What's a Thumbwick?
Or, what you need to know about starting a home based candle business.

Thumbwick Candles was my online website to sell hand made soy candles. I made up a word, so that I could be relatively sure that no one else would have a business with the same name. Thumbwick sounds like it might be a small town in England, but to my knowledge it isn't. The English translation of my last name is thumb, so it also has a personal meaning as well.

Alas, Thumbwick Candles is no more. 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. I had started to pay myself back a little bit of the personal money I had loaned my business at start up. Then I wasn't able to get a booth at our local Octoberfest event, which was my biggest money maker of the year - like over 30% of my annual income. My website fees were due, my business insurance was up for renewal, and I realized that if I kept the business going, I may have to invest more of my own money. In the current economic downturn, I knew that just wouldn't be wise.

You may be asking yourself why my business wasn't very profitable. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that in order to make a profit on a hand poured candle, the price needs to be much higher than most people are willing to pay. Pouring by hand, I could only make so many candles in an hour. My material costs were fairly fixed, because I didn't have the storage space, nor the funds to reduce costs by buying in bulk  I had overhead costs of my website, cell phone, internet service, permits and licenses, and business/product liability insurance. For every hour I spent making candles, I spent at least three hours of time doing other business related related work - website updates, packaging/shipping, inventory management, research & development (testing, testing, testing), email and phone correspondence, bookkeeping, advertisement, preparations for craft fairs, labeling, and several other things I can't think of right now. By my estimation, if I actually was successful in selling all of the candles that I made (and I usually made to order, so that I didn't end up with a lot of unsold inventory), I averaged around $7.00/hour for all my hard work.

Are there ways to make more profit? Yes, there are, and I will go into that in much more detail in my book. You just have to be willing to do the work. It is my hope that I can help guide others in making an informed decision about starting a home business with this website.

Make a young business more successful by enlisting the help of family and friends. At the left my mom helps me run a craft show booth back in 2004.

About this site:
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, in hopes that 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.

I am writing a book on starting a  homemade craft business, and I will post my work in progress on this site - adding to it as I find time. Click the Book link at the left.

Thank you for visiting my site. I hope you find the information useful.