Going from Creating Content to Making Products

0:00The world did not need another candle brand. And I think that if I listened to that and believed that, I never would have started the company. But what I felt strongly about was that what we were doing was a little bit niche and a little bit different. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. I'm your host, Shuang Esther Shan. One underrated skill that founders need is storytelling. They need to be able to create a narrative around their products, especially if customers can touch or smell it. Lindsay Silberman is our guest today, and you can say storytelling is her specialty.

0:42She started as a magazine editor before becoming a content creator and now a founder. Lindsay launched Hotel Lobby Candles in 2020, and she's here today to share how she transports customers to other places through storytelling. Thank you so much for joining us, Lindsay. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. So you have such an interesting career because you've had extensive experience in media. So you transitioned into content creation. How did you take your career in media and build a business from it? So I started my career in the magazine industry. I was an editor for about a decade in New York.

1:29working for places like Town & Country. I wrote for Vogue and The Wall Street Journal. And throughout that time, I really got to travel the world, write about a lot of amazing, incredible hotels and travel trends and destinations, as well as luxury beauty products. And during that time, I truly never thought that I would leave the industry to start my own business. I genuinely never considered myself to be an entrepreneurial person. And, you know, I think this idea for what the brand is now is something that I had had in the back of my head for a very long time, but I didn't think I would ever get the guts to actually pursue it.

2:14And then COVID happened. And so I had left my job just before that. My Instagram following had started to grow a lot while I was working in magazines. It was something that I had just done on the side as sort of like a fun, I don't know, just hobby, posting on Instagram, sharing my life, sharing my travels. And it got to the point where I had the opportunity to leave and start doing some brand partnerships and collaborating with brands. And, you know, I think at the time, this was 2018, it seemed like the right time to make a move out of the corporate world if I ever were going to do it. So when I left in 2018, I really was thinking that I would be pursuing this career as a content creator.

3:04And maybe one day I would start my own brand. And then COVID happened. And my husband and I were in our New York apartment. And some of my work had slowed down. And I really started to miss traveling and just that like connection of the smells and the sights and the, you know, just the full experience of travel. And I, I so craved that. And I know so many people all felt the same way. And I really began to think, okay, this idea that I had had for a candle brand that was inspired by travel destinations and luxury hotels, maybe if I were ever going to do it now would be the time to start figuring out how to make that idea a reality.

3:53And really the concept was inspired by my travels and I would go to these amazing hotels. I would walk in and I would immediately get hit with this beautiful scent. And it was often like a signature scent of the hotel. And I always wanted my own home in my own apartment to smell that way. And I really leaned into that idea, started looking into how I would possibly start a candle brand during COVID and basically launched it within nine months. I truly think being a journalist, having this extensive career in media kind of primed you for entrepreneurship because I think when you have to be a writer, you have to be so good at research, it probably was so helpful to kind of lead you down the different paths of finding a production partner and learn everything on your own.

4:50What are some other skills that primed you to be a good entrepreneur? You know, I think that in a lot of ways, the leap from being in a corporate role to being an entrepreneur is actually very challenging for me. I think I didn't realize until I started my own company how much my past experiences had been. I'd been an independent contributor. And that's just a term I only recently came to understand, which was that I kind of worked in a silo. I was an editor and a journalist and I would travel and do my own thing. And, you know, I would report into an editor, but I didn't really have to manage a team or just kind of deal with a lot of the things that you deal with as an entrepreneur, I will say that the aspects of my previous career that have lent itself well are wearing a million hats, playing the role of 20 different people, being resourceful, being able to be a creative director, a storyteller, pitching your brand and understanding what appeals to, let's say, an editor who may be writing about your story.

5:57I think just really juggling and sort of understanding the importance of a story and visual and a narrative and also just extensive amounts of research. That was so much of what I did was researching and asking questions and kind of finding the answers to things when they weren't readily available. And I think for Hotel Lobby, the way that you describe the initial hit of like a sense, and it's so much linked to memory. I think the way that you tell the story is so beautiful. For those who might not have a media background, what would you say to them to help them develop the sense of storytelling and actually incorporate that into their branding?

6:46Well, you know, the first thing I would say is that just storytelling in general and having a story behind your brand and your why and why you are like uniquely qualified to be the person to start that brand is so important. And I think you need to ask yourself, what is my secret sauce? What makes me the person that was the best person to create this product? And a lot of people don't have a story like mine or a story that's such an obvious answer. It's like, I think we see shows like Shark Tank or we read these stories where people just had a aha light bulb moment. and that is not always the case for people and I don't think it's like absolutely necessary to have that for a brand to be successful what I do think is you need to be able to explain why you're passionate about your product what made you decide to start it in the first place and also share personal anecdotes about the process of you kind of creating this brand and I think being able to distill your backstory and your brand into certain moments like that is really important.

8:04And I think even like for any industry, but I think when people look at the candle industry, they might think, oh, it's so competitive. It's hard to start a new brand. And I think that's where your storytelling superpower comes in, where you can actually differentiate and set yourself apart? Yeah, I would say, listen, the world did not need another candle brand. I think that if I listened to that and believed that, I never would have started the company. But what I felt strongly about was that what we were doing was a little bit niche and a little bit different. And we just sort of have a very specific point of view in our products that differentiates us from other brands.

8:49So we're very hotel and travel focused. We are 100 % soy wax, which is nearly impossible to find in the luxury candle market. It's not something I talk about as much as I should, but I learned a lot about what it takes to be a clean burning candle and ingredients and how most, if not all of the really high-end candles on the market have some aspect of paraffin wax in them, which is really not good for you or the environment. And it became important for me to start a brand that felt luxury and had this special travel tie-in, but was also clean and 100 % soy. So I think kind of all of those factors combined make us this little special corner of the candle market that people have grown to really love.

9:42And storytelling is so important for selling online because we essentially cannot smell or experience the product yet. So talk to us about transporting people through words, through scents, just through storytelling. For us, majority of our business is online. When we first launched, we sold thousands of candles within the first like 24 minutes of putting our Shopify site live. And not a single person other than me and my husband had ever smelled the candles before. The customers were entirely relying on how I was describing the way the candles and the scents would make them feel and sort of describing the sense of place and the sense of escape that these scents would give to their home and their everyday lives.

10:38And I think we've done a really good job with each and every launch of creating this entire world and universe around the scent that we're launching. So for example, we launched our New York candle and everything about it from the packaging to the color palette, to the way we changed our website to kind of giving people just like the visual cues, the descriptors, the narrative behind. I talked a lot about how I spent 15 years in the hustle and bustle of New York. And I just loved like the grittiness of like the concrete, but then also the bougie-ness of going to a lobby bar in New York and drinking a martini with my girlfriends.

11:23And so I sort of used a lot of those visuals into creating what that smell would smell like for people who haven't smelled it. We also really rely on descriptions. Like we have this beautiful holiday candle that really smells like walking through like a Christmas tree farm on a snowy day. And we've described it as the smell of bringing the presents inside from the car. And that was like something that I felt would give people the idea. Like a lot of people have a connection to that idea. They know what that experience and that time of year and that environment smells like. And so I think doing things like that really helps just describe the feel and the experience of what burning our candles is like.

12:12It's incredible to hear about your launch because it's a testament to your storytelling and also the community that you build that you were able to sell out in minutes. What are some other marketing milestones that you're really proud of? We have a lot. I would say we have been really scrappy. A lot of people think, based on looking at our brand, that we have this huge team and we have these huge budgets and we have investors and we have none of those things. We started with a few thousand dollars. We bootstrapped from the very beginning. We don't have a single investor. We've been really lean.

12:52And I think that it's a lot about making something out of nothing. Often, I think we have done a really good job of creating buzz around specific moments. we have done pop-ups where I wanted to create this experience for people that didn't just feel like they were walking into a retail store where they were going to have to I don't know feel pressure to make a purchase and it felt very transactional I really wanted to create a true unique experience so we had servers like that were dressed as Bellman passing around Prosecco and we partnered with a brand in order to do that. We had room service menus instead of like price lists or instead of things being like, I don't know, people not knowing what things cost.

13:45We created little room service menus so that people that had all of our candles listed with the scent notes and they would check off what they wanted. We created like a handwashing station where people could test and try our new hand wash, which is a product we started. I think everything that we do is very intentional and is very branded and feels very us. So for something like that, we wanted to stretch the money that we were investing into this pop-up as much as possible. So we had it hit on a lot of different marketing initiatives, one being social buzz. So a lot of it was very Instagrammable, really shareable.

14:28We also had influencers come, which was another big part of it. We had press coverage. And then we, of course, had sales. It gave us an opportunity to tell our brand story to people in person when we don't often have the ability to do that because of so much of our business is online. I think that echoes your branding and your product beautifully too, because I think the sense kind of transports you to a moment, to somewhere new, and your whole experience feels like you get teleported to somewhere new as well. So that sounds awesome. Through testing out different marketing initiatives, has there been something new that you learned that surprised you or something new that you wish you knew before you started?

15:20Well, interestingly, you know, I am a content creator as well as an entrepreneur. And I, a lot of my other business as a content creator is brand partnerships and paid partnerships. And I think when we were in our first or second year, I sort of just defaulted to like what I knew as an influencer, which is okay. You know, you, you do a paid partnership and it'll translate to sales if you pick the right people and you give them a good brief. And I think what we found is that actually didn't work for us. There were a lot of reasons for that. And we really have not done paid influencer partnerships since then.

15:59I think we got a little excited about it too quickly. And I think really the better strategy for us and for a lot of brands is to actually start off building really strong relationships with creators and your community before you start offering them money. I feel like we worked with people that maybe didn't necessarily have a pre-existing organic connection or passion for the brand. And sometimes that shows in the content when influencers and creators really believe in your product and it's something that they stumbled upon organically because a friend recommended it or you gifted it to them for the holidays, that storytelling and the conversion that results ends up being much more successful in my experience than kind of putting a budget toward paying some people that may not necessarily have a specific connection to your brand.

16:57Yeah. Speaking of like, you know, experience as a content creator and starting this entrepreneurial journey. How has it been managing so many different social accounts now? Like how do you balance your personal account with the brand and making sure like the content stays fresh for both accounts? Yeah. So we brought in an agency to help run our Instagram account, which I'm so proud of. I love the work that we do with them, but I also think because this is my business and it's what I do personally, I am approving every single caption. I'm approving every single word on every single story frame, the same with email and our email subject lines and copy.

17:46And I approve every single concept, every single photo. But I think by outsourcing that piece, it allows my agency to have more time to be creative and execute really cool video ideas and photo ideas that if I were running it myself, I probably wouldn't have the time to do. So that was a hard thing for me to let go of initially. And it also was an investment on our part and investing in, you know, consultants to help run our Instagram and some of our other like email marketing was a big deal. But I think that like, one thing I've learned is that it's necessary to let go of a few things whenever possible, because if you try to do everything, like things will inevitably fall through the cracks.

18:37So delegating that has helped a lot, but I still like to be involved in every part of the process. It's so important to let go of responsibilities in order to grow your business. And I'm very excited to chat more about PR and retail relationships. before we do i wanted to take a moment to thank you our listeners for tuning into the show we also have a youtube channel where you can watch some of our favorite in-person interviews so subscribe for more shopify masters thank you so much so lindsey you have been on both sides of pitching products to an editor and receiving pitches. What are some of the things that founders can do to establish better relationships with writers and editors to get more press coverage?

19:30When I was an editor, I was on the receiving end of literally hundreds of emails a week because not only was I writing about travel, but I also was writing about beauty and beauty products and travel products. And I could give you a laundry list of all of the things that I would not recommend for people pitching editors. I mean, first of all, the number one thing is just personalization. To me, there was nothing that made me just immediately delete an email faster than when I could tell it was just like blasted out to a bunch of people. It wasn't targeted toward me. I would rather send 10 personalized individual emails to individual editors that speak to what they cover specifically, even, I don't know, just checking in on them to see what they're working on and how everything is going, then sending, you know, 100 emails that are just generic sounding.

20:32I think your time is way better spent being targeted and specific. But the number one thing is building relationships. And that takes time. and it doesn't happen overnight where you reach out to someone and suddenly you're best friends and then they're writing a feature about you in Vogue. It could take years of relationship building, but I think the people that I covered and the people whose clients I covered were people who had reached out to me individually. We got to know each other. They got to know what I covered as an editor, what would make something an interesting product or story for me.

21:10And then they would come to me when they had something that fit the bill. And then they wouldn't bother me when, you know, they, with stuff that they knew wasn't a fit. I would say that just being very targeted and, you know, if you are starting out with zero connections, right? Like I think a lot of brand founders are going into it and they've never talked to an editor and never tried to get press coverage before. I would make a list of the publications that you want to see your product in, find out who the writers are that write the stories that would be kind of a dream inclusion or a feature for you and reach out to them.

21:50Try to get on a call. Try to take them out for coffee. Don't ever ask for anything. You know, don't I think it's more authentic if you really just try to understand what they're working on, what kind of stories they might be interested in and then share a bit about your product, but building a relationship that way is so much more effective than blasting, you know, a press release out to 150 people. Yeah. Be the consumer of that media first and actually enjoy the writing or enjoy the publication versus like just spamming any and all writers. It was so infrequent that someone would take the time to look up some recent things I had written about and comment on them to me.

22:39And even if you were to say, oh, I just saw your piece about, or I just saw your review of XYZ thing. Thanks so much for the recommendation. I actually just bought that product on Amazon after I read your review. Would love to know what else you're working on. As you know, I'm a founder or I'm doing PR for XYZ brand, and I think it would be a fit for you. Would love to send you a sample if you're interested, but totally understand if not, but just like would be thrilled to keep in touch. I think that is the approach. Perfect. Another huge milestone is the fact that the items are stocked by Neiman Marcus.

23:21Tell us about setting up and building those retail relationships. Yeah. So when we launched, we only launched with two products. Like I said, we sold out so quickly that we couldn't even get our act together to restock for another like month or two because it happened so fast and it was really unexpected and we were not prepared. And while this was all happening, we restocked a second time. the second restock sold out and someone a buyer from Neiman Marcus saw all the buzz and saw people talking about the brand both like in traditional media and on social media and reached out and said would you be interested in bringing your product into Neiman Marcus and at the time I was so narrowly focused on just like getting our website you know getting our product in intact and making sure that we had enough product to sell.

24:17And we actually had to, I don't want to say stall, but we weren't ready when they initially asked because we simply couldn't keep up with the demand from our own customers. So eventually, like after a few months, when we figured that part out, we entered into, I think it was at the time, maybe their top six or eight doors. And now we've doubled that business and we're continuing to grow into many of their stores in addition to some other retailers. And it's an exciting time.

24:55We have learned so much about the difference between like selling in a retail store versus selling on our website and the importance of kind of having a hybrid model like that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy to think about that, you know, you were sold out, you had so many logistical questions to figure out that prevented you from entering Neiman Marcus earlier. Where were some learnings from that experience that kind of helped you to iron out the kinks for logistics? Well, definitely just understanding like projections and inventory management. And And thankfully, my husband, who is my co-founder and runs all of the operations on the business side, was instrumental in doing that.

25:43And what we learned was just understanding kind of the balance of ordering enough product to ensure that you're not leaving money on the table when there's demand for it, but not ordering too much so that you have excess inventory and you're spending more than you're making. so that's like a really difficult balance often we will sell out of launches and we try not to because I do find that people get upset or they feel like they missed out or they maybe get frustrated but there also is something to be said for creating the sense of demand and also creating a mindset with our customers that they know that when we launch something they have to be on our website at exactly the time of the launch and they have to order right away because it's possible that our projections weren't right and we sell out faster than expected.

26:38So I think that was a big learning for us. Just like understanding customer demand, understanding the customer experience, building our SMS list. So our SMS list is way higher converting than our email list. And we learned that we should really lean into that and use our tech subscribers as our VIPs. So we started learning that we drop new launches to our tech subscribers first and then open them up to the public. And then that has helped us build our list and also just kind of create this like VIP mindset for people that are active members of our community. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What else do you want to build with Hotel Lobby in the next year and the years to come?

27:29Well, I think we're actively launching some new product categories. So this past year, for the first time, we expanded outside of candles into reed diffusers and hand wash. And that really opened up a whole new world of new customers and, you know, larger order values and kind of just giving us more of a way to be in people's homes beyond just with candles. So we're excited to just continue adding new products and product categories and also expanding into more retail, kind of thinking about different channels and different other experiential things like we've done in the past. And also collaborations and partnering with some cool brands and hotels.

28:18We have done that in the past and it's been really successful. And I think going into 2025 and even into 2026, we're being really strategic about partners who we're going to partner with or hotels that we may work with on a custom center collaboration. And so that's sort of what the future looks like for us right now. Well, thank you so much for being here, Lindsay. We're very excited for all of the new product launches and experiences that Hotel Lobby will create. Thank you so much for having me. It was so great chatting with you. That's Lindsay Silberman, the founder of Hotel Lobby Candle. Shopify Masters is produced by Megan Coyle and Gogo Zoger.

29:04Our engineers are Miku Betlam and Matt Schwartz. Our managing producer is Benjamin Gottlieb, and I'm your host, Schwang Esther Shan. Check out our YouTube channel for more interviews. The link is in our episode description, and we will see you next week.