A Day In the Life of a Candle Business Owner

hi my name is jasmine owner and founder of black sunflower and this is a day in my life [Music] [Applause] wait that is not my life let's start over my name is jasmine owner and founder of black sunflower and this is a day in my life the first week i made about 1500 and then it just exploded from there we have a live at 11. we reached 20k so we're about to do a 20k giveaway i gotta get some emails answered well welcome to my fancy desk i have one employee coming in later today one of the major processes that have been a game changer from me is utilizing fulfillment by the way we're running out of glue sticks go needs more than we're always running out of glue sticks and also a lot of people don't know they have free shipping supplies online you guys because shipping will make or break a business my business elevated once i worked on the quality of my pictures the table decor is 50 off [Music] [Music] my mornings i try to keep them pretty low-key because the rest of the day is going to get kind of hectic and i don't know what's going to be thrown at me the tip i can give most is to actually create some sort of schedule last night before i went to bed i actually wrote up my to-do list i haven't gone through it again but for the day but we'll get to that good morning how are you yeah that's perfect yes and so it's about 150 the space holds 160. i think that'll be good let me go get ready finish getting this child ready for school okay all right talk to you later bye all right so i'm running late like usual we're about to go drop gigi off to school and then we're gonna head to the gym but come on you guys i'm already late let's go [Music] hey so i want to take a moment to introduce myself my name is jazz i am the owner and founder of black sunflower where we give luxury sensory experiences i started my business in april of 2020 it was my pandemic project i went to go pick up my son from school and they said don't bring him back coven and i'm like what am i supposed to do with myself like i already knew i want to make a candle business but i was procrastinating i was taking forever i was put in an uncomfortable position and i was forced to make something happen and so i decided to put up my website april 10th the first week i made about fifteen hundred dollars and then it just exploded from there um i had maybe 25 instagram followers yesterday i reached 20k which is exciting we actually have a live later today we're going to do a 20k giveaway and this part of my morning is really special to me main reason it gives me a chance to reset some people like to work out in the evening but i feel if i was to work out in the evening it would never get done but like i said once i got my body active and that's why it's so important self-care as an entrepreneur as a person in general self-care is so important it allows you to keep going allows you to keep you on that grind sleep is important too and working out has allowed me the ability to sleep better i think today we're going to do legs [Music] okay i'm done it was an amazing workout not to go home get ready and take our bus to the shop all right so on our way to the shop i'm finally ready to start my day shakes are kind of my go-to it's like i'm always doing something i'm always running somewhere and so just having a shake on hand honestly has been a lifesaver and i probably shouldn't be doing this while i'm driving but this is how it goes we're about to pull up to the shop we're gonna hop on some emails there weren't that many it's been pretty dead i shut down the website because um we're about to relaunch and we were just sold out in my last video i kind of talked about being ready for whatever rush comes your way and i'm so appreciative for the upflip team but i had no idea how much traffic it would bring me and so i definitely was not prepared and so i made the decision to shut down the website about a week ago because looking at a sold out website is not cool all right so we finally made it to the shop we have a live at eleven i gotta get some emails answered we're gonna go turn on the wax bat i have one employee coming in later today and i just want to make sure that i have her whole plan set up i like to try to make things super easy for everyone one of the first things i always turn on whether i plan on making candles or not is the wax bat main reason is because i don't know how many times i've walked in here and it's thought i wasn't making any candles and halfway during the day i was like oh crap i need candles and i have no hot wax this was actually one of my first purchases that i made for the business or first major appliance purchases this one cost me about 2500 it's a hundred pound wax vat so it melts about a hundred pounds of wax uh in about 30 ish minutes or so there's a decent amount of wax in here i guess we could put a little bit more in so we're just gonna get a few more flakes in here i go through so much wax um one of the things that actually saved me a lot of money is when i started buying in bulk because shipping costs for a box of whack is whack a box of wax is pretty ridiculous because when i can get them on a pallet as opposed to ups just dropping it off i definitely save a lot of money so i'm going to go ahead and just incorporate it into here all right we're going to put the lid back on let us do its thing and i have one employee on her way in and so we're going to go ahead and check the board and see what we have left to do so these are some of the products that i have coming up right now i have a few that i'm waiting for jars and supplies to come in but right now i actually just want to focus on our stuff we have our candle flights and then we also have our 9-inch jars so we are going to start with wicking these and wicking is really important so as of now i have three technically employees i have one that's part time during the day mondays tuesdays and thursdays um i have another one she comes during the week after three she's an intern she's actually through a program i found through the county which is awesome it's a workforce program where they actually a county will pay the employees so there was a way for me to cut costs there and keep more money in my pocket one of my mentors he told me wait as long as you can to hire employees but with the demand i needed help i couldn't wait anymore so i searched out other resources where i didn't have to pay as much with um one of my employees she has a flex schedule where i tell her each week like hey based upon the money i'm bringing in you can work between these this many hours and this many hours so i'm able to keep that part time and keep my costs really low and i actually think she might be here well hello my doll hey how's it going are you ready okay um go ahead and get settled in and then come over here and we'll go over the board real quick all right i think everyone has that pre-live anxiety no matter how many times i go live whenever i start i'm like oh my god what do i do what do i do we reached 20k so we're about to do a 20k giveaway and i'm super excited because who i'm doing this giveaway with she found me on youtube reached out it was like girl i want to go live i love what you do what marketing do i use oh you guys are here for the business questions make sure you go follow black sunflower academy i am going to give all my business tips and tricks on black sunflower academy and actually have a treat for you guys i have a little surprise should i give him a surprise i would get surprised you guys it just so happened to work out this way i hit 20k yesterday and those of you a lot of you found me through upflip and look who's back they're going to hide the team from up flip is here they're actually recording some more so it all worked out perfect so i had to take a picture of exactly what we're giving away because i don't want to mess it up the grand prize will be this suitcase full of goodies it will be the new black the matte black with the wooden wick candles at that and this look that's you guys it's so pretty and with the lighting let's get a reaction from people who have never tried it no come on come on you guys have done so much for me all right go okay pick what flavor i'm gonna go for the chocolate you're gonna go for chocolate just take both of them let's see who won so chewy isn't it good i didn't even thaw them out they they were in the fridge really good thank you so yeah it's super good thank you all right i know you have a lot to do thank you so much for taking time out of your day to come on here with me so introduce yourself and i'm gonna finish this and i'll talk to you guys later peace all right um all right we're done there you go yeah yeah hey marie yes come here real quick were you able to finish the clear jars for the marble candles or do we have any more racks of those if you mean open that need to be whipped we still have some but for the most part i think i finished okay so let's finish those so we have we have three racks marbled and then do you know if arielle finished her tens at all i think she got close okay yeah let's see how many there looks like she has like four so she's almost done two so what's nice is we can start pouring those so once you finish wicking the rest of those you can start pouring the love winds and then the strawberries and whipped cream okay and then use the wicks in this bin closest to the left-hand side you got it because remember the talk we had about wix yes super important yeah if you mess up the wicks i cut you um you're not supposed to threaten your employees but sometimes you probably should no but she loves me so that's okay right [Music] one of the major processes that have been a game changer for me is utilizing fulfillment and having fulfillment center has allowed me the opportunity to spend more time in my shop and by spending more time in my shop i'm able to really dial down on the processes that i have and how did i come up with these processes honestly trial and error i don't know what needs to be done unless i do it and something goes wrong so many people are so afraid of failing and having things go wrong but i actually encourage things to go wrong because it allows me to improve on these processes um another process that honestly i wouldn't be able to survive without is having a website i don't know how many people say they're running a business and they don't have a website and they say because it's expensive or it's hard but shopify has been the main reason why i've been able to scale my business and by the way shopify is the sponsor of this video click in the description below and you can get a free 14-day trial and honestly from the ease of use to the apps that are included to the analytics and the data like to run a business and be able to have all the data right at my fingertips is amazing we're getting ready to relaunch the website i actually have the website shut down right now with the pandemic it was really hard because getting supplies was difficult but now that the supply chain is slowly picking back up i was able to find a supplier that actually had a very consistent flow so that i wasn't worried of i'm starting to use one particular jar and then all of a sudden there's no more of them left so another process that i set up is that i do custom blends of all my fragrances and so that i can start allowing people to pour on their own and also keep the privacy of my formulas i personally pre-mix all of my candle for or candle oils so that other people are able to pour them i'm actually am about to start implementing a process i'm going to move this on your side marie where i'm saving a lot of my bottles and what i'm going to do is start i have them in the big jars but i'm also going to start pre-pouring each fragrance oil i use different amounts of for each different candle and so they'll just have to pour the bottle in but i haven't implemented that but i'm saving them up because that's one thing i'm definitely going to be able to do i'm actually in the process of getting more baker's racks and one of the things that i really want to do is always have a rack of jars that are wicked and somebody is responsible to for making sure the jars are already wicked we'll have another rack of candles that are reported need to be labeled and then in the front we're going to put all the candles that are ready to be put out to production and taking to fulfillment so with setting up systems and processes one of the major things especially with candles is consistency i'm gonna talk about wix a lot i had a new employee who's having a hard time getting the wix even so i went to hobby lobby brought some foam board this thing cost me like five bucks an exacto knife and i was able to cut out these templates for them to just place in the bottom of the candles how did i come up with this i've seen other ones where you can purchase online wooden stuff and whatnot but i was about to spend the money and so you just place them in here they place the wicks in there take this part out and they're all even you have to spend a lot of money to get stuff in place look around you find ways that you can improve your business and save money at the same time because i'm all about saving money you guys [Music] all my employees i had to set them up their own bins with their own stuff because i've been in here by myself for so long i have a tendency to pick stuff up and never put it back where it belongs and so i tell myself i'm not allowed to go in my employees bins they have all their stuff so that's one of the processes i had to put in place as we're finding employees actually i've known marie for almost half my life and i think one of the first things i did when finding an employee is i just looked at my own network and letting people know like okay i do have certain expectations but as a whole i want you to own it's almost like you have your own little candle business and i want you to own it if this was yours i want you to treat it as yours i want you to make decisions as yours i want my employees to feel empowered like pay was huge for me so another reason why it took me so long to hire people is because i want to pay a good wage so i actually start off at 19 dollars an hour the minimum age washington state is 15 that i give every three months i do reviews and based upon reviews i will give a raise based upon that most people you don't even get a review for a year or so but i want people to feel empowered and people feel more empowered when they have money in their pockets and so i want people to take just as much pride in the candles as i do [Music] so right now i'm going through all of our shea butters the shea butters actually saved me last summer last summer when i hit a low point sales were low because i didn't realize candles were seasonal at that time i went back into my repertoire and i pulled out the shea butters and they helped get me through the rest of the summer having talent here to help me with all the little things that i've always put off has now allowed me to make body butters on a regular pouring candles has been hard for me to let go but i'm slowly letting marie i think i let you pour candles for the first time once yes you pour candles for the other day once you did an amazing job but the whole time i was sitting over there like what's she doing over there but leading by example and allowing her not only to try it do it right but also make mistakes and it's perfectly fine like when people make mistakes that's why you have to put processes in place and understand what's going on understand how your employees are working just like now i'm gonna i'm not hovering right i'm just slowly seeing that she has the same control it's quality control by the way we're running out of glue sticks god needs more than we're always running out of glue sticks we're always anything else you need for me marie um no i think i'm good actually okay so great now we get to make a run to the store later which would be great but before we do that i haven't even opened up my emails yet i know when we first came in here i said i was gonna open my emails it's now i don't know a few hours later and i still haven't done it yet so let's go over to the desk and we're going to get set up i don't even think i set up my desk yet so let's see what's going on [Music] well welcome to my fancy desk well actually i do have a desk but i like to be mobile when i'm in the shop so i have my own custom mobile desk i'm finally getting a chance to check the emails what's nice is there's not much going on and another reason why there's not much going on is because another process i have and another talent that i kept on hand was my administrative assistant lily well she's the director of administration i actually allow people to give themselves their own titles i really don't care what the title is whatever makes them feel empowered go for it she handles pretty much all of my inboxes and so now that i know i don't have too many emails to do marie mentioned that we need glue sticks she also told me that we need dawn so we're going to head to the store all right you guys ready to go i am let's go oh gosh it's a beautiful day so we're about to head to the store i have to pick up some wicks some dawn detergent i don't know i may get that on amazon we'll see but i will meet you guys at the store see you later [Music] i just want my international customers to be able to have more affordable shipping rates so i've been working with dhl to get um shipping up and going and as it won't be like super cheap but it's still within reason i was able to get a dhl account set up when you sign up with the accounts with these companies they are free and people they do it for free because they're in the hopes that since you have an account you will use them over their competitors my very first account i had was with usps and also a lot of people don't know like shipping stuff they have free shipping supplies online you guys like if you go to usps.com and click on i think shipping supplies there i think there's at least four pages of different size boxes and tape and fragile stickers and when i started that's what i use because boxes aren't cheap and as much as everyone wants their custom box and all this stuff save your money like usps literally helped me survive the first few months of shipping everything went out in a usps box and so definitely take advantage of that and because shipping will make or break a business going to the craft store i'm gonna go pick up some glue sticks so that marie can actually finish her job and then i'm gonna drop those off back to her and then we have to head back to the house so i can pick up the child get him ready for track practice so it's like the day never ends but it's okay so this is actually one of my favorite places to go to look for stuff for pitchers because i feel my business it elevated once i worked on the quality of my pictures and the props within my pictures and oh the table decor is 50 off especially when you're taking pictures with candles all these types of trays are super like this is cute these are actually really cute this is like 10 bucks i think this one's lopsided it is lopsided that's probably why it's on sale they're both lopsided like what the heck is going on okay let's skip another really cheap thing you can do for your pictures fabric just get a yard of fabric and use that as your backdrop saves you so much money okay true story i pass this every single time i come in here and i never get it but it's on sale this time so we're getting it if this is your first time seeing one of my videos with upflip we have another awesome video that you may have missed out on go ahead and click the link below to check it out you can see a lot more about how i started my business and got it going it's always nice to have random places that you can go and just pick up the things you need quickly now i don't normally buy stuff directly from like stores because it's more expensive it's really important to find wholesalers and places that you can get more stuff in bulk and planning ahead is very important because i wouldn't have to do this so we talked earlier about those processes and those systems obviously i need to work on my ordering system [Music] in my previous video i mentioned i had like my publicist i had a business manager things like that i've transitioned a lot of my admin work so i still have my director of admin but i've taken away pretty much everyone else so i no longer really use my publicist she does some of my copywriting work so i don't use my business administrator i still have my admin and my bookkeeper and as at this moment i have a cpa on hand but all of my work all of my funds have now been diverted into talent and part of the things i had to do is actually start a business academy and because everyone's asking so many questions about business and i really want to be able to help everyone this was part of my three year plan but i was kind of forced into this now which is perfectly okay it's the prime example of don't wait for the right moment sometimes the moment is just forced upon you and you have no choice but to go with it and make it work and so i started an academy page and i have somebody helping me put together courses with that and then i love hosting events i actually got a 3000 square foot event space and downtown and i hired an event planner to take care of that so by diverting my resources from a lot of my back and work now into physical things that are going to give me more exposure i'm able to keep up with the demand a lot more for candles and i'm able to expand my offerings as a whole what's up guys i just got home from picking up my son we're gonna go inside get something to eat relax for a bit and just enjoy the rest of our evening together it was a long day but i enjoyed spending it with you guys but i want you to see the rest of it oh hi hi you see all of those all those babies which one do you think had the babies um it's either that one it's probably that she looks like she has more babies in her yeah because that's the one that always gets painted again how many babies do you think there are at least 10 at least 10 babies there's way more than 10 babies at least oh being a mom and an entrepreneur i really had to find ways to incorporate more one-on-one time with my son because as important as the job is there were times where i was starting to realize that i wasn't paying as much attention or spending as much time because i was so engulfed in what i was doing so even just something as simple as we got these guppies and watching the fish and seeing everything that goes on it's something that he's going to remember which is really special so as much as i want to work hard and make my dream come to life and building a better life for both of us i also have to remember that we can't get this time back and to make the best of every moment and just watching the fish is something that we enjoy so thank you so much for spending the day with me you got to see me wake up make breakfast take my son to school head to the shop answer some emails um go to the store come back home see how i end out my day i really appreciate you guys spending time with me you could be anywhere in the world but you're here with me and for that i am thankful i hope that i was able to help you out you got some nice tips and tricks and i hope to see you soon take care peace one two three you're off of me okay mommy's tired this is how i end up my day i spend the time with my favorite person in the entire world until he gets tired of me and decides to go play roblox

2022-03-31 23:48

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