Doing the Basics Well
Hello CandleCalmers.
We hope this finds you all well.
Welcome to another blog, a small one this time, I promise.
We've been very lucky to get CandleCalm into the position it is in today, in a position to be able to provide the CandleCalm family with some super heart-warming essential oil scents at great prices, along with some of the old satellite aspects of the business, I'll come on to them later.
But what is luck? A wise old monk in Thailand once said to me "luck is when preparation meets opportunity".
I pondered this very hard at the time.
We created CandleCalm in March and only started selling our products in September. It was absolutely essential that we went to market with a high quality product that people could actually smell and enjoy, and that's why it took us nearly 6 months to be able to offer the public a great candle.
For a single scent, we make around 20 testing candles, all melted, mixed and poured at various temperatures, with various wicks and many different amounts of essential oils in varying ratios. It is so important to us, that you get the best hot and cold scent throws we can offer, as well as a long life luxury candle.
Getting 6 scents ready for the launch date was tough, and unfortunately we experienced a lot of wastage as we conducted more tests than necessary for these scents, but literally burning the midnight oil and with lots of persistence, we got there and launched on time with a great product.
We should've been really happy. We had everything sorted in time along with a nice homely website, but offering 6 scents just didn't cut it for us and this was very quickly realised.
There are many candle companies in the U.K, many of them throw candles together with lack of granular concern for a real quality product, and they even charge extortionate rates for their products. Some of them, like CandleCalm, go to great lengths to be able to offer a quality product, but are priced as such.
We really needed to be different. We swore that CandleCalm would always put the CandleCalm family (our amazing customer base) first and we would strive to offer a real quality candle at a good price.
Our quality control is detailed and our prices are very reasonable, taking into account a 30cl soy wax candle with a 10% essential oil load, but for us, it still wasn't enough.
Being a friend to the environment was paramount. We got tired of seeing how much plastic and gloss was used in packaging and materials for other candles and wax melts, so we decided to design our own compostable postage boxes for our products. Every part of our packaging is compostable, which makes us very happy and proud, apart from the candle jar, this is glass and does not break down, which is quite annoying. We sat and thought, day after day, of how we could create a compostable container for the candle, but it just wasn't safe to do with a flame involved.
Chris came up with a great idea. If we couldn't get our wax containers into a compost bin, maybe we could use compost in them, and so we implemented the Glow n' Grow program. We designed a paper dust cover for the candle, which is laced with kitchen herb seeds such as basil, dill, thyme and parsley. These are then used when the candle has burned out, to grow herbs inside the candle jars. You can check out more details here Glow n' Grow
So, we had the quality, we had the affordable product, we had the environmentally friendly aspect, we had the seeded dust covers, but there was still something missing. Something that is super close to Chris and Nok's heart.
Give back....
All of the effort put into to creating quality products, selling them in markets and online, being advocates for the reduction in CO2 emissions and friends of the environment was great, but we still needed to help and make others less fortunate, part of our intended success.
We then created the CandleCalm Charity Support Program
Still being way behind on our business outlays for CandleCalm, we were advised not to begin the Charity Support Program until we'd broke even, but this wasn't and isn't us. We started it regardless and signed our first charity partnership with Spinal Muscular Atrophy UK. It makes us immensely proud that others will grow with us and be able to share our success and we endeavour to continue to grow this program into something really special.
In the space of 6 months, we have achieved quite a lot, including the introduction of our Autumn scents and on top of that, creating a Merry Christmas scent from scratch in time for Christmas, and it's been a crazy ride so far, especially with looking after two children, one with a disability and with Chris away for 6 months of the year, but it's all been so worth it so far.
We recently had a stall at a small Christmas arts and crafts market in Marlow, and until this day, we hadn't received any feedback or appreciation for the whole concept as one collective effort, but a couple of very festive and cheerful ladies jumped on it in this market, and it made all the effort immediately very worth while.
"So, let me get this straight, your essential oil candles are very well priced, you only use natural, biodegradable ingredients and materials, you offer seeded dust covers to grow kitchen herbs and you give some of your profit to charity? Why do we buy other candles?"
To hear this was amazing. Somebody had actually picked up on all the effort put in and made a small comment, which to us, had such a massive impact. It was like somebody whispering in your ear "you're on the right track, keep going", which is what we really intend to do.
A crazy 6 months, 10 amazing scents, seeded paper dust covers, natural and biodegradable ingredients and materials, the charity support program, and with lots more yet to come, we can't wait to share our new projects with you all.
As this will be the last blog for 2020, we'd very much like to take this opportunity to send out a massive thank you to all of you who have helped us get here. To all of the CandleCalm family for purchasing our products, we hope you enjoy them. CandleCalm cannot be without you, so thank you all so much again and on behalf of our partnered charity SMA_UK, thank you.
Have a wonderful Christmas CandleCalmers and see you all in 2020.