80. $500K/Year Selling Candles… HOW?!

0:00From selling candles at flea markets to custom orders from the LA Clippers, we're delving into the journey of two sisters who built their$500, a year candle candle business from scratch. You can start as a side hustle, but even as a side hustle, you have to treat it like it's a real business. The best advice I got was to stop working so hard in our business and work on our business. Just constantly looking over our business and seeing where we can actually spend more money to get a savings in bulk that we can pass along to the customer is how we've been able to scale. The reason we still go to the markets is because we make money there.

0:37If you want to scale, again, it's reinvesting your money back into the business and continuing to just chug along, get at it. I'm your host, Alex Freeman. And if the thought of starting a candle business ever crossed your mind, you can't miss this episode. Jennifer, welcome to the UpFlip podcast. How are you? Hi, I'm great. Thanks for having me. Can you share a bit of your story and how you started RxLA? Yeah, for sure. We raised$3 ,000 with the Kickstarter campaign. With that, we bought some essential oils and vessels to start our pop-ups. That was our first goal to get in front of customers to sell.

1:15We didn't need that much money because Jocelyn already had the recipe and the tools. She already bought those with her own money. And then we just went to our own community. We borrowed everything from our friends and family. We borrowed a pop-up tent. We borrowed tables and tablecloths. So we just dived right into our first flea market. Now, you made mention of the way in which you utilized Kickstarter to kind of get that seed funding. Can you talk about any tips you might have for someone who is thinking about going the same route and wants to make sure they have a successful Kickstarter campaign?

1:44Yes, for sure. Kickstarter now has grown, as everyone knows, into a really good source. But now it's highly competitive. You have to have a really good story. You know, tell them why you're raising money and make that interesting. If your corporate job is killing you, tell them it's like sucking your soul. You want to be passionate about your project. and if you're risking at all, tell them, I don't have a background in this, but I love whatever I'm doing and that's why I'm trying to raise money. The second part is people really want to know on Kickstarter what you're going to do with the money.

2:17If I give you money, how is this going to help you? And why do you need it? What are you going to do with this money? But more importantly, you really need to have good cinematography now. We did ours on an iPhone 4. That's how long ago it is. Now people really do hire sometimes someone to film and edit their process. Because a lot of times they want to see not only who you are as a person, but also where are you planning to make this? Do you have a factory? Take us to the factory. Have you done any research? Because people do want to give money, but they also want to know that they're giving it for a good reason and they're going to get something in return.

2:53So yeah, if you're only asking for a couple thousand bucks, you maybe don't have to convince so many people. Sometimes people just want to help. But with Kickstarter, you have to meet a minimum, right, for your campaign to get funded. So if you're so far from that like$50 ,000 goal, people then want like kind of a good prize at the end to give their money. Now, I could be wrong here, but a lot of those tips also seem like a way to be competitive in the candle business because it can be such a competitive industry. There are so many places people can buy candles. But exactly what you were describing seems like a competitive edge for this type of business.

3:27Is that true? Yeah, definitely. Before starting a candle business, there's a ton of planning. For us, we didn't do a business plan or anything like that because it was a side hustle. But you can spend a lot of money. It can go right down the drain if you don't have good planning. So talk to me about what RXLA's competitive advantage is in the space. Tell us a little bit about the company in that way. It didn't happen from the start. Our competitive advantage now is that we're creating our own fragrances in-house. So that's really clutch for us because people come, you know, there's a lot of candle businesses and perfume businesses out there now, but they come to our booth and it's unique.

4:03It's friendly as in all the fragrances are very neutral, but just having the ability to create our own fragrances gives us that competitive edge. You mentioned not having a plan before, before you kind of dove into it. So talk to me about the development of the business. What was the thought at the start? And then how did you end up where you are now? So when we first started our first day at a flea market, which was hard to get into, we are still permanent vendors at Melrose Trading Post in Los Angeles, which is one of the oldest flea markets. It attracts tons of celebrities. But even to get into that, we had to wait in line all day and like apply and kind of like show them what we had.

4:42And luckily at the time, they didn't have a lot of candle vendors. So we got it. But we high-fived off making$20 each that first Sunday. And we were there for 10 hours. And that doesn't include how long it took to make the product and set up. So we really just didn't have any expectations. We were just shocked that anyone would even consider buying something from us that we made. I come from a sales background and I can kind of sell anything. But when it comes to something that you personally make, it's really hard to sell sometimes because it's so personal. I love that. So we went really slow because we didn't have any expectations.

5:17And the money we did make, we would pay ourselves maybe 20 bucks, but everything else went just right back into bulking up and getting more inventory. So we started as a sole proprietor, which is definitely my recommendation for anyone looking to start a candle business or a business in general. I see a lot of friends and family now coming to us and being like, Hey, I got my LLC license. Now what as a business? And that's like one of the most expensive routes you can take because it costs money just to have that LLC, where if you're a sole proprietorship, it doesn't cost you anything. So I think even just when you're starting a business, you want to keep your overhead as low as possible.

5:53And it's hard not to want to make everything legit. Our flea market stand, looking back at it, was super embarrassing. But at the time, we didn't have the resources. And I'm kind of glad we didn't because I wouldn't have wanted to just start with$100 ,000 and then throw all this money and see like, oh, is this what we need to do? We started with like paper stickers that we were printing at home. And then we got real labels after we found out which fragrances were selling. So not jumping in too deep with like being too professional at first, you know, helped us not have too much dead inventory.

6:28With that in mind, if someone is unsure about if they want to jump full into the candle making business, but they think that's where they want to go. What is like the minimum that they need to test the waters, so to speak? Like kind of how I just said, you could start with$100 ,000 and barely kind of be getting started. Or you could start with$100. Your approach is just going to be totally different. If you start with$100 ,000, you know, you're going to be spending a ton of money on advertising to get rid of all this inventory you just made ahead of time. If you start with$100, you might have like a couple of testers and do some pre-sales based on the testers people are liking so that you can get the money to actually invest to buy the supplies you need for your inventory.

7:09But it can be pretty minimal. You can get a wax melter. It doesn't have to be. We have four 65 pound wax melters now, but we started with the little Instapot ones that you can buy just for, you know, cooking at home. Then you need a pouring pot of some sort, just some sort of stainless steel pot, some vessels. And vessels can be anywhere from like free to 10 bucks for a nice one. But I've seen people reuse other candle jars that they have. People are using mason jars, they're cutting wine glasses in half. So if you're starting, you know, with a tighter budget, you're going to want to source these things like cheaper as far as your supplies go.

7:48But I would say, you know, you could do it for 100 bucks, start just with a handful of candles to sell your friends or family or even on Instagram. or if you really want to do the pre-sale thing, you could do it with no money. You can throw up something on AI, get like a look of the candle you're going for, price everything out. And when you get your sales, tell them it's going to take you, you know, two weeks to get these out, three weeks and do the pre-sales. Again, you know, people really have to trust you because fragrances are personal. Like you don't want to get something that you smell and you just hate.

8:20So you're going to have to be really descriptive when it comes to how something smells so you can sell it to someone if it's not right in front of them. And then I imagine making sure that you deliver on that description, that they don't end up with a candle that smells different from what they ordered. And I'm curious, how do you, you know, if smell is such a personal thing, how do you make sure that your descriptions of the smell are such that someone's going to be like, oh, yeah, this is what I ordered? One hundred percent. Like going back to, you know, our competitive edge, making our own fragrances, I think we really know, you know, what we're talking about with the notes and everything.

8:53But for me, I like to describe it as say, like our white tea candle and fragrances are best selling fragrance. And to me, I compare it to going to the Westin or going to a fancy resort, a lot of them are using this white tea type of fragrance because it's neutral. So that helps build like imagery in someone's head of what they can expect versus if I tell you it smells like ylang-ylang and bergamot. You're going to be like, well, what does that smell like? And also a lot of perfumes and fragrances and everything have the same ingredients, but how it comes out, it's going to smell totally different.

9:28So yeah, you have to kind of go with more of like a feeling and vibe, not just the ingredients because the outcome can be very different. Listeners, if you're looking for further advice and other perspectives on starting a candle business, you can head over to the Upflip blog where we share advice from the owner of Black Sunflower on how to start a$200 ,000 a year candle business. Jennifer, I want to talk to you about branding and getting started. You talked about looking back at your first booth and it being embarrassing. Can you talk about how you went about building the brand? Yes. So we started, like I said, off with just regular things that we could do at home.

10:04It was super DIY. I had paper Avery labels that we were printing at home. And then from there, every time we had more money, we were able to reinvest and we decided what was going to be more impactful for the customer. And a lot of people were saying like, I really like this candle, but these paper labels like rub off. So labels was one of our very first like bigger investments. And it's bigger because to get a good price, you're going to have to buy, you know, a thousand labels. So now you're committed to selling a thousand candles of the same label, right? Or same fragrance. So we started off that way and building the brand.

10:38And luckily, since we're face to face with our customers selling at farmers markets, pop ups and things like that, they told us what they wanted. They said, I love these candles. I already bought 10 of them. Give me more. Like I want a diffuser. Can you do that? And after hearing it from so many people, we busted out with diffusers. Next, they wanted perfume. And it's funny because I would kind of push back a little like you want perfume, but why would you want a perfume that smells like a candle? Like you want to smell like your house? And they'd be like, well, these are divine. Like, yeah, I want to smell like this.

11:07So we got perfumes and then people wanted to make their own candles. So they wanted the oils that they could buy themselves. So luckily, building our brand, we just had straight up guerrilla marketing. We were in people's faces. They told us exactly what they wanted and we did it. And with that face-to-face, what were you then doing to further nurture the customer base? I know that your email list has really factored into your growth. What were you doing to kind of capture email addresses and make sure that you were connecting with the customer even when they weren't necessarily standing directly in front of you?

11:38I want to say we were collecting emails for five years before we did anything with it. And even that was just purely because again, customers were forcing us. They were like, I'm writing down my email, like, send me information where I can buy these. And we're like, you can't, you have to come here. And they're like, I don't want to come to the farmer's market every Sunday to buy these, like get a website. So we got a website. And at first, I think we were on Wix or Squarespace. Those are really affordable websites for people starting out. and it just is a template and it had a built-in email area.

12:12And I didn't even know people were putting their emails in it. So one of my friends one day was like, you got to start doing your email list. I'm like, I'm overwhelmed. We're making everything. We're selling them. I can't do one more thing. And she set it up for me. And she's like, look, I'm going to send this up and you're going to see how much money you make. And you're going to want my help doing this because it's like you're just losing out not doing it. And she opened it and she was like, holy crap, Jen, you have as many email subscribers as my business. And she was working for like a legit known, well-known LA brand.

12:42And she's like, you have the same amount of email subscribers. I'm like, from where? Where did you find those? She's like, you have to pull them in. You have to extract them and put them in to another system. So we use Klaviyo now because that's what she told me to use. Formerly, other people were using MailChimp, but they, I don't know, at some point, they didn't have a relationship with Shopify anymore. So we went with Klaviyo. And the rest is history. The first couple newsletters she did for me, we made the same amount we made in one newsletter as one Sunday at a market. So I'm like, we spend the entire week preparing for this market.

13:17We have to pay rent. We have to bring all this inventory out. It's backbreaking. And then, you know, boom, she sends out a newsletter. We make the same amount of money. So I was like, okay, I guess we need to spend time on this. So when you're at that point, then how does the business pivot? How does it change what your kind of like day to day looks like? It's tricky because we have to have enough inventory to go out to all our pop ups still, which is a lot of inventory. And then that means we need to have back stock in the warehouse. So we're, you know, spending a lot of money on just inventory sitting around so that we have it on hand to be sent out, which is important for us as a small brand.

13:53A lot of people want and know when they're buying from you online that this is going to get shipped out. Like it's sitting in the warehouse, it's ready to get shipped. All I have to do is wait for the amount of time it takes you to print the order and ship it. And then the shipping time, because you know, we're not Amazon, it's taken five days through UPS to get to someone. So that part's hard, just having inventory to be online and to like run ads, because you just never know what people are going to buy either. We might have, you know, 2 ,000 candles sitting around, but they want the one fragrance that we happen to be sold out of.

14:23So pivoting to doing online marketing, which is what I would categorize emails as, is just making sure that I'm the one on top of the emails. I know what we have in stock. If we don't have it in stock, I can't run an ad on that or send an email or a special. And then now just getting a little bit more smart about it. Like before I might just do 25 % off the whole website. And now I look around and I see like, hey, we have extra rollerballs. That's what's going on sale this week. That's all that's going on sale. But yeah, it's fighting kind of with yourself on it. Because overall, I'd be like, oh, people aren't going to open this email if there's not some really good special in there.

15:01They're not interested in what I'm making them buy if it's rollerballs or oils. But it's kind of like a Pandora's box, right? Because if you want to sell the rollerball, then I got to do like a newsletter and a blog on like why the rollerballs are the bomb and why you're going to want to buy this. And guess what? You're getting a discount today for buying it. So you can't just kind of like spit it out and expect people to open your email and want it. You kind of have to educate and pump them up for it, too. Beyond the email, what other digital marketing are you doing? What kind of social strategy do you have?

15:31How important is that? And are you doing other things like Google ads and that kind of stuff? Yeah, we are kind of dabbling in it all. I think I spend most of my time on the emails because those are tried and true customers. I know that they want what we're putting out. Getting a new customer through a Google ad or an Instagram ad can be a little bit harder. So with those, it's good because you can say, hey, on Google ads, I only want to spend$10 a day or I only want to spend$200 a month on this Google ad. And it will just stop every day so that I'm not going over that budget. And then you have to go back and look at how is this ad performing?

16:08If it's not performing very good, then like, let's create a new ad and give or if it's doing very good for us, you know, I can see on my website on Shopify, the analytics, like what's bringing in the most customers. So then we got to pivot and say like, hey, Instagram's like killing it right now. We got to post more pictures, bring in more ads for new customers and things like that. But the key for ads, if you're going to pay for them is kind of knowing your budget and then setting those parameters. You don't want to just let Google ads like go for it because you're going to get a bill for 3000 bucks at the end of the month.

16:38Yeah. And so with that, you know, it's interesting to me that obviously there's now a robust digital side to the business, but you're still going out to the markets. Why do you still make sure you're going out to these pop ups and doing the markets and the in person stuff? We just really like to be in front of our customers and we're still learning. But also, you know, we have grown our wholesale significantly. All our eggs used to be in this pop-up space. And then when COVID hit, it was like, wow, what are we going to do if we're making three-fourths of our money from pop-ups? So again, we were forced to pivot.

17:12But the reason we still go to the markets is because we make money there. In person, when you smell our candles and perfumes, it's undeniable, man. People come to the booth, they put on a perfume, they walk away and I can't tell you how many times a day I have to smell someone's arm or neck because they're like, I put this on, I can't stop smelling it. I love it so much. What is this smell? So I'm like sniffing people's bodies all day, like they can't leave without buying it. But yeah, the face to face interaction is just so great. And we're still connecting with so many new customers, even at the same pop ups, because in LA, you know, they have pop ups that 10 ,000 people are coming through every Sunday.

17:49So in other cities, I could see how that would be challenging. You know, if it's always raining, or it's cold, you're not getting people outside. But where we're located in Los Angeles, and we'll travel to San Francisco and do pop-ups too. People are out and about and they love that customer interaction. They want to chat with us. They might not even be talking about candles or anything. They're just talking about what restaurants are around or they like our story too. So when we're just face-to-face with the customers, we really get to give them who we are as a brand, not just a product that's a picture on Instagram.

18:20But yeah, Instagram and the digital space, it all has its place. And now luckily we're able to kind of recycle everything. Everything goes hand in hand. If I have to post a blog, I need that picture. So I'll take that same picture or the same picture from a photo shoot, stick it in Canva, tweak it up a little bit. And that picture goes on our blog. Then it goes on Instagram. Then it goes on Facebook. It goes to the newsletter. It goes to the text messages. But everyone wants to see it in a different way. So that's the part that's going to take up a lot of time because you can't just put the same picture everywhere.

18:53They want like kind of a different picture, kind of different information, depending on who you're marketing to. But at least now my resources are getting recycled. Like I'm not just doing a photo shoot for just one picture on my website. I'm using those photos over and over again to keep trying to sell these items. You've added wholesale and bulk ordering as well. Can you talk about when you layered that into the business and how that all came about? Yeah, thank God for technology. Again, people come to our booth and be like, I want to buy wholesale and I want to take it home right now. And, you know, they would take our whole inventory and then we're like, how do we deal with these wholesale numbers?

19:30How do I know they even have a license and all these things? And so for a while, I was handling wholesale on my own and just trying to do my best to like keep everything categorized, which at the end of the year for tax season was just a nightmare because, you know, one more hat for me to wear as a business owner. But now we use Fair. There's so many new apps and companies that are making every aspect easier. And for us, I find we're on a lot of wholesale platforms now, but I find I really like Fair because they let us import our own customers. So I'm not necessarily paying them commission to get me new customers.

20:04They do take commission if they find me a wholesaler that wants to buy from us. But they just simplify it because you have to already be licensed to be on Fair. So I'm not getting people kind of like scamming me trying to just get wholesale for free, you know, like, but they're just a regular buyer. But it connects me with so many shops around the world, or they are international now, but mostly in the US for this platform. But the platforms are now just taking so much off of the business owner. Like now I can just have my catalog up here. And the order comes to me just like if you're ordering from my website versus in the past, I would have to get your business license, get your order, you'd be like, Oh, I want this fragrance.

20:44And I'd say we don't have it, you know, then we'd be going back and forth. then back and forth for like even a week. And this person's just like, I just want these products. Can you hurry up? You know, there's so much conversation to be had. Now they can just get onto their fare. They see exactly what I have in stock. They see when it's going to be back in stock and they order and then I can fulfill it from there. In the past, I'd have to call them back and be like, okay, now I've looked at how much your order is. I've packed it all up. I had to weigh it myself and it's going to cost this amount.

21:13And they might be like, oh, that's too much. Can you take out 10 candles? So fare really, really helps because now they just fulfill it and they send them a bill for the shipping if they're paying for shipping on the back end. So those things are game changers because it doesn't sound like a lot, but those are huge time sucks. It could take me a whole day just to do or half day just to do one person's order on wholesale. And now I don't have to do that. And now that I don't have to do that, our wholesale is up 100 % year over year because I'm not involved in it. When someone has to do something, when a customer has to do something that's too hard, they're business owners too.

21:51They're just going to say, forget it. But now they could just hop on there and order. So different platforms are big game changers. Peeba is a new platform that I definitely recommend to people if you're trying to sell in Asia. And it's exactly like FAIR. They basically hit me up and told me they stole fairs model. And they're like, you can import everything just like fair. It works just like fair. And that's important too, because I've been on other wholesale platforms where you have to do data uploads. And if your owner and you know what that is, oh my gosh, it's a disaster. You know, you're doing like HTML code, you're sending them Excel spreadsheets, you're trying to like label all your pictures so that they match the skew for, you know, but fair and people, they took all that out of there.

22:34It's just like uploading any other website. You don't have to be tech savvy to work with them. But Piva, man, people in Asia, they are buying USA made stuff right now, which is kind of crazy. Like before they'd be, you know, made in China is great. But now they're like, no, people here want made in USA. So they're importing our candles by the pallet to get to their stores. So even in like, I think one month, we surpassed a whole quarter on fare just because of the sheer volume that they're exporting stuff into China now. But again, like just going back to the platforms that, you know, before we would get inquiries from China, but there's just no way I'm not I don't know how to deal with customs.