Crafty1_AJ

The great thing about making face masks for kids is that you can use all kinds of fun novelty fabrics. Today I made masks with prints of donuts, unicorns, bugs, snakes, frogs, lizards, dinosaurs, bright tie dye, and dogs wearing silly hats. I'm having fun with all these crazy prints, and hey ... as long as kids have to wear masks to school and in Walmart, they may as well have some fun too!

If I only have a few jars to deal with, I put them on candle warmers to melt residual wax. Then I pour into a tart mold so we can enjoy the fragrance in our tart warmers. Or I pour scrap wax into a container I use to make firestarters. If I have quite a few jars to deal with at once, I place them on an old pizza pan and pop them into a warm oven. Then I use a silicone jar grabber (ok, that's NOT the technical name! :D) to hold the jars while pouring out wax. I wipe them down with a rag or paper towel, then sometimes I need to spritz a bit of rubbing alcohol at the bottom where the wick stickum was to remove residual gunk so a new wick will adhere.

Also not looking forward to the Amazon HANDMADE offerings appearing exactly like the commercially-produced stuff. We're already challenged to stand out as handmade amidst the vast number of commercial items. Ugh.

I know, right? When I read this, my heart sank. I detest plain white boring backgrounds for my candle pics, esp the white candles. NOT looking forward to re-shooting ad nauseum.

I would echo that going public has been bad for sellers. Working hard to keep shareholders happy often comes at the expense of sellers. They dropped letting you use your own PayPal. They hiked fees, and take them out of shipping money and even sales tax. They force you to offer free shipping or penalize you in internal SEO. Now the forced 12% ad fees for the lifetime of your shop. I don't get to choose which items to feature in the ads, and I don't get to choose a minimum sale. I can't opt out. Many of those forced ad sales have resulted in a net profit for me of about $2 -- not worth getting out of bed for. Of course we can always adapt our business plan, but it gets to the point of ridiculous. If you have to raise prices every few months to accommodate their latest schemes, it's nuts. This platform made sense for me when I started out. Now it's evolved into something else.

Three of my five shows have been cancelled so far. Still waiting to hear about the other two.

Soy candles really do benefit from a good cure time. I can't comment on your wick since I don't use that type, but my experience with lots of different soy waxes is that a week of cure time is minimum...two is even better, generally speaking. I've had lousy throw at 1-2 weeks, then at 4 weeks - BOOM! There it is. Lol There are a LOT of factors affecting HT ... wax type, fragrance load, cure time, wicking, ambient temperatures and airflow patterns when burning, and the type of fragrance itself. Some fo's just are NOT going to throw well in soy ... so testing different variables is key. And giving it plenty of cure time is a must, IMO.

Fun, bright colors! Nice swirls. I *adore* the smell of Provence!!

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Ditto.

I do about 2 dozen scents in soap routinely, with an occasional limited edition / seasonal scent. C'mas scents don't really sell well in soap, but fall ones work for me and my customers. In candles, I do offer a lot more than 2 dozen, but in part, that's because I have both a soy line and a paraffin line. I'm weird that way.

My Etsy sales are up substantially since the country basically went on lockdown. But according to E, only 2 of my sales have been the result of those new ads. Things that make you go ?? I don't like being forced to pay the 12% commission either, so I'll likely make some adjustments to my biz plan accordingly.

For all you trend watchers! Local news here reported last night that "comfort" items like chocolate, ice cream, popcorn, and alcohol (and we're not talking hand sanitizer here) are seeing a big surge in sales. I've noticed a lot of my candle orders lately are including comfort scents such as Vanilla Bean, Grandma's Kitchen, Butter Cookies, etc. I typically sell those kinds mostly in the fall/winter, not in spring. I'm getting feedback from customers that this crisis and the ensuing stress are EXACTLY why they are ordering favorite comfort scents. It's a coping mechanism when we feel like things are out of our control; we get a sense of having a bit of control when we can purchase and enjoy our favorite candles or foods. A friend's d-i-l works at Starbucks, and even though only the drive-up is functional, she reports that people are NOT slowing down in buying their favorite comfort coffee / espresso beverages either! Quite the reverse. I have to admit, I'm drinking a bit more coffee than is typical for me, although it's made here at home and not at the local drive-up window. DH is eating more comfort foods like my homemade pizza, baked potatoes, etc. He even requested my homemade mac & cheese the other day -- and he almost never requests special foods! And he actually made French toast today because it sounded good to him ... we NEVER eat French toast and usually the only thing he cooks is hamburgers. LOL Atypical times call for atypical stuff.

With my local B&M being closed, a "stay at home" order issued for our county, and my local farmer's market being postponed, I thought I'd be hurting. But apparently all those people at home translates to lots of online shoppers looking for a little retail therapy. My Etsy sales are most definitely up, and my conversion rate is running around 5%. No complaints.

My advice is that you can't cover every single variable in how a candle will be burned. Some people will light it and forget it until 8 hours later. Others light it and 10 minutes later, get called away, so they extinguish early. Some people burn in a room that's 68* F, and others burn in a room that's 78* F. Some never trim, others accidentally trim the wick way too short. (Oops, I've done that myself, and I know better!) You can't possibly cover all situations, scenarios, and human error. So aim for the middle/average. I include burning instructions with every candle order I ship, so if the candle gets messed up, at least the customer had fair warning. LOL I once had a customer complain that the candle I made was faulty, so I pulled a candle from the SAME BATCH and test burned. Nope, it was great. Another time, the customer was right -- we had likely grabbed the wrong wick size for that batch. At any rate, I'd say don't kill yourself trying to account for every single deviation from good burning instructions.

I use flat braid wick. Caveat: NOT an expert in palm pillars. LOL But I have made and burned quite a few, and these wicks have worked for me.

YES, I am happy for the quieter months of January, February, and March. It does feel good to have a break after working hard for 9 months. I don't start up with my markets and shows again until April, so right now I am just focusing on website sales, local B&M shop sales, and restocking. Shelves are fairly empty of stock after the holidays. Yay! My cc sales are up as well. Used to be mostly cash, then about half & half. Now it's trending towards mostly CC's. I don't work another job -- this is it! My DD used to work in the biz with me, but she is done with college and left the nest, so now it's DH and me. We make a great team and have complementary strengths! He is super friendly and a great, personable, enthusiastic salesman. He makes lots of candles for us, packs orders, and helps with the muscle jobs in getting us set up at markets and shows. I still handle making some of the candles, all of the soap, and do most of the online techy stuff. I love having him on board.

Another factor in burn rate is the length of the wick. It's hard to compare test burns unless the wick is trimmed to the exact same length every time. I'll admit that after years of test burns, I just eyeball 1/4" wick trims. But if the wick is accidentally trimmed too short, or left too long, you're going to get differing burn rates.

You didn't mention what type of wax you were using with the LX, but I will tell you that ambient temps affect the burn rate of soy candles, IME. My house is about 80* F in the summer and about 68*F in the winter, and soy candles burn slower in the colder temps.

We did have one screw-up. Things were so hectic at one point! So a customer got home to discover that she had the wrong candles in her shopping bag from us. Whoops. Thankfully, even though the show was 20 miles from home, the customer happens to live right here in our hometown, just a few blocks from the B&M where we sell our products. So we met at the shop and exchanged their candles for the correct ones they had purchased. Couldn't have been less painful. Super happy that if we had to goof up, it was to a local. LOL

Did our last show of the year yesterday. It's a very good show for us -- an intense, but fun, one-day dealio. DH and I did not have time to draw breath for the first 3 or 4 hours of the show. We forgot to bring chairs, but it was irrelevant -- we were on our feet until the last hour. Had customers waiting in line to pay early on, mostly because we were only taking one CC at a time. But most of the time, business was steady and we didn't have to make anyone wait for checkout. Next year, I plan to have two cc processors so we can take cards independently. Anyway, I feel like it's VACATION TIME!! Still have lots of website orders to ship, so not totally out of the woods. But it feels so great to know I don't have to schlep any product, tables, shelves, etc.ANYWHERE until next spring!! Looking forward to staying indoors and working around home for a while, especially since we're getting a lot of snow today. So thankful that the weather came today and not yesterday! I sold a LOT of Christmas scents in both soaps and candles at this show. Sales were slightly better than last year when comparing raw gross numbers. I'm happy about that. I love "last minute" shows because people come ready to buy gifts. "Give me 6 candles, 3 soaps, and 8 lip balms for stocking stuffers." Yeah, we can do that!! Tossed a ton of empty boxes into the cardboard recycling bin on our way out the door. Felt great! We've done our share of so-so, blah shows this year, so it felt fantastic to have a winner and go out on a strong note. ETA: Oops, forgot to report what kinds of scents sold, which was kind of the point. We sold lots of classic favorites such as Christmas Tree, Cranberry, Cinnamon, Vanillas, coffees, etc. The good ol' popular ones that never seem to go out of style. Lots of herbals, fresh & cleans, and bakery moved. Even a few florals sold. But loads of Christmas scents! I was surprised because we typically don't sell a lot of Christmas scents this close to, well, Christmas. LOL

I think it's due to the rise of mobile credit card processing. Just a few years ago, it was rare for a vendor at my shows and markets to take debit/credit. Now, vendors who only take cash are the exception rather than the rule, IME. My cash sales have steadily declined a bit, while card sales have increased. Sales overall have been steady.

Nice! I love that turquoisy color. I wonder how this one compares to the Old Mill Sapmoss? That was one of the very first fo's I soaped...ah, fond memories! LOL It was a fast mover, but it smelled divine.

I don't do eBay, so I can't tell you about that one. But here is a paste up from Etsy's fee page. Last line made bold and underlined by me: "Payment Processing Fees Online Sales. Eligible Etsy shops may use Etsy Payments to accept certain payments through Etsy (learn more about Etsy Payments below). Etsy charges a payment processing fee for each transaction through Etsy Payments. Payment processing fees vary based on the location of your bank account. See the Etsy Payments Policy to find payment processing fees by country. This fee is assessed on the total amount of the sale, including tax and shipping."

Oh, and another friendly heads up. Square doesn't just keep 2.6% of the amount of purchase. They also take 2.6% of your sales tax collected.