Paintguru

Interesting, and they do have it already.  I've never shopped at AFI...looks like you need to know what you're looking for when browsing their site.  Thanks for the tip!

3 hours ago, soshiegirl said:

I'm hanging on to my last bit of Mistletoe as well.  If you have enough oil left, you might consider sending it off to Julie from soapingsupply.com.  She dupes scents.

Interesting idea.  Does anyone have experience using Julie to dupe fragrances?  I'd hate to be stuck with 7 lbs. of FO that is not useful.  

They are different sizes, and I'm sure the Candlewic chart is simply giving a general target for paraffin and natural waxes.  As we all know, each wax is its own animal and the intention of the wick charts is to give you a starting point.  

So I'm nearing the end of my stock of CS Mistletoe (pre-reformulation), and I'm wondering what to do next.  Based on the reviews on CS, the newly reformulated Mistletoe is not the same as the one I have.  Has anyone found a suitable replacement?  I know a bunch of other suppliers have "Mistletoe" fragrances, but I'm not sure if any are similar to the old CS one.  

May just be your FO choices, not necessarily the wicks.  I personally simply found wicks that worked best for my wax and then identified which FOs played nicely with the combo.  

Just got this from Fragrance Buddy. 

25% OFF ENTIRE SITE USE CODE GIVETHANKS

Is anyone signed up for this premium Etsy service?  $10/mth, but you get listing and advertising credits.  No clue if it is worthwhile or not.  Since I'm a noob on the Etsy front, I'm just looking into what I SHOULD be doing as I start out.  

Is there an easy way to see all the fees Etsy is taking on each sale?  I had two sales and on both Etsy appears to have taken out more than it shows in my transaction history (looks like by $1 each time).  I must be missing a fee somewhere.  Perhaps my first monthly statement will be clearer?  One would think they'd make these fees clear as one sells products, but who knows.  

I think I'm running at about 30-40% "good-great HT" rate for the FO's I've tested.  Granted, I have a high standard, but I don't need to carry 100 fragrance choices, and there are literally 1000+ FOs out there.  Unfortunately, what works for one may not work for another, so we're all forced to just test.  

This has always been my issue though...if a small volume maker wants to compete with any of the larger volume makers, they need to have similar pricing, in my opinion, at least to start.  When one orders small quantities of wax, fragrance oils, or anything else, they really take significant cost hits compared to bulk ordering.  Either the maker has to not pay themselves for a while until they start to reach higher volumes, or they have to hope people will pay the added cost of their product.  

2 minutes ago, TallTayl said:

Want to keep it simple and add all the physical things attached to that candle to make it, and ship it? 
 

another initial assumption might be in house printing, graphics, photos, etc. and that we have the computer and a camera. We can calculate more of that later too.  Like how many candles will I need to sell to pay for a printer?

 

we can do overhead a little after finding out if we have a product to sell. We can also add costs to do a craft show if anyone is interested.

Sounds good.  I mean I already figured out that I'd have to sell at least 50 candles in a year to pay just for the HSCG membership and insurance, which seemed crazy to me as a startup candle maker!  These are the things you don't realize you need to pay for, especially if you're doing things the "right" way.  

Need to add everything in, right?  Labels, shipping supplies, insurance, etc.  Or do you capture that in the 2x, 3x, 4x equation?  Obviously cost of insurance inversely scales with # of items sold.  

12 hours ago, TallTayl said:

Once you do all the math the need to raise prices is kinda clear in my case. I hate working all day for free. 
 

of your prices are already high enough to absorb the shipping you might be ok. 
 

this is another lead in to two important discussions:

1) accurately costing your products

 

and 2) Pricing 

Right.  I set my website prices at the level I thought was appropriate once those fees were taken out, and I have flat rate shipping on everything.  Etsy, on the other hand, has many additional fees, plus the free shipping, so, as you said, the need to raise prices is clear.  Plus, again, I do think the price difference between Etsy and the shop's own website may help drive people to buy from the website directly, which is a win for both the shop owner and the customer.  

The free shipping thing is interesting.  I just turned it on.  Now Etsy is trying to get me to raise my prices.  I don't quite understand the point of this?  I guess it gets people to buy more stuff, which is money in Etsy's pocket.  I'm using Etsy to generate business and hopefully get them to my website, so maybe having my Etsy prices $1-2 higher than my website makes sense.

Well I finally got around to posting my Etsy store, so I'm only 10K sales behind you!   I appreciate the openness of everyone on this board to help others to get started.  

I have constant on lights going through white umbrellas.  Two of them do a real nice job with small backdrops.  I think the lighting is much better than the mini-photo box that I bought off Amazon.  In photography, I do think bigger is better, but I also think shooting in RAW and editing in Lightroom or PS goes a long way as well.  

I wish I could learn video editing.  I've been trying to get my 11 year old son to learn Adobe Premier, but his attention span is that of an 11 year old boy (shocking I know!).  I've done some clip cutting and text addition with free video editors out there (VSDC being one), that were relatively easy to use.  For trickier stuff like those fancy YouTubers do...🤷‍♂️

39 minutes ago, birdcharm said:

The cash method has to do with recognizing your transactions when they actually occur in any given year.  This is the common method of accounting if you don't offer terms, for instance, and you're paid when the product is sold.  It has nothing to do with keeping an inventory.  It's simply a matter of money in and out being noted when it occurs with no carry overs into another year.  If you purchase 50 pounds of wax and at the end of the year you still have that 50 pounds of wax that you intend to use to sell with the following year, the cost of the wax would be entered into your inventory until you sell it the following year.  In other words, on one hand, you will be deducting it as a supply expense, but you'll be adding it back in via your inventory until you actually use it (sell it), then it'll actually be considered. 

Ok, perhaps this is a stupid question, but for fixed expenses like insurance, equipment, etc., that doesn't actually go INTO the product, is that simply an expense you deduct for the year or do you pro-rate it across all your sales as a per item expense?  

EDIT:  I found some reading online.  I think I'm getting it.  This seems like it could be a major hassle for fragrance oils since they all cost slightly different amount.  Am I missing something?  I can see wax and containers being relatively easy to process.  

On 7/22/2020 at 11:18 PM, MilosCandles said:

All depends of your accounting method - https://support.taxslayer.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015704292-Schedule-C-Accounting-Method

 

I use the Cash Method so I do not worry about "Inventory".

 

 

So is the cash method simply you compare what you buy in a year to what you sell?  If I buy 50 lbs of wax but only sell 3 candles, I would come out negative a bunch due to the entire cost of the wax?  I just want to make sure since this is my first year of really selling anything and I'd like a consistent method of tracking things.  

4 hours ago, wild4waxmelts said:

I just realized that with my subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud, it comes with a program/app called "Adobe Dimension." I pay for the whole Creative Cloud because I use more apps than I don't so it's cheaper that way. I've never even noticed Dimensions before but from what I'm reading about it it sounds amazing, and possibly the answer to some of your questions.

 

The link to Adobe Dimensions alone is:

https://www.adobe.com/products/dimension.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjwreT8BRDTARIsAJLI0KJnDZ8VkR2_RUw8c35_sMXNHyUAn7_C2WW2-hbqafd-eYtNnWb9mrEaAjg_EALw_wcB&sdid=KKQKO&mv=search&ef_id=Cj0KCQjwreT8BRDTARIsAJLI0KJnDZ8VkR2_RUw8c35_sMXNHyUAn7_C2WW2-hbqafd-eYtNnWb9mrEaAjg_EALw_wcB:G:s&s_kwcid=AL!3085!3!332972171938!e!!g!!adobe dimension

 

The link to the full Adobe Creative Cloud is: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html

 

I pay monthly  ($52.99) for the Single User plan as I've always had my own Design Studio. It's cheaper to pay one price for the year but with my health issues....enough said. I also pay extra for Adobe Stock (Images) which is  $29.99 monthly. THey ley you roll over your unused image count which is great!!!

 

SO now I'm curious: anyone here use Adobe Dimension??? Reviews, samples, complaints, etc would be great LOL!!

 

Thanks,

Karen

 

 

I have the entire suite, so I'll look into it.  

EDIT:  So Adobe Spark is Adobe's Canva competitor, not Dimensions.  Dimensions appears to be more of a rendering package than anything to do with photos.  Spark does have a background remover as well that looks pretty good.  

Interesting!!!  And not completely Photoshopy looking!

Well the one I posted is a real photo, but I agree that if we create transparent product photos, we can drop them into any background.  Do you just pull backgrounds from Canva?  I've tinkered with Canva a few times, but I'm no expert.  I don't want to steal any secrets, but knowing how to create different images with the same product photo would be super useful.  

I already like the stark white, auto cropped images from FotoFuse!

Wow, that's pretty cool!!  I just took this one as a "busier background", but maybe I just go with your method of controlling the white background images.  

Here are two that I feel are different enough to give me a *blah* reaction.  I see white balance differences and small perspective differences.  

Maybe I switch to non-white/staged backgrounds.  I waffle between the two types for what is best.