Newest En devour

As I am sure you have seen on our site we have started making pillars. Tell you what, that is a different animal from jar candles, but because customers ask for it, we started doing it.

We offer them in all of our scents, in a couple of different sizes. We keep a few of the popular scents made up but for the most part we pour these to order. When we see an increase in the pillar orders we will try to plan ahead to have the main ones ready to ship when we get the orders. The tools we use

Because we are trying to do this as a business we invested in a 70 # wax melter. We also have pouring pots for each scent. You might ask why is that important? Well it saves of time and gives us allot of flexibility to be able to do small orders of multiple scents without have to stop and clean the pots. The wax melter allows us to pour allot of candles in one pouring.

Suppliers

Another important thing for me was to establish relationships with several suppliers. For example on our scents we only deal with 2 suppliers, this still gives us a very large selection of scents to choose from but gives us consistent quality of scents. Allot of people think you can just pour in scent into the melted wax, basically that is true, but there is allot more to it. If you get allot of variation in your scent supplies you actually have to revise the candle formula based on the supplier. Cinnamon from one supplier does vary compared to another, it might not be as strong as the other so you have to add more scent oil to the batch. Also wax will only hold so much scent oil, when it cools all of a sudden you have pools of oil in your candle or on the bottom. This is very important to us since we scent the candles to the limit of what the wax will hold. Pretty much the same holds true for Wax, if you change brands or blends you have to start all over designing your candles.

Why so many options?

That is probably the toughest question, or sometimes the easiest. We got into candles for fun and making them for ourselves. Then what happens, someone sees what you do and asked, "Hey can you make one for me". So we did and it kept happening more and more. So the next step is giving them as gifts and then next thing you know your selling them to friends as gifts. I don't know about the rest of you but when I get into something I tend to go nuts. We started with 12 scents, people start asking, hey do you have this scent or that scent and before you know it you keep adding scents. And then you are out and about and you start seeing jars, and start thinking, hey that would be a cool candle. Then you are at the next step, "Oh My" how did I end up with so many scents, and types of jars and before you know it you are a full blown home based business. Thats the short story of how we got started, purely by accident. So we started to think like a business, started buying stuff in bulk to get costs down, Have you gone to your local hobby supply store and looked at supplies? Well to make a 16 oz apothecary candle you have to pay about $2.50 for a jar, spend a couple of bucks on wicks, buy a 10# block of wax, buy a vial of scent (just enough to make one candle), color chips and before you know it you have a $20 candle, and don't forget the mess and the time.

I guess I could tell you a little about us. Well us is Helen and Scott. Helen has been doing crafts for quite a few years, everything from floral, painted clothing, and cakes. This is scott, I went to school for chemistry and work in computers, yes I did this site. I spend all day doing web based applications then come home and make candles and do our website, with some xbox time threw in. Helen is the primary creative person, I am good at production, I know how to make something good, keep the cost down and be able to do descent quantities.

I could also tell you a little about our candles. Well when I started doing the candles I pulled out the chemist in me. I tried multiple waxes, multiple wicks and all kinds of tests. My goal was to avoid several things that I hate about other candles. First I wanted to use as much of the wax as I could. Finding the right size wick is very time consuming, but it paid off, our candles burn down very completely, for the most part a film of wax is left on the walls. Second, when you blow out a candle and smell it later, mostly you just smell the burnt wick, again finding the right wick paid off, there is little to no carbon smell when you smell our jar candles after they have cooled. Third would be labeling, thats been the most challenging, we did like most started off with the white address labels, they were ok, but I used the removable labels, next we went to the clear address labels running them through the color laser printers, they worked good but we were never real happy with them, then finally, label material we could run through the laser cut to size and then apply like the decals on models. Soak it in water then slide it on. They are very clear, we have kept the type to a minimum so you actually SEE our candles. I always disliked when I burned candles I saw a glowing advertisement. The last area that was primarily focused on was the wax, we use a vegetable/paraffin blend, its a very soft wax that smells very strong even when not burning and does not soot as much as most. We have also started making soy candles because we had so many people asking for them. There you have it, the "Candles with Charm" story.