How to Start A Candle Making Business ?

What do a relaxing bath, a romantic dinner, and a power outage have in common? They’re all improved with candles! No longer just for décor or even utilitarian purposes, the popularity and usefulness of candles has grown dramatically. People use candles to clear away invasive scents from their homes, beautify rooms, relax their souls, or get lost in the charm of a flickering flame. Starting an at-home candle-making business is both an easy and inexpensive way to make a product you can stand behind and market easily. 

Do Basic Research 
 Before buying supplies and trying to melt and mold anything, invest in a well written candle-making book like Candle Making: A Step by Step Guide From Beginner to Expert. While there’s lots of information on the Web about candle-making, realize that when you’re working with flames and flashpoint—the point at which wax ignites—you want the best and most reliable information. 

Find a Supplier 

While many local craft shops will have what you need for making your first or second batch of candles, instead consider purchasing supplies much more inexpensively in bulk from wholesalers on the Web. Fortunately, bulk doesn’t necessarily mean hundreds of pounds of wax either. A reputable Web wholesaler offers various bulk waxes for as little as roughly Rs.50 or 60 /Kg, basic inexpensive molds, wicks, wick holders, and additives like scents, colors and wax primers for anywhere from a 1/3 to ½ less than what you’ll pay in a craft or specialty shop.

Get Your Supplies 

When you first begin making candles, you don’t have a lot to spend; in fact, for a meager 1000 Rs., you are in. But once you have your most basic supplies in hand, your how-to book, a few rupees of wax, some colored wax chips (a little goes a long way), essential oil for scenting, a sturdy pot, a dozen votive molds, wicking and wick holders, a thermometer, a few pot holders, and a clear workspace yor are ready to begin. And once you know what the tricks of the trade look like, you begin to nab amazing deals at garage sales, like the funky containers for 10 Rs. that made unique mold shapes, or the box of silicone molds worth about 500 Rs., you snagg at a flea market for 100 Rs.

Time is Money—Decide How Your Time Will Be Spent 

While individuals who enter the candle business do so with very practical goals in mind, like being able to work from home and make an income without a huge investment, one tenet of candle-making that is rarely considered is the concept of making one’s time equal money. Before beginning, decide how you will make the effort of the candle-making process pay for itself because, although you will need to be present the entire time the process is underway (anywhere from one to multiple hours depending on your energy level, and what kind/how many candles you’re making), you’ll find that you’re really only doing about 15 minutes worth of actual work. 

Although candle sales, even modest ones, can yield sometimes as much as 300% pure profit on materials, it's too easy to forget to figure in your time investment. Making candles takes more than just a stove and the materials; it takes odd chunks of scattered time—time to melt the wax safely, prep the molds and the wicks, pour carefully, pour again when the wax shrinks (sometimes in a different color, which requires another batch of melted wax), add scents, and release initial batches from the molds so you can keep the process cycling seamlessly. Make a plan for those days you’ll be making candles. This means plan on doing other tasks you’re able to do in and around your home, specifically in your kitchen or wherever it is you’re melting where you can watch the stove while wax is both melting and settling between pours.

Make A Simple Marketing Plan 

Candles are a simple product and marketing them doesn’t take a huge amount of effort. Choose stores carefully. A large mega-mart store will almost certainly have no interest in selling your homemade creations, no matter how inexpensively you can wholesale them, but a small, locally-owned store with similar appeal items likely will. And you have nothing to lose by approaching these venues. 

Remember to speak with managers and owners, not salespeople who don’t have veto or buying power for the store. If it’s a place where you’ve shopped in the past, even better. Be polite and bring samples. To encourage a purchase and ease sales for the retailers.Always offer free displays with each dozen votives purchased—simple recycled brown boxes that began their lives as shipping boxes for CDs which you can decorate with a sketch of a sleeping cat, Emerald  (the company’s namesake). You can also included small business cards with candle-burning instructions on one side and the scent and logo (same sleeping kitty) on the other with current contact information and—Emerald Candles—across the top. Offering these kinds of simple additions will help the retailer display your product without a lot of fuss or effort on their part, and the more you facilitate a store’s sales, the better, of course. 

Choose Price Points And Sell Your Product 

The beauty of candle sales is that, even by offering votives at very reasonable wholesale prices of about Rs.2  each, you should still be able to make over 100% profit on the materials as well as allow your retailers to sell the product for nearly three times what they’ve paid, depending on where they place their price points and when the candles sell, which they will be  quickly, retailers will not hesitate to order more, knowing they will get a fantastic deal and feeling reassure that votives selling for a Rs.4 or 5 will be a reasonable price point for just about anyone. 

Don’t Be A Stranger 

Stop by the shops where you’ve sold your candles. Check your displays. With permission (of course) do some dusting and maybe a little rearranging of your products. Bring more cards with contact information for custom orders and leave them by the register (again, with permission). And most importantly, offer to switch out scents that aren’t selling with those that seem to fly off the shelves (which will inevitably be the most unlikely scent in your mind). 

Being your own entrepreneur doesn’t always take the savvy of Mukesh Ambani or the media power of Rajat Sherma; believe it or not, sometimes a good idea and little bit of cash is just enough. Interested in beginning your own candle business?