How To Start A Candle Business in 4 Steps

Starting a candle business is fun and can be incredibly rewarding.

What’s better is that it doesn’t have to cost much money to get started either.

All you need is an idea, passion and the willingness to work hard (plus a few candle supplies!).

Let’s talk through the four steps to starting your own candle business.

Key takeaways:

• Find a niche; it will make growing your business much more enjoyable and financially rewarding.
• When creating your website, just use a free theme from Shopify.
• Make sure you price all of your products to include your time.
• Never, ever, EVER stop marketing your business. Ever.

The smartest thing you can do is become a Home Fragrance Academy member to learn how to start, grow and scale your business (cheeky plug!).

1 - Create your branding

When I say branding, I don’t mean the pretty logo and colours.

The first thing to do is to think about the niche you want to target.

Most people who want to start a candle business will end up making candles that look the same as everyone else's and use the same fragrance oils. Therefore, they will target the same customers as everyone else.

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see when coaching people within HFA.

In order to succeed, you must find yourself a niche—something on which you can focus 100% of your energy and not get distracted by other ideas.

Some examples of a niche could be:

• Book-themed candles. Create a range of candles representing books; your audience will be book lovers.
• Destination-themed candles. Create beautifully scented candles based on destinations worldwide and target people who love travelling.
• Candles based on occasions. Create a range of candles with messages such as ‘Happy Birthday’, ‘Good Luck’, and ‘Happy New Home’ and target the gifting market.

Once you’ve chosen your niche, you can focus on the logo, colours, fonts, and tone of voice you want to adopt for your brand.

Find your lane and stick to it. Then come back and thank me later :)

Frostbeard Studio sell candles for book lovers

2 - Build your website

There are lots of e-commerce platforms available that you can use to build your website.

But I would always recommend Shopify.

Shopify is the king of e-commerce and one of the most popular e-commerce platforms for a reason.

When building your website, just stick to one of the free themes for your candle business website. You don’t need a paid theme.

Try not to get bogged down with the layout of the pages; Shopify have created these with optimisation and sales in mind, so don’t change it too much.

Things you’ll want to change and add to your new website:

• Your logo.
• Your colour and fonts.
• Beautiful product imagery.
• Unique and compelling product descriptions.
• Your story lets people know who you are and why you created your business.
• Clear messaging which will resonate with your niche audience.

Once you’ve built your website, you can register a domain name and quickly point it to your new website.

There you have it; you’re now ready to start accepting orders.

But wait, have you thought about pricing…

3 - Get your pricing right

This is something many people don’t quite understand and get right.

Whatever you do, please don’t compete on price and try to be the cheapest.

To calculate the price of your candles, use the following details:

1. Calculate all the costs of your physical candle (wax, container, fragrance oil, wick, label, packaging, etc.).
2. Work out how long it takes you to make a candle.
3. Add the 2 together.
4. Multiply the total by 4 - that’s the minimum price you should charge.

Let’s say you want to earn $50 per hour, and you can make 50 candles per hour. I’ve based the following calculation on this for ease of maths:

• Total raw materials cost: $5
• Total time to make: $1
• Total cost: $6
• $6 x 4 = $24

You would need to charge $24 for your candle.

Why this formula?

You need to have plenty of margin in your candles. This is because you will want to reinvest profits into advertising and marketing and create new products.

Oh, you will also want to pay yourself, right?

Plus, if you want to start working with retailers and having your candles stocked in shops, then the retailer will expect to pay a maximum of 50% of the retail price.

So, based on this, your pricing model would be:

• Candle cost to make: $6
• Wholesale price: $12 (2x cost)
• Retail price: $24 (4x cost)

This will ensure your candle business is profitable and sustainable.

4 - Marketing

I said it earlier, and I’ll say it again…

NEVER STOP MARKETING

No matter how many orders you’re getting and how overrun you are.

If you are fortunate enough to receive more orders than you can handle, you should focus on handling those orders instead of letting your foot off the gas with marketing.

When marketing loses momentum, it’s very hard to regain it, and it will take time.

This is a big lesson I learned in 2020—we were growing faster than we could handle. So, I turned off our ads, which were performing very well.

If I had kept them running, we would have scaled much quicker.

The best thing you can do for marketing in the early stages of your candle business is:

• Create engaging content (behind the scenes) and share it on all social media platforms.
• Creating YouTube videos detailing your fragrances and telling your story.
• Find relevant Instagram accounts and comment on their photos - do this 50 times daily.

If you can consistently do these things every day, your candle business will soon build traction, your audience will grow, and you’ll get more sales.

Conclusion

Starting a candle business is fun, creative, and rewarding. But it’s important to ensure you’re targeting a niche, have a basic website, have worked out your pricing, and are constantly marketing.

Good luck with your business. If you want more in-depth information, please consider becoming an HFA member. You can take courses and participate in our live coaching events, which will help you grow your candle business.