Hi, my name is Melissa and I am the owner of Homemade Candle Creations (aka Soy Candle Making Time)! I am here to share with you what I’ve learned about successfully making soy candles and starting a candle business. I owned my own candle business for 4 years and decided that I wanted to share what I’ve learned for those that might be thinking about starting a soy candle business, or that just want to know how to make them as a hobby.
You’ll learn the basics of soy candle making as well as more advanced techniques, and troubleshooting. I will also be going through the details of starting your candle making business and try to cover all the bases so that you don’t have to go looking for hours on the web trying to find all the info and piece it together! Don’t know where to find supplies? Don’t worry, I’ve got that covered for you too!
So thank you for visiting and I hope you find this site useful! If so, be sure to subscribe below for special tips and updates!
A little about myself……
I have always loved candles, and 4 years ago I decided to try making my own candles. As I was searching online about homemade candles, I found out more about soy candles and their many wonderful benefits, including being much easier to clean-up! So I ordered a 5lb soy candle making kit off of ebay as a birthday present to myself and made my first soy candles, which turned out really well and I found that I really enjoyed making them.
So I decided that this might be a good business opportunity for me, since it is always best to work at something you really enjoy.
Well, I quickly put a website up a month after getting my first soy candle kit and added some Paypal buy now links. This was around September, and I made my first 2 candle sales online only a month or 2 after that without really doing anything to promote the website! I was excited and so after Christmas that year I really started trying to promote my website and learned more about designing it (the original design was pretty bad! lol). I had already been learning about making websites before starting the soy candle business, but now I really had a fire under me to learn all I could about making a professional looking website and marketing it!
So to move on here, I really am not a sales person and have never liked “trying” to sell things so I took it slow, except for promoting as much as I could online. But even then, my sales increased steadily every year and especially around the holidays! I was excited about this, but after 2 years, Thanksgiving and Christmas time started getting more and more stressful.
Now, I started homeschooling my oldest in first grade in 2010-2011 and that really made it tough keeping up with the candles and homeschooling once the school season started, since that’s the same time candle sales really start to come in. So for second grade this year, we really started getting behind, and I just wasn’t enjoying doing soy candles as a business at all anymore. It was nice to get sales, but at the same time I did not look forward to filling the orders.
Now I tell you this, not to scare you off from starting a soy candle business, but just to make it real. It’s not easy, especially if you are the only one taking care of EVERYTHING and can’t afford to hire help.
I decided this wasn’t for me and closed the doors on the candle making part of my business in January 2012. I had a lot of sad customers,but I decided that what comes first is God, my family and my sanity! lol I do not want to sacrifice the incredible benefits of homeschooling just to try and make some money. I am happy to say that after quitting the candle making business, I was able to get my second grader caught up on his work and ready to move on to 3rd grade!
I know that I LOVE working on websites though, and I would work on them all day long if I could, so I decided that I had learned so much about soy candle making, (and I do love them) that I could start a website with information on the subject and help others with tips and ideas for making gifts, starting a soy candle business or just making them for fun! And this part of it is a lot less messy too 🙂