Welcome

Thumbwick Candles was my online website to sell hand made soy candles. It began in the summer of 2004, and ended the spring of 2008. A home based business, like a candle business is not the way to get rich. Don't misunderstand me, because getting rich was never my intention. I wanted to take a fun hobby and create a business that would sustain that hobby and also make a little bit more. I was approaching that point. Then came the economic downturn, I knew that I either needed to expand the business and try to tap new markets or close it down before I needed to invest more of my own money. I wasn't ready for expansion, so I chose the latter.

You may be asking yourself, what can be done to make a home based business more profitable? There are several things, but the main issue you will need to overcome is that to make a decent profit on a handmade item, the price needs to be higher than many people are willing to pay. You need to get into a niche market and target the right customers. As a maker of soy candles, my prices were fairly low, because my goal was to sell a well-made candle that most people can afford. I made them myself, so there were no labor costs, but I could only make so many candles in an hour. I had the cost of materials and electricity. I also had the overhead costs of my website, business phone, internet service, permits and licenses and business liability insurance. Plus I spent MANY more hours not making candles, on other business related work - website updates, packaging/shipping, inventory management, R&D (testing, testing, testing), email and phone correspondence, bookkeeping, advertisement, preparations for craft fairs, labeling, and a multitude of other things that I can't think of right now. For every hour I spent making candles, I spent at least three hours of time doing other business related things. In short, it was a LOT of work, for very little profit.

So what can you do to make you homemade craft business more profitable? You can:

1. Raise the selling price of your products, but you will need to differentiate your product so that people will pay more.

2. Try to reduce cost of goods sold, by finding cheaper materials and buying in bulk, but you don't want to sacrifice safety in exchange.

3. Streamline your production process so that you can make more items per hour. The risk here is that the more automated your process becomes, the less "hand-made" your products become. Eventually you would be making mass-produced crafts, which people can get at any discount store.

This website was first established on May 26, 2009. It is a resource of the knowledge I gained while running a home based soy candle business. I want to share this knowledge with others, so that, I hope, they may be able to make their own businesses more successful. It is also intended to be informative to those who are looking into starting their own home based craft business. It will be updated with more information as I have time, thus it will always be changing and growing.

This site does NOT SELL CANDLES. Please don't email me and ask to buy candles. I don't sell them anymore. A quick internet search on handmade soy candles will give you plenty of businesses who do sell soy candles. I encourage you to buy from small, home based businesses, to help them thrive.

A final note: If you want to borrow any content from this site, you are free to do so providing you follow these guidelines:

1. Reference Margaret Palecek, Thumbwick Candles as the original author,

2. Provide a link back to my websites www.thumbwick.com, and www.thumbwickcandles.com,

3. Preserve all referenced sources and links within the content.

4. Also, while not necessary, it wouldn't hurt if you drop me an email and let me know that you used my content.