How To Start A Wax Melt Business

The home fragrance industry, particularly in wax melts, has a low barrier to entry. This means that it doesn't require a lot of time, skill, and money to start a wax melt business. However, it takes a significant amount of time and skill to excel at it.

As a result, many people decide to start their own wax melt businesses. For the purpose of this newsletter, we won't discuss how well these businesses comply with the CLP regulations or if they test scents before manufacturing and selling (many don't!).

Copying others is the last thing you should do, as this industry is full of people doing just that. It's no wonder that so many wax melt makers are struggling, since they all offer the same products and compete solely on price.

Instead, the purpose of this newsletter is to demonstrate how you can differentiate yourself and stand out in a highly saturated market.

That’s really what you should be thinking to yourself - “how can I stand out and be better than my competitors?”

At Cosy Aromas, we see this happening all the time:

• We launch a VIP subscription - a month later, others follow suit.
• We introduce 110g wax melts - a few months later, everyone else does too.
• We offer 25g sample pots in custom boxes - and soon others copy us.

Even at Craft HQ, where we produce fragrance oils, we were the first to announce free CLP labels with all orders. However, another company saw our announcement (the owner was in our Facebook Group where I announced it) and quickly implemented it into their business and now claim to be the first. This is now a service offered everywhere too.

This isn't a rant, but rather an opportunity to highlight just how bad this industry can be for copying.

If you can be an innovator, you will definitely succeed. As I see it, there are three main areas you can focus on to be different: Branding, Product, and Pricing.

Let's get into it.

Branding

The first thing to say about branding is that it’s much more than just your logo.

It’s your image, your style, your tone-of-voice, your packaging, how you engage with customers, what you stand for, what you believe in. It’s everything about your business.

When looking to craft your brand you should think about the following:

• What’s important to me and my business? (Eco-friendly, pet friendly etc).
• Who is my target audience, and what are their interests?
• How do I want my business to be perceived? Friendly, professional, personal etc.

Going through this exercise will help you to define exactly what your brand will be, who you’re going to target and how you’re going to speak with them.

Please don’t just look at a logo of another company and create something similar - that is not branding.

From here you can either use tools such as Canva to create a logo and identity which reflects your brand values. Or, if you have a spare £300-£500 you can hire a really good freelancer on Fiverr or Upwork to do this for you.

Products

When creating your products try to be as unique as you can.

This doesn’t have to mean coming up with brand new concepts, it could just be crafting unique names for your scents, or creating packaging which others don’t use.

Either way, you should try to be as unique as you can. This is only going to help you stand out in this crowded market.

Pricing

We see so many home fragrance vendors pricing themselves far too cheaply, and on top of this they’ll constantly run discounts in a hope to get more orders.

This is a really quick way to fall out of love with your business, because you’ll be working like mad making lots of products to fulfil lots of orders and have barely any profit to show for it, let alone to reinvest into more products and marketing.

You have to remember that these products are not commodity products. They are a luxury. So you can price this accordingly.

You need to make sure that you are making a very healthy profit margin in your products. This is nothing to do with being greedy, but if you don’t have a healthy profit margin you will struggle to pay yourself AND reinvest into your business - both of which you must do.

At a bare minimum your retail price should be at least 4x the cost to make your products - which also must include your time.

So, if a product costs you £1 to make you’ll want to charge at least £4 for this.

Getting your numbers and pricing right is crucial to the long term success of your business.

People aren’t looking for the cheapest. They’re looking for something which is great value for the price they pay.

Take our products at Cosy Aromas for example; we are no where near the cheapest, but we’ve managed to grow because we reinvest profits back in to making our products as good as they can be.

We’re now in a position where we have full time people dedicated to product development, we wouldn’t be able to do this if we didn’t have good margin in our products.

Product Descriptions

Here’s a really quick tip for you; do not use the scent descriptions on manufacturers websites as product descriptions on your own website.

This will destroy the SEO and search engine rankings of your website.

The reason for this is because Google doesn’t like sites with duplicate content, it can therefore not rank your website, or worse, black list it.

So many people just copy and paste the scent description because they are unaware of the harm it can cause. This is your way of standing out, being unique and ranking higher in search results by crafting your own product descriptions.

If you’d like some help with this, please reply to this email and let me know as it’s a service I can offer.

I hope you found this information helpful. As always, if you have any questions please feel free to reply to this email and I’ll gladly assist.

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