Start a Candle Business in 5 Steps
Build everything around your product line and your presence when you start a candle business.
The product line produces revenue, and your market presence finds customers. Both take time, commitment, and thoughtful strategy.
If you’re just starting out, trying to figure out how to “get going” can be confusing, intimidating, and scary, especially if you’ve never started a business before.
You don’t want to make the wrong moves right away and waste an opportunity to take part in something you love.
Follow these five steps to ensure you have the right foundation for starting a candle business in 2021.
Establish the identity of your business
Every company needs a logo and a name.
What most people get wrong is they believe this is what creates your brand.
It’s just not true.
Think of a logo right now. Odds are you thought of a company you like instead of one you hate.
A logo is memorable because of the emotional promise their product brought to your life.
Seth Godin talks about how poorly designed the Starbucks logo is, yet it unmistakably represents the heart of a worldwide coffee company.
Don’t obsess over finding a perfect logo or business name believing you need it to establish your brand.
Your brand is defined by your customers and ultimately springs from the emotional impact your work makes on them. When they view or burn you candle does it bring delight and peace?
If all your customers feel that way then over time your logo and name, whatever they are, will connect those feelings to your company.
That is your brand.
The common belief of new candle makers is they need to register a business. It depends on where you plan on selling, but a business and logo is often more sexy to put on your products than not.
The few avenues to sell candles without a business behind it are small craft markets (often held in church basements or similar humble establishments), or direct peer-to-peer sales, like Etsy or eBay.
Engage in sales at larger craft fairs, formal e-commerce markets, or for wholesale transactions as a business.
Find a business structure that suits your needs best, then register with the appropriate government bodies (find a state-specific guide at the bottom of this article).
Forming a business is as simple as paying the state some money, filing some paperwork, and registering for tax id numbers. Once you have a business, make sure you have an insurance policy before selling any candles.
If you’re planning on selling at craft fairs, many require insurance policies anyways.
Build an exhaustive portfolio of your customers
We’ve written before about how critical your identity in the industry is when it comes to pricing candles.
Before you start building a product line or even set a price, figure out who you want to build your brand.
That’s right, “who” not “where”.
The candle market has touch points in every demographic across many categories. You can’t expect to sell everything to everybody, yet so many people do.
Another pitfall beginners fall into is targeting the same, tired niche as everyone else.
Seriously, how many candles, poured in the same containers, filled with the same fragrance, marketed towards the same group of people can the market really hold?
The $10 – $15 mediocre container candle can only sell so many times. Many businesses and individuals saturate this niche because it’s easy to make that product, but the hardest part of candle making isn’t creating a candle – it’s earning the trust and attention of your customers.
Think of your work differently.
You’re not selling candles.
Success actually depends on how well you can solve a problem, deliver an experience, or reinforce a status. You’re selling a promise to someone that your product will live up to a need in their life.
Consumers don’t want to buy a key unless they have a safe they need to unlock. Define your safe then build your key.
Think about dating – your ideal partner has a certain set of characteristics that attract you to them. Good relationships begin with chemistry on all levels and then flower into a lasting bond.
Sales, or more specifically marketing, is no different. Seek to build relationships with people that have traits you want.
Remember, 1,000 customers that buy from you one time are only half as good as 500 customers that buy from you four times.
Your market presence is a relationship, and you should seek quality before quantity.
Develop a laser-focused product line
The journey to define your safe and build a key has to start small and purposeful.
View your solutions to problems as a specialist, not a generalist. You can’t sell everything to everybody without stretching yourself too thin and compromising the quality and promise you’re making to the market.
Find one product and master it.
You can being to spread out only after you establish a customer base over time and build a larger team. Offer too many products or variety too early and you’ll never grow.
Instead, you’ll be overwhelmed with inventory, paperwork, and lackluster production. It happens all the time.
Great candles are built on excessive, radical patience and procedure.
Mastering a single design requires an honest and significant investment of time and skill. Trying to spread that over a massive product line to “be everything” for your customers places a burden of time on you and your team that inevitably sacrifices quality.
It also increases your risk of burning out before you go anywhere.
All of that to say keep your product line very minimal at first.
Provide no more than one scent for each major fragrance category and limit your offering to a single size. This may seem trivial, but if you can’t sell this, why would you expect to be able to sell a more comprehensive product line?
It’s easy to obsess about selling a candle and forget your business.
Don’t prioritize the sale over the customer.
Why?
Your ability to find the attention of your niche and deliver what they want will drive continuous growth. Worrying about making sure you have “the right candle for anyone” broadens your scope too much.
Your goal at this stage is to build the solution your customer’s want.
A smaller catalog allows you to fine tune your approach for this special and specific group. This takes empathy, understanding, and procedure.
You should already know who is going to buy your candle. It is your only job to get their attention and solve their problems.
Methodically plan your first three months
Passion needs a plan.
You might get pretty far without writing a formal business plan, but the excitement can only last so long.
More so with a team, a plan introduces accountability to a greater idea.
Without setting goals and building strategies to support them you are doomed to burn out.
After all, even the greatest marathon runners need a route and the most passionate athletes still form a game plan to achieve success.
Goal setting is one of the most significant, concrete ways to measure progress. You need some form of business plan to establish where you’re going and how you’ll get there, but don’t stop there.
Plan your first three months. As a rough example, plot the following categories of your work with the following metrics:
- Equipment
- Starting & ending equipment
- Budget
- Expected throughput
- Sales
- What will sell?
- How much will sell and where?
- Who will buy?
- Product development
- Quality safety test plan
- New candle designs
- Candle designs to be retired
- Documentation for safety & performance tests
- Marketing
- Focus social media platforms
- Content creation targets
- Estimated marketing budget, if any
- Supplies
- Sales goals required supplies
- Product development required supplies
Take this exercise as far as it makes sense for you.
Add metrics to each category you create that are concrete and measurable.
Identify where you are today (might be zero) and define where you will be in three months for each category.
Also note the time and financial investments you expect for each.
At the end of three months, review this hit list to identify how you can improve. Did you meet the expectations you set? Could the manner you planned be improved to be more useful to your business?
Why conduct this exercise at all?
It forces you to think through the immediate details of your business.
Planning doesn’t take that much time to do, but it builds expectations and structure around what you’ll be doing. The important part of planning this way is to build guardrails around your passion to guide it towards a focused result.
Construct an exceptional digital presence
There has never been an easier time to build a website.
As important as social media may be to your brand, a website is a corner of the world that you control.
It can be as robust or shallow as you prefer, but it should exist.
Period.
We live in an age where not having a formal website is somehow considered suspicious. Even if you only ever intend to sell candles in person, a website puts you on the digital radar and establishes credibility, discovery, and identity to the world for what you do.
Social platforms come and go.
They control all the rules of engagement as well as how effectively your content is marketed whereas your website is a place where you make all the rules.
At a minimum, build a site that tells the world who you are and why you do what you do.
Be creative and unique in your content strategy, making sure to highlight where to find your candles or how to best contact you.
This is your digital storefront, even if it ends up being an information booth or just an online store directory that points to your Etsy shop.
As you grow, your website will grow with you. Even if it’s simple, someday it may serve to directly sell your products, connect with your customers through a blog, enable your email campaigns, or even be a place to attract talent to your team.
Learn more about our digital recommendations for candle makers in this very thoughtful post.
Conclusion
There’s obviously a lot to starting a candle business you should consider alongside everything mentioned in this article. Factors like:
- Capital and financial planning
- Work & life balance
- Physical location for production and the overhead that requires
- Strategies for building out a robust business plan
However, the most important factor that contributes to your success is a relentless pursuit of your dream. No plan, equipment set, website, or logo can replace your hard work and determination.
Don’t start a candle business if you aren’t ready to get your hands dirty and work hard, even when you don’t want to. A lot of things in this phase of building a business aren’t “fun”, but your success will only happen if you show and and finish those tasks too, day in and day out.
Your plan will fuel you when your passion lapses.
Count on it, and enjoy the tremendous satisfaction of lighting the wick on a candle born of your unrelenting drive towards the destination.
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