Current vibe - Cozy
Heellloooo (in a Mrs. Doubtfire voice, ofc!).
High Water Candle is LIVE (obviously otherwise you wouldn't be reading this, lol). Honestly, I'm so proud of myself, which maybe isn't the "right" thing to say, but I literally never thought I'd be a small business owner, wowzzaa! So how did I get here, well I was laid off and *poof*. Sort of kidding sort of not, but let's chat about this journey a bit and where I hope to grow to. I've never written a blog before, so bare with me on this one. But I'm sure there will be loads of 90's references, and streams of consciousness.
If you haven't yet, check out the About Us page for a bit of back story on how I started making candles. But to dive in, October 30th I registered High Water Candle as a business. At the time, I honestly needed a hobby and I thought learning more about business would be educational and fun. For years I chatted about starting a business, but I don't know if I even thought I was serious at the time, more like a pipe dream.
November 3rd, four days after I registered, I got an email at 8 am that I was a part of a company's 14% cuts. I was shocked, sad, angry, confused and scared. I'm a recruiter and love what I do, so what the heck was I going to do with this amount of free time?! Well, clearly look for a job was my priority number, a good friend and mentor of mine suggested I do three things each day to find a job. This would help give me structure and a sense of accomplishment. I added onto that, I'd do three things each day for a job and for my candle business.
Thats when everything started to snowball with HWC. Each day I started with job search stuff, and then spent the rest of the day doing candles. Honestly I feel so lucky to have started candles a while ago and was able to spin it into something more. I'm not someone who does well with unstructured free time, I need a task, or goal or anything to keep my eyes forward.
The process of starting a business is hard, harder than I thought. I don't really know what I expected, but each task turned into needing to learn five other things to accomplish the original thing. But the pride I started to gain in my ability to learn and tackle things was unlike anything I've felt before.
So being the person I am, I set a launch date, to keep myself on task and have a firm date to have some of the "hard" stuff out of the way, like building a website, learning candle math, etc.
Nine weeks after getting an email that devastated me, High Water Candle went live. In nine short weeks, I learned so much about myself and my ability. I feel in a completely different spot from where I started and I cannot wait to see where 2023 will bring HWC and me.
I think I'll do separate posts on each thing I've learned so far, things like building a Shopify site to my label disaster, so stay tuned. But I mentioned I wanted to set some goals, so here they are. This list will grow as the year goes on, but this is what I got so far.
- Get a firm CAC that is reasonable for candles
- Find out the average CAC first, lol
- Get my product costs down
- Get over $5,000 in sales this year
- Learn about social media marketing
- Learn photography
- Get a home studio for product shots
- Post weekly to social media
- Get comfortable with videos for social media
- Have HWC playlists for each vibe
This year will be hard, I know that now, but I think it might be the most rewarding year to date, for me. I've got a lot of work ahead of me, and no time like the present. So I'm going to make some coffee and work on playlists.
Wellll Allrrigghtttyy Thennnn (Ace Ventura, duh). I think thats all for now.
K, thanks, byee!
