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. In choosing a name I made up a word, so that I could be relatively sure that no one else would have a business with the same name. 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.

So, 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. 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 approximate cost of 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, I just wasn't making enough money.

Are there ways to make a bigger profit? Yes, there are, and I am working on a book that will go into that in much more detail. Basically, you can raise the selling price of your candles, or can try to reduce cost of goods, by finding cheaper materials and buying in bulk, but you don't want to sacrifice safety in exchange. You can also streamline your production process so that you can make more candles per hour. The risk here is that the more automated your process becomes, the less "hand-made" your candles become. Eventually you would be making mass-produced candles, which people can get at any discount department store.

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, 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.

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

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 website www.thumbwick.com, and
3) preserve all referenced sources and links within the content.
4) It also wouldn't hurt if you drop me an email and let me know that you used my content.