated.

So are logos.

Truthfully, naming your business effort generates more stress than a lot of other decisions because it’s practically permanent.

Armatage Candle Company isn’t perfect, but it remains.

What matters isn’t your name, but what you do with it.

Dress a pig up however you like – it’s still a pig.

The point is, if you make and fulfill bold promises to your customers, your name will represent that no matter how “good” or “bad” it is.

Think of the Starbucks logo.  Seth Godin calls it a horrible logo, but calls out that they’ve made it meaningful by providing an impact on the world.

In the same way, if your work resonates with your customers and fans, your name and logo will remind them positively of that going forward.

Whatever you choose to name yourself, get the legal work out of the way and file for a DBA, LLC, or any other business structure (whichever your research leads you to believe will serve your needs best).

But since you may need help picking a name, here’s a few suggestions to get you started:

• Don’t be afraid to keep it simple.  “Something Candle Company” works fine!
• Candle puns aren’t always as clever as you think they are.  Run it by a few random folks first.
• Google it before committing to it.  It may be taken already or have search results you would never climb above.
• Think about the future.  If you ever want to expand outside of candle making, does your chosen name make that more difficult or confusing?

Mission Statement

At this point, your only job is to tell stories to yourself and everyone around you until you find the right one.

Your story is the unfinished effort you strive to accomplish with your work.

Another phrase for this is the “mission statement”.

Figuring out what you want to do is how you’ll make every single decision that follows.  Companies like The Futur define their work as wanting to, “Teach one billion people how to make a living, doing what they love.”

Every major decision Chris Do makes supports this story – everything from the content he creates to the audience he seeks to resonate with.

If you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, what problem you’re solving, or what cause you’re supporting, you don’t have a business – you only have an expensive hobby.

People pay money to have their problems solved, not to support your desire for money.

If your goal is simply to put more candles into the world, you’re creating a commodity rather than art, and you should learn more about manufacturing theory instead of this blog!

A great mission statement and story answer the following questions:

• How is your work going to change the world?
• What problem are you solving?
• Who are you solving problems for?
• Why are you solving that problem?

Consider the following example:

“Fill homes with interesting fragrances and decorations worth talking about.”

• How does this change the world?  By filling homes with interesting decorations.
• What problem is being solved?  Desire for interesting home decor.
• Whose problem is being solved?  Anyone seeking to spice up their living space.
• Why?  To create conversation and atmosphere.

No matter what the company accountable to that mission does, their work needs to support those goals.

Your mission statement can be private, but exposing it publicly will ensure you have a compelling reason to remain accountable to your goals!

One more thing: write your mission statement as an ACTION.

Define Your Target Customers

You may be selling candles from your home, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have customers.

If you expect to sell to anybody, you’ll end up selling to nobody.

You can argue with that all you want, but sales theory and experience shows if you don’t have a specific audience in mind you likely won’t get very far.

Does this mean you choose a demographic and cater to their specific needs?

Yes, kind of.  But also kind of no.

Start with your mission statement which should answer the question:

What problem are you solving?

Your audience then neatly becomes people who have that problem, which should help narrow down your ideal customers.

If your mission statement is, “Fill homes with interesting fragrances and decorations worth talking about” then you may seek people that are:

• Home owners
• High income earners
• Interested in art
• Interested in dinner parties

The rest is research, which means figuring out where they are and how to present the right message to them at the right time.

Knowing your mission statement and your ideal customer helps shape the rest of your business.  In fact, you may not even want to sell directly to the customers!

Your target audience may be people that shop at expensive boutique stores, which means you may work towards selling to the boutique store that shares the same audience!

All the groundwork here sets the stage for every future decision about what you make, how you price it, where you distribute it, and perhaps most importantly, what you create.

Outfit Your Workshop

You can’t make candles without an investment in your tools.

Assuming you already know how to make candles, this step is intended to make sure you have what you need to scale from a small hobby into a profitable venture.

Your system may vary, generally speaking when constructing your workshop use the following DOs and DON’Ts.

DOs

Invest in multiple pour pots

Invest in a Presto Pot, hot plates, or even a wax melter

Invest in shipping materials – save what you can from supplier deliveries (if you can use it)

Organize your digital resources appropriately

Keep your supplies and equipment organized with labels in a dedicated area away from pets and children

DON’Ts

Try to make a double boiler system work if you need to pour more than a four candles in a day

Hand-calculate every wax and fragrance weight for your candles – use templates that do all the math for you so you don’t make unnecessary mistakes

Continue with anything until you have a working fire extinguisher nearby

Leave too many old candles that don’t pass testing for too long.  Recycle and clean them out or give them away.

As you grow, think about how you can store wax, fragrance oil, wicks, etc in the most efficient way for your processes.

Folding tables, while not attractive, serve a very strong purpose and can move around and transport easily.

If you’re selling at a booth, they work wonders behind the booth for any administrative needs.

At a minimum, you should have at least one of the following:

• Heat gun
• Large aluminum pour pot
• IR thermometer
• Glass (candy) thermometer
• Hot plate/Presto Pot/Wax Melter
• Kitchen scale (grams/ounces)
• Small measuring glass (for oils)

For a full list of recommended equipment for candle making and content creation, look at the Equipment List.

Build A Product Line

Once you have an identity, a target audience, and a workshop, it’s time to start putting together your first sell-able candles!

Resist the temptation to create tons of variety, colors, and scents to try and appease every version of your customer.

Growing too much at once will exhaust you, spread your resources thin, add a lot of overhead, and cost you inventory.

All with no sales data to warrant such an aggressive product offering.

Instead, keep it simple and follow the Rules For Building Your First Product Line.

Abbreviated, they are:

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

Make sure you understand how candles work and how to test them before you even THINK about selling any.

Become a specialist, not a generalist

Resist the temptation to “be everything for everyone”.

It’s tiring and you actually need to focus.

Grow your product line from one base

Choose a standard mold/vessel and wax blend to make ALL your candles from.

This greatly simplifies scaling out and making adjustments to your design early on.

Target every major fragrance category

Scent is complicated.

Offering almost any category an olfactory bulb could want almost guarantees everyone can find a scent they enjoy.

Track your analytics to tune your work

You can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Figuring out which analytics lead to the best results should be a top priority of your early days and beyond.

Gather an insane amount of feedback

The last thing you want to do is invest your time and resources into a bad idea.

Instead, approach your work with humility and try to use customer feedback to drive a portion of your decision-making.

(that, or switch your target audience to people that want your art!)

Besides those rules, make sure your graphic design is on fleek!

Depending on your target audience and estimated candle price, investing in graphic design is the easiest way to build perception of value around your product.

Not to suggest you need to pay someone to figure it out, but rather take the extra time to elevate your presentation.

We wrote an article about label design principles that may give you necessary insight into what it takes to transform an average label into one that attracts your people.

Secure Insurance

Watch the news enough and you’ll see an unfortunate trend in house fires caused by candles.

It’s not always that the candle was built poorly.  Sometimes accidents happen.

At the end of the day candles are a fire hazard (even if they’re beautiful), which means they pose a risk in some way, shape, or form.

As a seller of fragrant goods, someone experiencing burns or damage to the property can come after you.

You?

Well, maybe your LLC instead of your personal assets, but a lawsuit can happen.

Insurance provides a means to protect your love of the craft today and tomorrow.

You can buy many different types of candle making insurance, but you’ll always need Product Liability insurance.

Product Liability insurance, “exist to cover financial liabilities related to physical harm or damages caused by the product”.

Meaning, if a candle caused a fire in someone’s home and they triggered legal action against you, the insurance policy would protect you from paying a significant amount in legal, medical and other fees if you were at fault.

From a previous post:

“To be clear, product liability insurance doesn’t mean you can’t be found responsible for the damage.  If your candle really is responsible (which is determined by insurance companies and/or a court of law), the insurance company will typically pay out any fees (up to a certain amount) you’re liable for, even if it’s just legal fees.  Without insurance, your business is on the hook to pay out, and a single case can swiftly bankrupt you without insurance.”

Signing a policy is doing your due diligence in the industry – insurance is part of the cost of business and should be secured as soon as possible.

Seek insurance companies that understand what you’re doing with candles (which you should have a good idea around at this point), and make sure they clearly spell out what their policy DOES and DOES NOT cover.

They should understand candles.

Two well known companies that offer insurance policies to candle makers:

• Indie Business Network
• Handcrafted Soap & Cosmetic Guild (HSCG)

Whoever you’re exploring, make sure you speak with a real person and talk about what you’re doing, how you’re selling, and what a real claim looks like with them.

Budget

The entire point of selling candles from home is to make some money!

A budget allows you to easily see if your work is on track to be profitable or if you’re just sinking money into the workshop with no results.

Your budget can be as complicated or as simple as you want, and only makes a difference if you track everything you’re doing.

It may feel more administrative than you wish, but it’s part of running a business.

At the end of the day you’ll make money if your revenue is greater than your overhead and material costs.

If you can measure these three items, you can track profit:

• Material Costs
• Overhead Costs
• Revenue

If you don’t have a background in accounting or don’t like math, then keep your initial budget simple.  Our guide to candle pricing goes into incredible detail over measuring material costs, overhead, revenue, and profit if you want a more detailed approach.

Everything we’re about to do should take place over a MONTH, meaning you will need to record these numbers every month to see how you’re doing.

Material Costs

Material costs are any costs associated with physically creating the material.  Track all expenses associated with creating each candle, which may include:

Wax	Wicks	Fragrance Oil	Containers
Coloring	Packaging	Safety Labels	Primary Label

Calculate the cost per candle for each of these items, then look back over the previous month to see how many you sold of that particular candle.

Overhead Costs

These are all the costs that occur over a period of time and aren’t tied to a single candle.

Sometimes they’re paid over a month, every other week, or even annually.  Figure out what the “monthly” rate of the cost is for items like:

• Research and development materials
• Advertising
• Website fees
• Insurance premiums
• Shipping materials (this can also be a material cost if done correctly)
• Business fees
• Shipping (we recommend you track shipping as an overhead cost)

If they’re paid annually, divide that number by 12 to find the monthly cost.

Revenue

Revenue is easy: how much money did you receive for your sales in a month?

If you ship candles, the amount a customer pays YOU in shipping counts as revenue.

At this point you can think about how to price your candles to find out how much the customer should pay you:

Price Model #1: Monthly Profit Approach (Set Your Profit)

The Monthly Profit Approach takes what you’re capable of selling and declares your intended profit.  It’s a little backwards, but it guarantees a profit if you’re able to sell the amount of candles you’re planning on selling.

Answer three questions:

1. How much profit do you want to make every month?
2. How many candles can you sell in a given month?
3. What is your monthly overhead plus monthly material costs for (2)?

The candle price then becomes:

Candle Price = [ (1) + (3) ] ÷ (2)

For example, if you want to make $1,000 per month selling candles, expect to sell 60 candles, and have $460 of overhead and material costs:

• Overhead: $100
• Material Costs: $6.00 per candle * 60 candles = $360

Candle Price =  [ $1,000 + $460 ] ÷ 60

Candle Price = $24

Price Model #2: Standard Profit Margin (Simple)

The Standard Profit Margin approach ignores all overhead and multiplies your material costs by a certain factor.

Once you know the UNIT material cost (the amount for a single candle), you multiply by a number between 2 and 4, typically.

Candle Price = Material Cost per Candle x 3

It’s barbaric, but easy.  You won’t know your profit until you compare your overhead, but it helps get you started.

This oversimplification ignores your identity because you’re pricing the commodity, rather than the solution you’re providing to your target audience.

Does that make sense?

You could price a metal key at $4, but it’s worth far more than that to someone trying to open a door it unlocks.

Price Model #3: Research-based Pricing

In this model, you’ll take everything you know about your target audience and combine it with your identity in the marketplace to produce a number.

You’re not selling candles, you’re solving a problem – refer to your mission statement.

Nearly every product on the market is there to solve a problem:

• To be entertained
• To be fed
• To organize
• To impress

No one buys a vacuum to own a vacuum – they buy one because they seek to solve a problem of dirtiness (or spiders in some cases).

In the same vein, no one buys a candle to own a candle – they’re seeking a solution.

Price your candles to the solution for your specific audience, not the product.  You’re likely not the only candle on the market, so study everyone competing for your same people and price competitively for the solution you’re providing.

Profit

So did you make a profit?

To find out, add up your material costs and overhead costs and subtract them from your revenue.

Profit = Revenue – Material Costs – Overhead Costs

Or build a spreadsheet, hire a college student, or buy software that does it for you.

Create a Plan

Motivation is unreliable, but habits are everything.

If you’re serious about selling candles regularly you need to form a plan.  

Your plan always shows up even when your motivation doesn’t!

How do you build a plan?

Step 1 – Foundational Work (Month 0)

First start with defining success, milestones, and your short-term expectations.

Building a business takes time, and assuming you’re going to be raking in enough to replace a substantial amount of income quickly is foolish.  After all – this is for the candle maker looking to kill 10-20 hours a week making a side income and not the 80-hour a week entrepreneur.

Before reaching this point you should already know a lot of what we already covered:

• Name
• Mission Statement
• Legal filing, DBA, etc
• Target customers
• A fully equipped workshop
• Product Line
• Insurance Policy (or plans)
• Pricing model and budget

Step 2 – Define Your 6-Month Success Goal

Highlight what you hope to accomplish in the first 6 months.

This is your success statement.

It may sound like a silly and pointless exercise, but if you aren’t clear about where you’re going how will you know you’re on the right track?

Address the following items, and anything else you deem important:

• Total candles sold or profit
• 1-2 accomplishments

For example:

• 120 candles sold (average of 20 per month) for around $1,000 in profit
• Sell a few candles at a craft show
• Buy a new painting for the house with the profits from sales

This sets your expectations ahead of all the work.  It means you’ve given thought to what you really want out of this.

Only time will tell if your expectations were wildly unrealistic or not, but you have to start somewhere.

A lot of candle makers get started and burn out super fast because they never sat back and figured out what they really want out of candle making.

Step 3 – Supply Chain (Month 1)

The next month of work will revolve around developing designs for your product line.

We recommend distributing your supplier network out where it makes sense to avoid locking yourself into the success of another company.

For the next 30 days, lay out your plans for candle design development and testing, including where you’ll source supplies and what you expect to come out of the testing process.

You probably won’t launch with more than 4-5 candle designs if you’re following our recommendations, but you need to vet and test those designs to make sure they’re safe and perform well.

Don’t forget to account for cure time!

Step 4 – Distribution Planning (Month 1 – Month 2)

As you’re designing your initial product line, you should also be researching your target audience to figure out where they are.

Depending on your strategy, you should secure shipping supplies at this time so you’re ready to go.

When it comes to distribution, there are many options.

In-Person

Selling candles in person, such as a craft fair or pop-up market.

Ecommerce

Selling candles over the internet.  Shipping and packaging orders from your house then sending directly to customer via a postal service.

Popular platforms include:

• Etsy
• Amazon Handmade
• Ebay

You can even sell through a few of the major social media applications now!

Wholesale

Selling large quantities to a business who then sells direct to customer.  The pricing model often changes when selling wholesale.

White Label

Selling an unmarked product to a buyer, usually in large quantities, wherein they apply their own logos and branding.

Step 5 – Execution

Now it’s finally time to start selling!

You should have almost everything you need – it’s just a matter of putting the pieces together and learning how to sell.

Don’t be afraid to pivot into opportunities that provide less friction.  Planning is merely a starting point.

You may find your assumptions were totally off or even land in the middle of a global pandemic (which tends to shift your ability to do certain things for your business).

Step 6 – Reflection

While time passes you should look back on your data.  Answer these questions:

• What am I doing that I should KEEP doing?
• What am I doing that I should STOP doing?
• What am I NOT doing that I should START doing?

Do your best to always improve and expand your work.

If it requires learning more about sales or ecommerce strategies – invest in a book!

If you get a few months in and everything begins to feel like a soul-sucking chore then you probably need to change it or stop it!

Your happiness should be number one.

If you miss any of your 6-month goals, really sit down and pour over the data and events to find out why.  Insights like this are crucial to your growth and understanding of the craft business.

When you’re done reflecting set new milestones and re-evaluate your expectations of what this hustle is.

Conclusion

Selling candles from home is a lot of work, even if it’s a small time operation.

Be patient with yourself and never stop learning.

Any advice, including everything you just read or skimmed, is meant to be transformed into the version that works best for you!

Put up blinders to the “success” of others – most everyone displays their proudest moments but hardly ever lets anyone in when they’re frustrated and feeling defeated.

Your story is unique, as is your journey through this waxy world.

If you’re ready for a lot of hard work and even more fun, welcome to the wide world of candles!