TallTayl

You would be surprised how much more you know than many others in attendance.

In soap calc you can adjust the setting for the amount of fragrance per lb of oils at will. The number soap calc spits out is the total for the batch as it was entered. If your resulting batch sheet called for 1 oz of FO for your 2lb batch, then the setting was at .5 (.5 oz per lb x2 lbs= 1 oz fragrance) It's helpful to know the usage limit of your FO to decide if that setting needs to be adjusted down. You can go by your nose too. If this one was too strongly scented, the next one you can dial it down some.

what other wicks have you tried?

That is one super deep melt pool for such a short time. Can you show how it looks after 2 and 3 hours? Then again in the last half and third of the jar, especially the last couple inches. That is where all the real trouble starts.

Have you tested a candle with only Nag Champa from your supplier? The OP reads as if it was a blend. If you did blend then any number of chemical reactions with the other FO could occur. Not all Nag Champa from every supplier is the same. I make a couple dozen NC soy candles a week and do not have that color change phenomenon.

That's a lot of wick for that diameter jar. One thing i noticed about the BBW triple wick jars is they burn really, really hot. The MP on the store demos i've seen are over an inch deep. Not only does burn off scent prematurely, the temp of the glass makes it impossible to safely handle the candle to move it if needed. After having over-wicked candles in glass shatter nearly setting my house afire, I'm of the conservative wicking camp for home safety. For instance, I double wick a cast iron container that is 4" wide. It throws to beat the band without creating a full MP until further down the candle. You can pick up the pot at any time during the burn without burning yourself.

What are the dimensions of the candle you are triple wicking?

see if you qualify to speak, then it's just travel expenses

No scent comes through, just texture. I have scraped some of the "caviar" from beans and got zero scent in CP. Vanilla scent notes are so fragile as it is, and extracted with alcohol. ETA: i use them in Vanilla scrubs where a faint hint of vanilla contributes to the absolute and FO scent combo i like to use.

I have been to the Central Soapers as a speaker. I was skeptical, but ended up having a great time.

Exactly, Daisymay! And they don't question prices because they just know the candles will be exactly what they want. I dislike large candles, personally. It takes too long to burn through them-especially if it is only a marginally good scent. Strong does not always mean good. I have tossed out hundreds of strongly scented, but horribly headache inducing candles. My customers buy the 8 oz tins 3,6,9+ at a time so they can be a part of the original scent experiences they can only get from me. No way i would trade that to sell one But whatever works for you we all go through our chandling journeys at different paces and take different paths.

It is much, much more than just container size. I have a few scents that work brilliantly in my wax and wick combos. One in particular i recall is a soy tea light scented 3% of my lilac fragrance. It threw so strongly i had to extinguish and move it outside. Like OG above, i make hundreds of soy tins a month that throw so well wicked conservatively i would never consider changing them. Ditto the scented beeswax pillars. The trick is finding that sweet spot with your wax, convection of the container, wick and fragrance.

not to my nose. It has a very slight spicy note to it. People like it in soap, but in candles I find it kind of weak compared to other scents.

When deciding about pricing, keep in mind what it would cost to replace a lost/stolen/damaged order. If the cost of replacing an order would make you lose money then you are priced too low. Also factor in enough to cover for botched batches. It happens to all of us. If a botched batch will kill any hope for healthy profit on the sale then your prices are too low. A WS customer of mine demanded that I drop my WS price by $.70 per bar because she was not making enough money. Well, the packaging she chose was ridiculously expensive for her market. I politely declined, said I was no longer able to work with her, and sent her links for The Soap Guy and Soap By The Log among others that would fit her price point. After 3 days she agreed to pay my price because nobody else would do what she wanted. Stick to your guns. WIth pottery someone suggested rather than throwing individual pieces on a wheel I instead slip cast everything so the pots could be made faster and cheaper (Made In China style). I asked why the heck I would want to do that... the reply, so I could pass the savings on to my customers. Clearly that person does not understand what I do or the market to which I cater.

WHAAAAAT? $2.50 RETAIL? She is super busy because she is underpricing herself. No way you can turn a profit with those numbers. By the time you figure in sales taxes, COGS, waste, etc it would actually be cheaper to hand out $1 bills.

Wholesale can be worth it, sure. Just make sure you have solid terms and limits to what you will do, along with high enough minimums.

I would ping Scott Crew: http://www.scottcrewcandlesupply.com Once you figure out the process making them is not that hard.

Not all titanium dioxide is the same and it is next to impossible to know what is in each batch. Washed out, yeah I get that, but bleeding? Something is not right.

Oh wow! Something on it has oxidized badly. Any ingredient list available? Or msds?

Paypal is slowly catching up too.they are taking reservations for their version. It is with googling the changes. CB, yes the little hologram thing has the emv chip. Europe has had it for years.

Huge changes, Jcandle. I've been getting notices from paypal and square for months.Come October when taking credit cards in person you need to use the special new chip card readers or all fraud liability falls directly on you the merchant. If you process a chip card using the mag stripe you automatically forfeit fraud protection for the sale. Moreover, if the card is faked, you can be fined heavily. Paypal and square both are allowing us to reserve readers. https://squareup.com/apple-pay Square says "free" but it is actually rebate driven. Pay $49 and get back rebates in the form of processing fee reversals for a short period of time. They have not addressed how to handle liability chip cards over the web. I will be eliminating direct processing of cards on my shop in favor of people processing their web cc orders through a third party, probably paypal.

I love it too, so quick and easy. The new credit card changes coming in October are making me a little nervous though.

I'm in the less is more camp. People love the idea of additives, but change tunes when having to clean it out of the tub/shower.

http://conversionxl.com/pricing-experiments-you-might-not-know-but-can-learn-from/ I have used several of these successfully! My favorite that i stumbled upon is anchoring. My first week or two at a prime venue had a colorful display of votive candles marked at $2 per with a multi pricing bargain at the prominent corner. People saw those then balked in utter surprise at the $20 big beeswax candles very fairly priced in the next display. Sold a load of low margin votives buy very few beeswax candles with healthier margins. When i swapped the positions so they saw the $20 candles first they recognized them as a true bargain and the sales skyrocketed. Something similar happened when my DH put a bargain rack of candles in that prominent corner a season later. Made the prime and barbain candles both seem undesirable. When i tucked the bargain candles on a low shelf toward the back where people had to search all candles, both sale priced and first run, sold strongly. People like a bargain, but they LOVE a bargain they discover by working a little for it. Putting your most expensive items as the first thing your customers see makes everything else seem so much more reasonable! So keep the bargain bin in the far back and son't mark them down quite so much :D

Was it EO or FO? And where from? My well-aged (read as: bought in a co-op and stuck it in the cabinet forgetting about it for yeeeeears) Amyris EO from LN is thick as cold molasses now. I can't get any scent to come through CP with it, but i don't recall it causing acceleration. :-/