A Look Back and a Candle Sale

I know we have all heard it many times before, but 2020 was a doozy. It seemed only fitting after all this time, to post for the first time in forever, to share where we are at, how we got there and offer a few apologies. If you are not at all interested in the "behind-the-scenes" part of the business, no worries! Just pop down to the bottom for the details on the sale!

Let's start by heading back to March. We had such big goals for the year and we started making plans to improve the way our business ran. Then, of course, everything came to a halt. We had to send our team home and it was Dana and I for several weeks on our own. Then when our daughters finished their college classes (from home), it was the four of us for the rest of the summer.

Here is the thing that happens when everyone else is gone and it just you again - you realize how much needed to be changed. And so the changes began. We changed our inventory system, our shipping software, our accounting software and more.

The biggest change we made was the decision to outsource our inventory and warehouse management. That started in the first week of August and just came to an end in the last two weeks. It was one of our worst business decisions to date. The partners we picked (yes, we tried two different ones) were not the right fit. Mostly not their fault. We truly thought we had done enough research and asked the right questions, but we didn't. If you placed an order in the second half of the year, we are so sorry. We had so many late shipments, broken shipments and wrong shipments. It reached a point where our whole team was literally just trying to fix problems instead of running our business. It was downright awful and exhausting.

Even with all of that going wrong, our bad decision making wasn't because we outsourced. Our biggest mistake was convincing ourselves that someone else could do it better than we could ourselves. We were tired and frankly the idea of orders being fully managed without us having to be involved in every piece of sounded like what we needed to focus ourselves on other parts of the business. We convinced ourselves we couldn't do it as well as someone else could and that is just not true.

We had 45 days to get through the end of the holiday shipping season, get everything back into our warehouse, reconfigure our warehouse, set up a whole new shipping system and hire a full time warehouse manager. Our deadline to be out of the old location was January 7th. I am proud to say that on January 7th, we shipped a full day of orders from our location here in NY. Our warehouse manager just started his first full week and is up and running really well already. The best part is that all the systems we had to put in place to run our shipping from another location are still in place and now they way we process orders is so much smarter, easier and more efficient.

Hindsight might suggest that we never should have done it. I actually think it was a valuable lesson in so many ways that will likely help guide us in future decisions.

In the cleaning up and rearranging of the warehouse we have a bunch of extra inventory that we need to clear out. So, we are offering a fantastic sale!

We have a mix of 10 oz. boxed candles, our large jars and just a couple of small jars (at $10) and trios, all for $15! Click on this LINK to find them.

And you will find a big surprise - if you are a fan of our Pumpkin Sage candles, we are offering the 10oz. for $15!

Please note that the sale does not apply to previous purchases and is only for certain sizes and scents.

Thank you so much for your patience last year and happy shopping!