This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Greetings, hello, and welcome. Or should I say good morning, good afternoon, or good evening? Depending on where you are and when you're listening, wherever it is, welcome to Side Hustle School. I'm Chris Guillebeau. Today I've got a story for you about someone who learns to sell candles.
Has a social good component in which she's making money and also doing good with it. Longtime listeners may know that I believe you can do both of those things. And on the Side Hustle Book Tour, I've been telling a story that's very popular. It's the story of Mark Gaskins in South Carolina. Mark has created this candle brand called Meeting in Market, which I believe is based on a famous intersection there in his hometown.
We've done a whole episode on him before, but the short version is that one day he's on vacation. I think it's in Austin, Texas, walks into an expensive men's store and sees a candle for sale for $80. And of course he thinks that's ridiculous, $80 for a candle. And he also thinks, like any good side hustler would, how can I sell those? I wanna sell expensive candles too.
So Mark goes home and watches some videos on YouTube, learns to make candles by watching videos on the internet and creates this little brand. Like I said, that's been a popular story on tour. I've been mentioning it in several of my talks from city to city. Well, today we have a different story of someone selling candles. It seems that candles are a great physical product, at least for some people.
And in this episode, we'll look at how this person ties it into supporting various charities and fundraisers. Because this is Side Hustle School, it's not only a charity project, she makes money too. So it's just kind of a good thing all around. That story is coming up in just a moment after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]
Today's story comes from Nicole Nichols in Moore, Oklahoma.
By day, she's a project manager at an oil and gas brokerage. But in her spare time, she's burning the midnight oil, running her social good handcrafted candle company, Lux Allume. It started when one of Nicole's mentors was working on raising money for an AIDS orphanage in South Africa. And they realized that people are generally more likely to give when they get something in return. It's not a bad thing, it's just human nature.
So while they were trying to think of something they could offer for donations, Nicole remembered that she knew how to make candles. Candles were also something that they could easily make in bulk. And it seemed like just about everybody liked them. So Nicole ordered supplies from a variety of vendors and began testing. It is an easy business to get started in, just like our friend who learned to make candles by watching YouTube.
But to get it right requires a delicate balancing act with lots of different variables. Nicole tested out different candle options from the comfort of her own dining room and part of her kitchen. After a lot of trial and error and hot wax, she felt that she finally had a batch of candles she was comfortable selling. These were 100% soy wax candles with cotton braided wicks and fragrances that were infused with natural essential oils. Perfect for the eco-conscious.
They did a fundraiser for the orphanage and sold out of 50 candles, earning $600. She loved that she was able to make a difference in this way and sought out more fundraisers and charity events that she could share her light with. For example, to celebrate Star Wars Day, May the Fourth Be With You, Nicole partnered with a popular freelance artist to create a candle box set called May the Flame Be With You. That box set cost $50 and included an art print, an eight ounce lightsaber candle called Come to the Dark Side, and four six ounce lightsaber silver candle tins. They donated $5 of every box set they sold to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, 'cause a lot of kids like Star Wars, and to their surprise, they sold out faster than you could say these are not the droids you're looking for.
Shout out to everyone who gets that reference. These days, Nicole has expanded her offerings to include candles that are not affiliated with any particular organization, but she remains on the lookout for more fundraisers and causes to partner with. LuxaLoom joined the internet ranks in 2016 when she launched a retail shop using Shopify and created a candle subscription box using CreateJoy, where they now have 115 monthly subscribers. Of course, I will link up CreateJoy and Shopify and all that stuff in the show notes for you. Nicole's subscription box came about completely by accident.
After testing some new candle scents and blends, her sister mentioned that one of them reminded her of the Disneyland ride, The Pirates of the Caribbean. The sisters had spent a lot of time at Disneyland as children, and they figured this would be something others would be interested in too. So within a couple of weeks, they'd written down a bunch of Disney scents they loved and Nicole started creating. The box alone brings in $2,500 a month, but there are some significant costs. About $900 of that is for shipping and postage, and supplies are about $950.
So there's minimal profit on those subscription boxes. The real profit comes from wholesale orders and individual candle sales. Her wholesale order is net about $3,500. Nicole just raised her prices and is getting into the busy holiday season where she hopes to make another $2,000 in pure profit. She's also upgrading the website, improving the product packaging and thinking of ways to level up the current experience for her customers.
So what's her advice for you? Well, she suggests try to perfect one product and then slowly expand. If she decided to offer all the scents that her vendors and suppliers do, she'd have well over a thousand to choose from. And guess what? It's a bad idea to try to sell a thousand different items at once.
In her case, she recommends starting with 10 cents and expanding from there. As a quick side note, I might actually recommend fewer than that, maybe something more like three to five. She also suggests starting small with the resources that you already have, a wonderful side hustle school principal. To this day, Nicole uses her front entryway as a shipping station and her spare bedroom as an office holding inventory. Her process of making the candles is pretty basic.
She melts a large batch of wax on a 35 pound melter, dispenses it into small batches, adds fragrance, and then pours that into the containers. Of course, there's still a lot of work that goes into all of that. The pouring, the adding fragrance, and the curing is all based on certain temperatures being met. If you mess it up, you don't have a great candle. And Nicole looks for a great scent and a good finish on the top of the candles.
Now listen up, side hustlers. We ask her how she sets herself apart when candles are sold pretty much everywhere. And guess what she said? She said she tries really hard to not worry about what other companies are doing because she'd go crazy if she did. She focuses her brand, Luxalume, on being the best it can while still donating many of her profits to charity and supporting many causes.
Looking to the future, Nicole is hoping to gradually expand her range while selling more candles and supporting more causes. And you know what I think? I think her future looks pretty bright. [Music]
All right, thank you, Nicole, for sharing that story with us. I'm gonna keep hammering in certain messages.
Candles are the ultimate saturated market. They are everywhere, yet for some reason, people keep buying them. So there's probably room for people to keep making them. In her case, that Star Wars theme is really fun. And of course, it's also great how she's able to support charities and fundraisers with the project.
So I love what she's doing, and it just goes to show, if you're trying to figure out what your side hustle is, maybe there's a pretty obvious answer. Like if you've been trying for a while and you're stuck and you're like, what's my idea? Maybe you're looking too hard. Maybe you really should just look within yourself and ask, hey, what is it that I already know how to do? What do I know about?
What skill do I have? What are people asking me for? And in Nicole's case, nobody was asking her to make candles, but she encountered this problem of trying to increase her friends' fundraising efforts, realizing that they could probably be more successful if they had some kind of incentive or item that went along with that. And then she thought, huh, what could it be? Oh, wait, I know how to make candles.
Let's try that. Doesn't mean that this approach is always going to be successful. But once again, another principle that I like to emphasize is the cost of failure, let's just say the cost of it not working out, are pretty low. Like if we had started this whole story, and after the first few sentences, instead of the candles selling, it was, oh, and actually nobody bought the candles. Then maybe she would have been out a small amount of money for those supplies, but then they could have moved on to try something else.
And they wouldn't have known whether it would work unless they tried it, which in this case, of course, she's so glad she did. That's my encouragement for you today from afar, wherever you are in the world, inspiration is good, but inspiration, combined with action, is so much better. Every episode of the show has a show notes page where you can access any of the resources mentioned, that person's website, sometimes their social media, if you want to learn more about them. And you can access the page for today's episode at sidehustleschool.com/301. That's for episode 301.
You'll never guess what tomorrow's gonna bring. Episode 302. I know, it's a shocker. Thank you as always for listening. You are awesome.
I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
