Ramaroa

Indeed, they do look amazing, such wonderful detail and colour.

Nope your not alone, I save all the wick bits. I often use them up by making tealights for myself, using leftover drippings of wax from cleaning the pour pot. Nothing goes to waste.

Aww, that's very generous of you! Lemonjelly I was looking at your order, and you're doing better than I can for bulk order prices on wax in NZ. What kind of candles are you making? You might need some wick sustainers, the little metal tabs that attach the bottom of the wick to your container or votive.

I agree you have to make your own rules, you're working for yourself and don't have to do anything you are not comfortable with. Its all good experience though and I'm sure you will go from strength to strength. Often when you stress with these guys that you need to test their desired containers or whatever, they rarely come back, so don't beat yourself up or get too despondent about it all.

You're off to a great start, and it helps to have such lovely products and photographs. There are, as others have said, quite a lot of typos, missing spaces after fullstops and so on, but you can easily fix those. The easiest way is to copy and paste your text into Word or whatever application you use and run a spelling and grammar check. It saves a lot of headaches to do all your edits in word and paste it back.

Not that I know how to do any of this, or know where you need to put the code, but I have seen lots of information and downloads of source code that you can add to your site, in order to disable the right click function. It's not foolproof as people can work around it if they have the will, but at least it sends a clear message to the person trying to copy your images that the images are protected and may act as a deterrent to wouldbe image thieves. Google 'no right click' and heaps of information is available on the subject - I just don't have the time to read it all and disseminate what you actually have to do in simple easy to understand terms.

I find orangey colours the hardest to keep consistent each time. Always too red, too yellow, too something and then I get it to a shade I like and can never make it the same again. Grrr!

I like Kaye's too! I have to say you might come up with some problems with the word 'swanky' on the internet, it often gets blocked by the swear-o-trons. This board obviously doesn't do it or we would be reading 's****y'.

Another lovely success story, well done, you must be so proud of yourself.

Congratulations, that is just so, so lovely, well done!

I think you should to stick with the Bert idea if that is what you still want. Millions of company names have nothing to do with the person who owns them and there's nothing to say that the company name has to be anything to do with you as a 'girl', so you shouldn't worry even if people do think it is a boy's name - hope that makes sense maybe not? Groovy baby! I now have an Austin Powers thing going on - maybe have a look for some inspiration and graphics: http://www.austinpowers.com/movieinfo/index.html

Don't feel bad, I am sure I have done worse, I put mine in the dishwasher. :tiptoe: I blame the people who make them, why do they make them from cheap tacky old tin that goes rusty with one glimpse of water?

I like both of those, very nice. I would favour the pink given choice of the two. Glad you veered away from the Smelly thing, it could work in another context but just not with Place. Smelly Berts.

The stress and strain of moving halfway around the world fries your brain, it's my tax year that ends 31st March. :rolleyes2 You don't have to tell me about the wierdness, that's why I left. :tiptoe:

There is a lot of public information out there on the inner web which can help you, of course there's also a lot you can ignore, but you can get a lot of your questions answered at places like this: http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/layer?topicId=1073858805 Tells you what you need to register for, tax and what records to keep. You need to get a good understanding of what is allowable as business expenses and keep everything. If you are using a portion of your home you can claim a % of your electricity, telephone, insurances, council tax, possibly petrol and milage expenses etc. UK Tax year ends 31st March and you have to keep records for 6 years and anything up to 12 years for some tax records. It will pay you to become au fait with some basic accounting and get yourself an Accountant.

I made the BIGGEST mistake ever when I first started all this and ordered tons of boxes to fit one or two candles, thinking that is what I would need the most of. I had some really big issues in the early days as I never seemed to have the right size of box for the job and it became a really huge PITA forever trying to find the right box, as people ordered way more than I had anticipated. Now I still have heaps of the smallest boxes, but now I just go to the stationery store and buy a few of each size when I need them. They are really quite cheap and I worked out that I save myself nothing by buying them in bulk. They take up loads of space. I buy boxes of 50 'Jiffy' Padded Bags and they are excellent for posting Tarts - would be perfect for lip balms I expect.

I'm sitting here laughing to myself at the irony, when you consider all the issues and worries we all have about scent throw.

Good job so far, I am sure you will think of lots of things you would like to tweak or make better and it takes a long time before you will eventually be able to say 'OK I'm done, no more changes'. Two little things as I didn't look at or read everything: 1. The Picture for unscented votives is not showing, just a red cross 2. In the categories list can you do something with the 'Unscented Containers & Candles' so that it doesn't hang to one side. It looks a bit odd not being justified in line with all the others. Agree you need more variety of pictures and could I suggest you put the fragrance descriptions somewhere other than on the product itself. Remember you are selling your 'Fragrance', as much, if not more than the physical candle itself. People like to create a vision of those fragrances and it's a bit tedious to have to click on every product to read each one.

Yes and yes! I often get a waft of the fragrance the next day if I have poured in an evening (which is almost always). My hands at the moment smell of vanilla, despite having washed them several times and I haven't even poured the batch yet. I always end up with fragrance oil on my hands when mixing, because I don't think I will ever master the art of getting it out of the bottle without it dribbling all down the sides.

The .com domain name is available too!

What about just going for 'Pastel Princess'? I like the sound of that and you could do something nice with the two Ps in a logo. My Song Suggestion would be Deep Purple: Smoke on the Water

Have you used the advanced search on Google? Click the link beside the Search box and type your phrase in the box marked 'Find Results with Exact Phrase', which will cut out all the links with the individual words dotted around.

Hey WicknWax -I'm originally from UK and have a Black & Decker Heat gun from Homebase. Have a look in B&Q or somewhere like that, where the 'mens' power tools are for something like this: http://www.blackanddecker.com/ProductGuide/Product-Details.aspx?ProductID=5551

I think most people can accept that 100% soy wax is natural (not organic) in it's raw form, until we want to do things with it to make it look or smell nice. As soon as we add synthetic fragrance, zinc wicks, perhaps with metal tabs and colour it quite simply ceases to be a natural product. I really started out with the idea of being 'all natural' but have come to accept that I can't have it that way and I am upfront with my products and tell people that my candles cannot be considered entirely natural. I would love to sell only pure white candles fragranced with only esential oils, but the market is quite small here for such a 'high end' product. The only way you could market a 'totally' natural product would be to use no colour or use natural vegatable based colourings and although I don't know any who does that - I expect you could. Problems abound with fragrances as you would have to use natural pure essential oils, which are expensive and not particularly good in candles as they don't give the strong throw that people want. I'm happy to be proved wrong but I would not consider paraffin a natural product, it may start out from crude oil but not knowing the ins and outs of the petro-chemical world, it surely must go through chemical processes to be turned into petrol, paraffin etc.

Well these people http://www.piedmontspa.com obviously thought Piedmont sounded spa-ish! I think it's a lovely word especially if you think of it with an Italian or French accent, like the northern Italian region. I found the spa town of 'Acqui Terme', Piedmont, Italy. Acqui is a lovely word with a very appropriate 'watery' connotation for that spa feeling. Might be some words there that give you some inspiration.