Why My $6 Lemon Candle Made $300,000

[00:00:01]Today we got a good episode for you. We are covering questions from all over the spectrum. From how do I ship fragile items to how do I break out of my shell and not be so shy to sell my candles and be the face of my brand to should I open a Etsy store or how can I finish my Shopify store and I need some help with that? And then we'll wrap up with a question of how do I scale my business from at home to a brickandmortar. Lots of great questions. Let's get into it.

[00:00:41]Now, we haven't met before. I'm Sebastian Garznet, the co-founder of Garnet Beacon Candle Company and the founder here at Candle Business Pro, where we help makers go pro. We always provide you with lots of free resources.

[00:00:51]You can get those in the show notes below or by visiting candlebuspro.com.

[00:00:55]You can also come and join our community I call the inner circle where candle business owners come together to help scale and grow our businesses. Let's get into this. The first question here is from Grim and Grace Candles. And the question is, "How do I break out of my shell of sinus and start marketing and adding a face to our brand? I've been in the military. I was a fitness trainer, but I just can't seem to pull the trigger on adding my face to my brand.

[00:01:24]Should I just stay behind the scenes and keep being mysterious? Great question.

[00:01:30]And honestly, it's one of the things that when we first started, I was the same way. I didn't want to be the face.

[00:01:37]I didn't want to be in front of our customers. Honestly, I thought we could just open this online business up, open our Shopify store, and hopefully sales would come in. And eventually, they will. If you work on your website design, if you work on your SEO to drive traffic, and now it's really about also driving AI SEO to make sure that all of the uh AI platforms such as chat GBT and Claude are sending people to your website cuz people are using that so much more than they are Google nowadays, right? So, you can do all the things to get traffic coming to your website. But the key is we have to be a brand that people want to buy from when they get there. Uh, and it's going to take a while to build up that traffic to your website. So, when we're definitely when we're first starting out, we have to show who we are. We have to show who our brand is. If you think about the big players in the candle space, I'm talking the Yankee Candles, the Bath & Body Works, right? They don't need to put a face behind it because they are an established brand that you're going to find at every single mall. Sometimes you'll find multiples in a mall. I believe in our small town, we still have like two Bath & Body Works and strip malls. So, of course, they have plenty of advertising dollars to build out their brand and promote it. They also make a quarter 50 cents a candle. That's why they can sell them for 10 bucks. Uh because they're selling at such high volumes. All of us are small businesses.

[00:03:01]Think of the last time you bought from a small business. Most likely you knew who that was. You there was a face behind that brand. Whether it was out at a craft show or, you know, a market or if it was on Etsy, there's always a like about us section on there. Usually a photo of the founders uh that started that small business as well. I believe it's going to be very hard to try and grow a small business without putting a face on it. And the reason for that is because we all buy and support businesses that make us feel good, right? We all have certain values um in life and we want to support others that uh enjoy those same values, right? Uh so we all are searching for all kinds of different products to buy uh throughout life, whether it's for ourselves or as gifts for other people, but we buy from people with a purpose. And you can have the most amazing looking candles. You can have a beautiful website. You can have amazing social media, but if I don't know who I'm buying from, it's going to be hard for me to to make the decision to go ahead with that. I don't know if you're just a robot, if you are a real person, are you here in say Michigan? Are you in the Midwest? you know, based on what we're buying, we want to buy certain things and from certain people, I think, and so I think it's going to be very hard to try and grow your brand without being part of it. Uh, for instance, when we first started our business, we used, you know, Facebook, a little bit of Instagram, and then we had our website. Now, we let people go on the journey with us from all of the struggles of not testing uh or not getting the test results we wanted and having to start all over again to candles not having the synth throw to the uh candles tunneling or getting too hot and so we had to change wick series and all the struggles, right? That brings a human element to our brand. And so when we first opened up our Shopify store, that's how we got over $3,000 in sales that first weekend.

[00:05:22]That was because it was the friends, family, all the people that kind of came on the journey with us for a couple of months while we were building out the brand. If they didn't know who we were, we would not have gotten that kind of support. Um, if people land on our website, they see a candle that they might like, they want to know who they're buying from. It's just it's just the way small businesses really operate even now. And and thinking about like the bakeries and the places that I uh support. I like to know who I'm buying from. I like to know um a little bit more of their story. So I think you're going to have to do it. Um it's uncomfortable at first. For instance, when we did our first market in person, cuz again, I was a 9 to5 work from home person. didn't have to be in front of anyone besides my team whenever I would host meetings, but I was never on stages. I was never, hey, look at me.

[00:06:16]I'm I'm not uh an outgoing um or an outward uh person when it comes to when it comes to that. I'm more of an introvert. Extrovert, that was the word I was probably looking for there. Uh and so when we set up for our first market, it was very I mean, I was shaking. I did not want to just start random conversations with strangers. That's just something that I've never felt was uh a skill of mine. Now I can do it. Uh do I like it? Not really. But I still do it. And I know that doing it is just part of our business. That's why on our social media, any of our social media that we do, and I think that anyone that puts themselves on social media will definitely agree with me on this, that any posts that they make, whether it's Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, any of the platforms, if they are in the post, there's just more engagement, there's more reach, there's more likes, there's more interactions, and it's going to drive more people to the website when they're ready to buy. uh versus just seeing an image of a candle. I don't know the story. I don't know the backstory. There's nothing connecting me to that image uh or to that product. If I just see a lemon candle on Facebook, just a picture of a lemon candle, I have zero desire for that. But my sugar lemon candle has brought in over $300,000 this one candle. So, we sell it with us involved with it. Okay? Anytime we post a picture of this, it's not going to tell the story of it of why it's so amazing, right? That's obviously our perception and the perception of many of our customers that come back and buy again, but a stranger isn't going to connect with that. There's emotion behind being a person and being a face of the brand. So, long way to answer there. You you've got to do it. You got to break out of your shell. You mentioned that you were in the military.

[00:08:08]You were a fitness trainer. Remember when you are posting on social media or being the face of your brand, just put yourself in, hey, I've got this. Just build up that confidence that you can do it because you've done a lot of things that are going to be much harder than selling a candle. So, uh, thank you for your service and everything you've done.

[00:08:25]And, um, just get yourself out there.

[00:08:26]You're going to be just fine. All right, completely changing gears here. Uh, Crystal Greer asks, "How do you ship fragile items for us?" We I have a video that I will link uh, below how exactly we ship out our candles. It'll walk you step by step of how we do it. Very simple. And uh if we're sipping like one candle, we're going to need to have at least 1 and 1/2 in of packing peanuts all the way around the product. And we will wrap every product in a 12x 12 perforated sheet of bubble wrap. So we get them at Staples. Uh only buy them when they're buy two get one free for the big rolls because they are on sale like every other week. Buy two get one free, they're about 30 bucks for the roll. So, for 60 bucks, you'll get three rolls of there's 100, I think, per roll.

[00:09:10]And they're they're perforated. So, every 12 in, they automatically will uh rip apart. Makes it very easy. We will wrap all of our candles in there. And then we will make sure that from the outsides of the box, we have an inch and a half of packing peanuts. And we just reuse the packing peanuts that are sent to us from our suppliers by Candle Science. They send plenty of packing peanuts with every order. So, we will then use those to protect it with. Um, and then in between inside of the box, we'll make sure that we have an inch an inch. So, basically the the width of a packing peanut between all the glass inside. You're going to experience breakage at a higher rate from the glass hitting each other versus the outside of the box. Um, so just make sure that you have a a little bit in there to um just protect them. So, they just aren't able to touch each other is is all that you need to do on there. But I'll link that video here so you can see the step by step of exactly how we um pack up all of our orders. We haven't had a broken candle since the first year that we shipped candles. And right when we first started, we didn't know what we were doing. We learned from that. Uh in the last over 3 years, we have not had any breakage. We also haven't had any melted candles. In the uh my latest video about packing up orders that I'll link to, I also talk about candles melting. And there's just such a big fear about that.

[00:10:29]We send candles to all 50 states, not as much to Hawaii. It's a little bit expensive to ship there. So, but we have people that are on our monthly subscription. Um, so every on the first of every single month, regardless of what day of the week it is, unless it's the weekend, we ship a c candle out to everyone that's on our list. And that goes to southern California, Arizona, uh not New Mexico, uh uh Arizona, uh Texas, Florida, Alabama. So, pretty warm areas.

[00:10:58]And I I do see often in some of the groups that people will set up their shipping to where they only ship on certain days of the week. But the reality is is once you give it to the post office or you give it to UPS, you don't know where it's going to sit. You don't know if it's going to go directly to the location UPS store or post office or if it's going to sit where you live for a couple of days. Is it going to be on the truck? Is it going to be inside the building? We just don't know. It's Sometimes I'm sure you all have tracked a package that has gone it's supposed to go to the east coast and it goes all the way to the west coast first and then it turns around and goes back, right? So, we don't know where it's going to go.

[00:11:32]the way we box up all of our products.

[00:11:35]We've never had a candle melt. And uh I see people talk about putting ice packs in there and stuff. It's just not a reality. We we can't run a business doing that because there's going to be too much cost involved and too much worry. A lot of us and I I appreciate that many people want to make sure they're giving 100% service that their products are going to arrive per in perfect condition. Absolutely great to see that. But we also don't want to try to resolve a problem until it's a problem. Those are hang-ups that will hold you back from just getting out there and doing it. So what you know, send out 10 candles, one of them breaks, two of them breaks, one of them melted or something, which it's not going to happen, but if it melted, then you could be like, "Okay, now there's a problem.

[00:12:21]Let me fix that problem." It's great to think ahead, but I see what happens is it holds people back from moving forward in their business. And that's that's with a lot of things. That's with people their website's 90% done. And I think there's a question kind of about that we're going to allude to here in a moment. Or um they have eight candles ready to go, but they really want to have 10 when they launch and they're going to spend another two months figuring out what those other two cents are going to be. You've already got eight. Get them out there. I would start I I I I say in a lot of my episodes, I would start my brand all over again with six. Six uh candle scents is what I would launch with. I would not try to do more than that. And let your customers decide what direction you go and what journey um you're going to take them on through your sense. But uh get out there. Don't hold yourself back just to buy more time. We all do it and um because we're nervous, we're scared. Uh we're we feel we're going to be judged.

[00:13:17]Um just got to get out there. Just got to get out there and do it. So, uh, but Crystal, I will link that video for you in the notes below. Next question here is from Audrey Wilson, and that's, uh, website building for my products. I am trying to set myself up by myself and build build this out. Any advice on where I can get help finishing that at.

[00:13:36]Okay, so a couple directions here when it comes to your website. Now, if you are looking for the back-end setup, I have inside of the inner circle uh, a workshop on how to build a Shopify store. Now, I am not a professional designer. They have plenty of great templates that Shopify gives you that you can use. They look fine. You just swap out some colors for your colors.

[00:14:00]Obviously, you have to add your own imagery and things on there. I would try building it out yourself and seeing how far you get. Now, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube on how to design your website. Plenty. And you can go to fiverr.com or upwork.com and hire someone for a pretty decent price these days cuz there's so much competition in that in that space to design your website. But what most people have found and say they absolutely love about my workshop on how to build your Shopify store is I show you the backend and how we set it up to run a candle business.

[00:14:42]That means how we tag our individual candles by size so that they are put in specific collections. All the different tags that we use so that on our website you can search by um you know fall scents, winter scents, summer scents. Um and then also I do collections by scents. So like for instance on my website you can you can do a a search by a um scent note such as vanilla. So then anything that I have a tag with vanilla all shows up for you. So you can see a dozen different candles that we have that have the vanilla scent in there somewhere, right? So it just gives a more robust response to people when they're shopping on your website. And it also helps with your SEO, your search op uh search engine optimization for when people are searching on Google for your brand because Google wants them to find what they are searching for and Google would rather send them to a collection page that's going to have a variety of options versus directly to a product page. So if you were to type in and search for vanilla candles, right, we're on I think the third page on Google.

[00:15:54]That's what we're we're trying to get to the first page on Google for vanilla candles cuz that's a very high uh intent keyword search and it would do a lot for our sales and so we're working on it.

[00:16:04]Right? So when someone types in vanilla scented candle when they come to our listing there and if someone was to click on it it's not taking them to our sweet memories candle that's called very vanilla. It is going to or our very vanilla monocent candle. um it's taking you to a collection page that has several different candles that have vanilla in it. So then it's going to give the shopper some options there.

[00:16:29]Just keep that in mind. The way we built out the back end of our Shopify store is something that you can hire someone to do. But if they don't understand how you want or how you'll want eventually those results to show up, what'll happen is you'll have to go back to them, rehire them again to go back and make changes if you don't understand the back end of it. So, I would recommend to anyone come join the inner circle. Uh it's, you know, for the for the minimal monthly fee, you can go through any of our workshops. just go through our Shopify workshop, learn it, understand how we run the back end of our Shopify, and this is everything from how we do our setup for collections, our products, um everything on there, how we do our SEO on the back end, all of that stuff.

[00:17:12]So, you can go through all of that and then you can design the website to look however you want it to look, which is awesome because in fact, inside of Shopify, they now have what's called Sidekick, which is like their little AI assistant. You can actually ask the Sidekick or what you want. Hey, I want a red background. I want this. I want that. And it'll do it for you, which is really cool. So, that's all included with your Shopify subscription. So, you wouldn't have to pay for that. Then, if you decide, hey, you know what? I really just want a really custom website, then go and hire a designer. So, hopefully that helps you out a little bit there.

[00:17:44]Next question here is from Irene Zel, and Irene's question is, is it best to sell on Etsy or as a standalone website business? Great question. I say do both.

[00:17:53]do both because Etsy brings customers to Etsy, right? Etsy is a marketplace. So Etsy, people go to that and they're searching for something and you hope that your products are going to show up in the results. They have their own customer base. Millions of people go to Etsy every single day to look for gifts.

[00:18:11]With Shopify, when you open that up, nobody's going to go to it. Nobody's going to go to it. You have to be the driver of the traffic there. And you've got to do that through your SEO, through your marketing, through every avenue that you are promoting your products.

[00:18:26]You should be sending them to your own dedicated website because you own all of that um contact information. When someone goes to my website, I know where they came from because Google Analytics is going to show me. I know, do they come from a Google search result? Do they come from social media? Do they come through a paid ad? How do they get to my website? I know and own that information. I can see all of that.

[00:18:51]Also, when someone buys from me now, I can keep I can send them emails and follow up with them. They're in my customer world and I have that customer data. On Etsy, it's going to be more restricted. Now, some people will complain about the fees of Etsy. Um, and that would be the reason why they don't want to be on Etsy.

[00:19:10]Breaking news. Etsy fees are extremely low. Okay, it is 40 cents to list on Etsy and they take 15% of your sale. Okay, so let's just do the math on that. Let's say my candles are $25. They're actually 26, but for math purposes, we're going to say it's $25.

[00:19:31]Someone buys four candles from me on Etsy, 100 bucks. That would be the threshold of shipping for free. Uh so let's just let's keep that in mind that we will have to we will have to pay for shipping. That's fine. $100 for four candles. These candles cost me about $650 a piece to make. Okay, so that's $26 to create that product. Okay, so it's $26 to create the product. There's that 40 cents on there. So let's just say that's another $2 out there. So that's $28. And to send four candles to someone might be up to about $12. So that 28 is now 3840 bucks, right? So 40 bucks to sell to $100. So I just made $60 on that, right? So that's a $40 cost to acquire that customer, right?

[00:20:22]But that customer was $100.

[00:20:25]A 40% fee is great. Think about wholesale. If someone has a say $20 candle that they sell retail, it cost them $5 to make it and they're they're selling it for $20. They're doing that minimum of 4x that I always recommend.

[00:20:42]Wholesale is going to be 50% of your retail. So your retail is 20 bucks.

[00:20:46]Wholesale is going to be $10. So that means you're making $5 per candle when you sell it wholesale. So if I'm making $60 on Etsy by selling 40 or four of these, that's still really good money.

[00:20:58]also to get traffic to your website and that's going to be through paid social media ads, Google ads, other avenues of marketing or even when you know you have a pop-up on your website that offers 25% off on your first order. All of these other things are costs, right? And so you have to get traffic. You can't just open up and say, "Hey, I'm a business."

[00:21:20]And just assume you're going to get all this business without any marketing spend. So that marketing spend is going to be either through Etsy and they're them them taking their fee. It's going to be through your website through you having to run a sale or you need to have a popup to acquire someone's email address or you're going to go and do a market and there's going to be market fees, application fees, you have to buy tents, all that kind of stuff, right? Some of those fees are just going to be one time, but many of those fees are just ongoing. Uh with your own store, you also are paying $39 a month to Shopify.

[00:21:54]uh just getting started and that hurts a lot more when you're starting out now.

[00:22:00]We, you know, we're doing say $50,000 a month. Uh we can absorb these marketing fees in different places, right? Um that number was a little high, like $40,000 a month. And that's total in our business, not just through our website. So, I just want to be clear there uh that that I mentioned that. And so, we can absorb that $39 fee. But I remember our first month, our second month, uh first month was good. I told you we had like $3,000 in sales the first weekend, friends, family, people that went on the journey with us. That second month it we earned every sale and it was tough. And so an extra $39 fee from Shopify um was tough.

[00:22:39]I do have a link. We are a Shopify partner. And so I actually have a it's it's $1 a month for three months. So you can get in and build out a Shopify store. Um play around in there. And if you end up signing up, great, but if not, it cost you three bucks. So, I'll link that in the show notes uh as well um for you. But because it's just tough to spend all these different fees when first starting out. So, I know people say Etsy is has high fees. They are not high fees in the uh overall realm of trying to grow a business. It's actually great. Uh we make money every single time that we sell on Etsy. Uh we don't focus on Etsy very much at all. It's going to be for the ones that have something unique. I told you I sell a lot of this candle and I'm very proud of this candle. It's not unique. People are not searching on Etsy for a lemon candle. They are searching on Etsy for doughbo candles, um candles for grandma's birthday. They are best friends wedding candles. They are searching for something very specific.

[00:23:40]So, you've got to play the game on Etsy to understand how it works. This candle by itself, just out there, isn't going to sell very well um out there at all.

[00:23:48]So this is why to answer your question I say be on both. Be on Etsy. Let traffic come to you potentially through Etsy and then be on Shopify where you are sending your own traffic and you going to keep building that up. The one thing about Etsy versus Shopify is Etsy owns everything there. Their algorithm can change overnight. You can be getting 10 sales every single day and then all of a sudden bam they change up how they are sending um traffic to different pages and now you're out. Keep that in mind.

[00:24:16]uh with yours, you are in control, but that also does mean that there's a lot of work involved with that. So, you'll have to balance both of those out um there. Uh and the last question here uh today is um Felicia where and that is how do I scale a business from home to a brick-andmortar? Great question. This is exactly what we did. So, we sold our first candle on February 25th. We opened our brick-andmortar store on August 1st.

[00:24:43]Now, our dream was always to open a brick-and-mortar store. So, we always had that as the goal. It wasn't like we fell into it. It wasn't like we just decided one day that maybe we want to go that route. We always had that as as a dream for us. We just didn't realize the reality would come when it came. And I do think that it came quicker than it may come for some others. But here's the steps of how we got there. We sold our first candle February 25th. It's the middle of winter here in Michigan.

[00:25:14]There's not markets on the weekends.

[00:25:16]There's not craft shows. There's none of that. So, right after we had that great first weekend, that next weekend reality sank in of, oh, we don't have any new customers. We got to get out and get customers. So, you know, obviously our website was already built. We had done that ahead of time. But now it is how do we get new customers? So, Chad's working on doing some social media post. And social media is is a very long game.

[00:25:38]Don't It's a very long game. Okay. Uh social media, we use that to re-engage our current customers. We're not trying to grow our social media as the main way of getting business to our shop. Um we we meet people out of markets. We get them to our website to buy from us again. Uh and then we we got into wholesale and that's the route that we went right away. It was winter time, cold here. How can we sell candles right now? And I went right into wholesale. Uh I had bought several different wholesale courses from um different people and in fact it's what I kind of drew from all of that and then our experience over the last several years because now we've crossed over 170 wholesale accounts and so that's what goes into my wholesale course that we have at Candle Business Pro that you can take and um so we went right into wholesale and that is what we did February, March, April, May and obviously forever since then. So, we started that in February and we started getting into shops right here locally in our uh town. Uh, and so that was our next step. Opened our website, sold to our friends and family, people that went on our journey. Then we went right into wholesale because we couldn't do markets yet. May 1st was our first market and we had like four markets in May. And so that's when May kicked off markets and we thought, "Oh, that that's when we were assured that we had something people wanted because that's when we got to put our product in front of strangers, people that didn't know who we were. They didn't know nothing about our product. That we could they could come into our booth, complete strangers, look at our product, smell our product, examine it, open their purses, open their wallets, and give us money for our products. That's when we were assured, hey, we have something there. It wasn't our friends and family supporting us. It was complete strangers. They liked the price point. They liked everything about it. They bought it. That boosted our confidence. Okay, we've got a product.

[00:27:38]No problem. Now, let's look at brick and mortar. What's it going to take to do a brickandmortar uh location? And so, for us, it was we can't just sell candles.

[00:27:49]What else are we going to have? We can't just sell candles. So, we went the route of having the opportunity for people to come pour your own, right? So, it's the experience. You're going to come in because it's fun. It's date nights, family nights. uh come in and do a pour your own and also fall in love with the rest of our brand and then just become shoppers of our brand because most people when it comes to like the pour your own, they come in and pour candles, they fall in love with they they enjoy the time, the memory, but they don't want to do it every time they need a candle, right? And quite frankly, their candles are never going to turn out as good as our candles or your candles because the way pouring parties work is a little different on on the science behind the making of that. So, um, it's it's about the experience. It's not about the actual creation when it comes to that. So, we knew that's what we were going to do and we needed to just wait for a space to become available. There was a space that came available. We jumped on it, opened it up, and that was 4 years ago. And so, uh, and and here we are still. So, we've opened up several since then, and we've now opened up brick-and-mortar stores for other people uh that they paid us to consulting to go and open these up uh for them. So, that is our story of how we got to brick and mortar. Hopefully, this episode has had some tips, tricks, um ideas for you to help you uh grow and scale your business. If you have questions you would like me to answer on an upcoming episode, drop those in the notes below.

[00:29:17]Please subscribe, like, share. Those things really matter uh for [music] us and the growth of this channel and I would greatly appreciate it. Until next time, have a fantastic rest of your day.

[00:29:28]Take care.