We knew when starting a business there would be challenges and triumphs, decisions big and small, some maybe we didn’t want to make, but needed to make as small business owners. Recently, one of those big decisions came up and, of course, it needed to be addressed. This particular decision related to the primary ingredient in our candles, soy wax.
After securing upwards of 15 pop-up and farmers’ market appearances over the summer, we took stock of inventory and proceeded to order supplies. Much to our dismay, our supplier significantly marked up the cost of soy wax from what we had been paying over the past year. As a business owner, this, of course, changes things because it's the original costs that helped determine pricing when we first launched.
As we have all seen over the course of the pandemic, costs have risen across many industries and, now, we’ve seen the shift in supply and demand in our own industry leading to inevitable cost increases. Even with research into other possible suppliers, this was still, somehow, the cheapest option.
With this being said, we have made the decision to raise prices on our 8oz and 16oz candles from $15 and $25 to $16 and $28. This was not an easy decision (we’ve been mulling it over for weeks), but in order to continue making candles of the same quality, without compromising on safe and all-natural, sustainable ingredients, this was truly the only path forward to be able to make a product we love, and many of you seem to love as well, make some sort of profit as a small business, and donate to help protect the earth and its natural resources.
While this isn’t the way we anticipated kicking off the summer season, we wanted to establish our new prices on these products before we head into all of our upcoming events. We have always stood by our candles and believe, even with price increases, that they are still competitively priced compared to similar candles of the same quality.
These candles are not off-the-shelf candles made with paraffin, or a paraffin-soy blend, with cheap oils and wicks. Our candles and hand-poured in small batches using sustainable, USA-grown soy wax, cotton-braided wicks, that are free of harmful metals including lead/zinc, and use only high-quality fragrance oils that are free of phthalates, parabens, and other carcinogens, and are also California Prop-65 compliant.
At first glance, soy candles might seem more expensive than other candles, but the fact is they burn at a lower temperature, which means they burn and last longer than paraffin candles. There are also many candles marketed as ‘soy’ that are not, in fact, made using only soy wax, but paraffin-soy blends. This is not the same as 100% soy candles. One-hundred-percent soy candles, like ours, burn cleaner than candles made with paraffin or paraffin blends, and don’t emit nearly the amount of soot they do.
Our goal, from the very beginning, was to create high-quality, hand-poured soy candles that are free of harmful ingredients including, paraffin wax, metal wicks, phthalates and others. And while it may cost us more to create these kinds of candles, we just cannot compromise on the quality of ingredients, it's just not what we want, and we truly don't believe that's what any of you want either.
With all of this being said, we wanted to give a heads up to all of our customers, wholesalers, followers, and everyone who has supported us, because we believe in transparency and know all of you would appreciate that as well.
As of Saturday, June 5th, our website will reflect these price increases, and these will be the new prices for these two products moving forward. We hope this is the only time we need to raise prices. This isn’t to say that we won’t continue to run sales or special discounts in the future, because we love a good sale too!
Our next event is our pop-up at Heimlich Nurseries on Saturday, June 12, (details here), and we will be announcing many dates for farmers’ market appearances. Thank you all for your continued support, we hope to see you at some of our upcoming events over the summer!
Thanks, Joe.