Have you ever been stuck trying to cook up that inspiration inside your head?  You know it’s there.  You can feel it.  You are so close.  You can almost kind of taste it.  You know what you are looking for, but it’s just not formed in a usable form.  I’m not just talking about brand inspiration.  I mean anything creative really.  If you find yourself stuck there right now, don’t stress.  We’ve all been there.  Recently.  I was literally there like twenty minutes ago.  Fine tuning this blog post.  So if you find yourself there, I want to tell you a story.  The story about how I developed my idea into a business, found the inspiration for my company’s brand, and the few things I have picked up along the way to develop my creative process.

Learning How to Start a Company

I’m hardly an expert.  In fact, I’m quite the opposite.  My candle company, Road Trip Candle Company, has only formally existed for about six months.  A year ago today, my business knowledge consisted almost entirely of things I picked up on Shark Tank, I had the social media awareness of your out of touch uncle (not the really weird one, you know which one I mean), and I had never made a candle in my life.  I had always been fascinated by business and dreamed about one day starting my own company. 

The weird twists of 2020 gave me that opportunity.  I had spent enough time judging the Shark Tank pitches like I was Mark Cuban or something.  It was time to put my money where my mouth was.  I spent the next six months learning and practicing.  First in a broad way.  Reading blogs and watching YouTube videos about starting businesses and all that.  I learned the basics and fine tuned what exactly my company would do. 

Step 1) What to Make: Why I Chose Soy Candles

As I was giving myself a crash course on all things small business, I created a checklist of characteristics I decided were necessary for my business.  The checklist included things that maximized my strengths, minimized my weaknesses, had the potential to start without breaking the bank, had a realistic plan to scale, and most importantly, would keep my interest and attention forever (more on this checklist to come in future posts since it is so important to starting your business right). 

Candles checked all the boxes.  Candles had the perfect balance of creativity and math/science.  Plus, I could learn how to make candles at a relatively low cost and do it all from my house (pretty important considering it was 2020 and we were all on lockdown at home).  I also liked that candles had simple and straight forward safety requirements (compared to something like food) and that people would burn through their candles or become interested in a different scent and need to buy more candles (unlike, I don’t know, furniture or something). 

The ecofriendly and health aspects of soy candles made that decision easy (soy is renewable and burns clean compared to other waxes like paraffin).  It was all coming together.  The next step was figuring out if I could actually make candles.

Step 2) Learning How to Make Candles

A quick Amazon search led me to my $40 soy candle starter kit.  It had everything I needed to make a few candles.  A small pouring pitcher, a cheap candy thermometer, a few wicks, wick stickers, some wick clips, six different 10 ml fragrance bottles, a bag of soy wax, some dye chips, and six ugly tins.  Hours of research had led to this moment!  Time to make a candle! 

I set up my wick and it came out centered-ish.  I carefully smelled each scent like a sommelier and settled on cinnamon.  I flipped through my limited supply of dye chips.  What color is cinnamon?  Hmm.  Well not blue.  Red remined me of that spicy cinnamon gum or that cheap liquor you drink when you are 22 years old.  No good.  Yellow it is, I guess. 

I set up my pouring pitcher in my makeshift double-boiler and melted my first batch of wax.  I needed the liquid wax to get to 185 degrees before I could add my fragrance and color dye.  You know the saying a watched pot never boils?  Well, that didn’t apply verbatim, since well, the water in the double-boiler was boiling…but the wax.  It felt like it took forever for the wax to get to 185! 

After what felt like five years (but was probably around twenty minutes), my wax hit 185.  Game time!  I carefully poured in the cinnamon fragrance oil into the pot like a chemist pouring mercury.  Next the yellow (not ideal, but good enough for now) dye chips.  It was still annoying me.  What color is cinnamon?  I set the timer for two minutes and gently stirred the mixture (thinking about what color would be ideal for cinnamon the entire time). 

Once my wax, fragrance, and dye were mixed, the waiting game started again.  I needed my wax to cool a little bit before I could pour it.  I had decided to pour my wax into the vessel at 155 degrees.  Art meets science.  My wax mixture looked like the wax mixtures on YouTube and even smelled surprisingly good!  Was I actually doing this right? 

I could barely read the temperature on the cheap candy thermometer that came with the kit, but eventually it looked like it more or less said 155.  Time to pour!  I carefully made the journey from the stove to the counter where I had set up my wicked candle tin.  I poured the mixture into the tin and barely made a mess (although what constitutes a mess is still up for debate in my house)!    Is it possible I did this right?  Now I had to wait again to find out. 

Once the candle was set, I had to figure out how long to let it cure for before I could burn it.  Less than an hour for the candle to harden, but 48 hours before I could test it.  You see, I settled on a 48-hour cure time because that seemed like the perfect balance between the time required for the candle to cure properly, and the maximum amount of will-power I had. 

Would it work?  Would it melt?  Is it going to smell good?  Is it going to smell at all?  It’s not going to explode or anything right?  It looks good.  Time to find out.  The moment of truth!  I brought my prized candle to the living room, turned on the Yankee game, lit my candle, and set it carefully on the coffee table next to a fire extinguisher.  It worked!  Success!  I certainly had plenty of room for improvement, but I felt like I was off to a good start. 

Next, I enthusiastically ordered my first candle wholesale order.  I picked a few dozen jars, a few different wicks to test, some dyes, and an assortment of fragrances to sample (more on this process in future posts).  As I started to get comfortable making candles, I decided to move forward and construct a cohesive brand and develop my first line of candles!

Step 3) Finding the Inspiration for my Brand

Reflecting on how my brand developed, the factors and process that got me to this point played a major role in developing my brand.  To put it into context, I hit a roadblock at this stage.  The biggest roadblock I had hit since deciding on candles.  I had enough trouble figuring out which fragrance oil to use when I only had six choices.  And don’t even think about getting me started again on what color a sophisticated cinnamon candle should be. 

The choices ahead of me were daunting.  The fragrance choices were endless.  I was fully sold on soy wax, but what kind?  I had several choices.  Who knew?  Soy wax was supposed to be the part that was settled!  And what vessels would I use?  Certainly not something like those ugly tins.  But what?  Would I make colored candles?  Most soy candles out there right now are white.  Would colored candles make me stand out, or make me look like I was out of touch with current trends?  What would I name the candle scents?  What would I put on the labels?  Most importantly, how would all of this fit together under the umbrella of one cohesive brand? 

To make the decision process even more overwhelming, I needed a brand that would stand out among what felt like a billion or so other small to midsized candle companies.  “Andrew’s Candles” or “So and So Creek Candles” or whatever else you scroll through when you type “candles” into the Etsy search bar just wouldn’t get it done.  With so many competitors out there, a unique brand that stands out is quite possibly the most important part of the entire process.  But let me tell you.  After spending what felt like an eternity spinning my wheels and making no tangible progress, “Andrew’s Candles” was sounding more and more appealing. 

Then my first bit of traction happened.  You know that feeling you get when your car is stuck in the snow and can’t move?  So then you alternate digging the snow out from under your tires and trying to shift your car from drive to reverse over and over again until you eventually move (yea, I’m expanding on the spinning wheels thing).  Then eventually, your tire gets that first bit of traction and moves like a half inch.  The sudden jolt of adrenaline as you realize that half inch is the first step in generating the momentum you need.  To make a long story short, I found a YouTube video that got me thinking through a new lens and gave me that first bit of traction I needed to get my whole concept going. 

The funny thing is that it was a video I had already seen.  It was about a couple that started a candle company called Frostbeard Candles with scents inspired by popular novels (you can find the video here).  Their brand had more than the other stuff I was looking at.  They were deeply connected to their brand.  Not only did it reinforce their passion, but it also guided a direction for every product they would make.  This is what I needed.  A deep personal connection that also created natural guiderails to all my decisions in a world with unlimited choice.  You see, I realized that when they came out with a new scent, it was naturally guided by their brand.  They couldn’t just make some candle called “Cinnamon” or whatever because it wouldn’t fit with their other novel inspired scent names.  I now had a much better idea about what I was looking for.  I looked inside myself for my inspiration. 

Remember earlier when I said there was a lot of waiting in the candle making process?  Well to pass the time during that waiting, I listed to music.  I’m a rock fan (especially classic rock), so it wasn’t surprising when a Red Hot Chili Peppers song came on.  What was surprising was what happened next. 

As the song was playing, I started thinking about this music festival in Boson I had planned to attend.  It was a three-day music festival and the Red Hot Chili Peppers had been scheduled to headline one of the nights.  If you are paying attention, you might have put together that I’m describing the music festival in hypotheticals and this story takes place in 2020.  The music festival was cancelled.  I got frustrated just thinking about it. 

But then, I thought back to the first time I went to the festival in 2018.We took a road trip to Boston for three days.While in Boston, we wandered around the typical tourist areas (more on this in the future) in the morning, and then went to the music festival all afternoon and night.As I thought about that trip, I was waiting on a future vanilla bakery scented candle.All at once it hit me.The candle smelled exactly like the bakeries we wandered in and out of in Boston!Boston Cream Pie!Road Trip Candle Company was born!I could picture the entire thing in my head.It was perfect.Scents inspired by road trip destinations all across the country.I immediately started thinking about my favorite trips and all the places on my “to do” list.In future posts, I will cover how created my first line of seven candles, finalized jars, collaborated on label design, started an Instagram and a Facebook, and launched my Etsy shop.