Well, we have just had a well earned break over the Christmas holiday and thought you might be interested in our story so far.
As you may know we only started this as a business in late May 2021.
We had started making wax melts as a hobby in the lockdown in early 2021. We loved it so much that we decided that we would look at the feasibility of doing it as a business.
We already had 2 businesses and a side hustle, so this was a challenge!
Our side hustle was selling holistic products and jewellery on Amazon, which we had never really done with any great enthusiasm although it did give us the basics of ecommerce.
Our 2 main businesses were running online marketing for local businesses across the South West and South East of England. We had been doing this for 13 years so that gave us the abilities to promote any new business idea.
So, May 2021 arrived and we started to sell our wax melts on Etsy and our own Shopify website. We started with 26 different fragrances for which we had spent hours of research to find out what other companies were selling and which ones were popular.
May only saw 2 sales on Etsy but we persevered ino June, albeit on a part time basis due to our main businesses. June saw a small increase with 22 sales on Etsy.
In July, we added Ebay to our selling platforms. Again, we had a small increase as we started to learn the optimisation skills on Etsy to get our listings seen by more people.
August saw another increase in sales on Etsy and also Ebay started to see sales coming through. We could now see that there was something in this and more importantly, we were absolutely loving it. We decided that of all the businesses we had run over the 13 years wax melts were by far the most enjoyable, so we needed to put more time and effort into it.
So, September came and we put all our efforts into the wax melts business and we increased the number of sales by 300%. We had also added some more fragrances along the way.
We were starting to forge an excellent reputation as well with our customers, many of whom were coming back time and again and also leaving glowing reviews.
October saw the arrival of our Halloween range of wax melt fragrances and they were very well received by customers old and new. We saw yet another huge increase in sales over the previous month and we knew that we were finally on the right track.
In November we put together our Christmas range in readiness for early December, which was great fun. We tried and tested many different possible fragrances before making our final selection of 16 brand new Christmassy scents.
November saw great growth again and then December hit us like a train!
With no previous experience of sales at this time of year we were not expecting what happened next! To keep up with demand we worked 16 hour days for the majority of December!
Was it hard work?
Heavens yes!
But was it rewarding?
Absolutely!
So, here we are at the end of December and we are so excited about 2022.
We have 8 new fragrances due to launch in the first few days of January and we are already looking at adding reed diffusers and room sprays to our portfolio of products in the Spring.
We are also looking at adding Amazon as a selling platform as well.
To do all of this, we are looking at buying a big workshop for our garden to increase productivity and then by next Christmas we hope to have some staff as well.
We thought you might like to see how popular our fragrances have been, so here is a list of all of them starting with the most popular.
So, which ones are your favourites? We would love to hear.
We are planning to write another post about what it takes to start a wax melt business as we have come across several people who believe that it is simple to do and also not that expensive to start!! Believe us, when we say that neither are true!
So, until next time.
Thank you for reading and for being a customer.
Debbie and Jon
Angelic Scents
