This three part series is now available and discusses various aspects of hosting children’s chocolate making parties commercially.
This article is available free to project club members.
To find out how to get your free project club membership - Click Here.
Part two of this series is now available and this installment covers various business models suitable for a small or part time chocolate business. Even a small side business requires planning to be succesful and this article discusses the early planning stages for your business.
Of all crafts, chocolate making is perhaps the most common one for hobbyists to cross over into selling their products. This is the first in a series of articles designed to help hobbyists who wish to sell their chocolates or start a small business and discusses a variety of things to make your chocolates more desirable to potential customers.
Although aimed primarily at those new to selling their chocolates, there is a wealth of useful information here for anyone who sells chocolates and more experienced chocolate makers may benefit from these hints and tips as well.
I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
When it come to business, a bigger truism has never been spoken. Admittedly, a business relies on satisfied customers and without them - you have no business (or won’t have one for long). No matter what you sell, or how you sell it - some folks will not be happy with something you do. For that matter even if you just give away free stuff - someone will find something to complain about. All you can do as a business person is satisfy the vast majority of customers and potential customers.
You do this by being receptive to customer comments and complaints. Smart businesses actually seek out customer feedback. Although it will sometimes cause you to hear things you don’t want (more…)
Ever have a situation when it was vital not to laugh, but nearly impossible not to?
About 25 years ago I owned a small tropical fish store. One evening a sweet little old lady walks in because her goldfish was sick. When I asked her to describe its symptoms, she explained that her fish was constipated and needed some medicine. As you might imagine I nearly ruptured some internal organs trying to hold back the laughter.
Being a true professional I managed to keep a straight face as I explained that they do not make fish laxatives, but she was quite insistant on buying something to help her constipated fish. So after a long hard look at my merchandise, I decided that a small package of a vegetable based fish food might provide the necessary fiber (I still felt bad about selling her anything for a fish that was probably not sick other than in her mind, but at least I kept it down to 59 cents or so).
Several days later she stopped in to thank me, saying that the new food did the trick and Rover (or whatever the fish’s name was) was feeling much better. After further conversation it turns out she may not have been as strange as my initial impression of her seemed. She had been feeding Rover a tropical fish food which is much higher in protein than goldfish food, although to this day I can’t figure out how she determined the fish was constipated.
To sum this up - Even when a customer seems to be irrational, they may actually have a legitimate problem. So always treat every customer problem or complaint as a legitimate problem. Sometimes they are using your product in a way not intended, it may be a defective product, or maybe they just know something you don’t.
As many of you are aware, I have been offering a free Introduction To Candle Making course on this site since 2003. That course is immensely popular and I have decided to expand the course offerings.
In preparation for the expanded course offerings I have set up a new domain to enable upgrading the course software without interruption of the existing course. The free candle making course has been moved to it’s new home and additional courses are now under development.
The new course site is Artisan School
Here is a direct link to the Introduction To Candle Making Course in its new home.
We are planning to expand course offerings beyond candle making as well. If you are interested in designing and teaching a course at Artisan School, look over the site then use the teach a course link to apply. We will consider courses in most artisan, craft, and art subjects.
One question I get a lot is “How can I safely embed dried fruit (or insert your choice of flammable material here) in my candles?”
There is only one answer - THERE IS NO SAFE WAY TO EMBED FLAMMABLE OBJECTS OF ANY TYPE IN AN ORDINARY CANDLE! This is especially true in regards to flammable objects which are porous, since they may actually soak up the wax and become oversized wicks.
The common reply to the above answer is “But I see them in stores all the time, so there must be a way to make them safe.”
If you see someone selling something - that doesn’t mean it is safe. For example, several large auto manufacturers have marketed and sold cars that sometimes exploded on rear end impact due to their design. Just because thousands were sold, doesn’t mean it is a safe design.
If you look carefully at these types of candles, you will usually notice that they are imported. And my guess would be you would have a rather difficult time trying to sue them should their unsafe product burn your house down.
Some potential embeds are borderline risks - such as hard candy. Although it may burn, it will not act as a wick. This makes it far less of a potential fire hazard, yet still not 100% safe.
Smart, responsible candle makers avoid making unsafe candles. One rule of thumb I use when making candles is: If I can light the embed with a ciggarette lighter, then I won’t embed it. The exception to this are Hurricane Shell candles.
A hurricane shell is basically a hollow candle (often containing embeds). The actual burning is done with a small candle in a glass holder placed inside providing both a physical barrier (the glass), and a spatial barrier (air space) between the flammable embeds and the flame.
More information on making Hurricane Shells can be found at:
Chunk Hurricane Candle Project
and
Autumn Leaves Hurricane Candle Project
A new project article is now available on making waxed teddy bear air fresheners. These are made with stuffed animals, and scented wax. They make great gifts.
What’s with Mission Statements? It seems every time I look at one it is just a bunch of meaningless doubletalk. For that matter, why call it a mission statement? Are all these sites run by secret agents or something? Whats wrong with calling it “About Us”, and actually saying who you are and what you do?
Mission Statement
“We help clients in all industries create distinctive process capabilities and to leverage those capabilities for competitive advantage. How we help our clients succeed is as important as the results.”
I kid you not - I pulled that off the web. There were several more paragraphs, but to be honest after reading the page I still haven’t a clue what they actually do.
Is it just me or do others need to fight down the gag reflex when they see this type of stuff on a web site? I always get the feeling they are more interested in selling manure than any products or services I might actually be interested in. Why not just come right out and tell folks you are full of crap and it seems to have backed up onto your web site. It almost seems like they hire political speechwriters to come up with this junk - a whole lot of words without actually saying anything.
Are the days when folks expected to actually understand what your business does or can do for them a thing of the past? Personally I feel no amount of doubletalk, jargon, etc… can substitute for plain talk about who you are and what you do / offer. Why be intentionally obtuse? David Weinberg’s Beyond shareholder value has a great suggestion for the opening line of mission statements. Start by telling folks something they want to hear.
For the folks that insist on using this nonsense try this Mission Statement Generator the random mission statement it spits out will make as much sense as anything else you write, and if nothing else is good for a few laughs.
Bob Sherman is the author of several candle making books as well as hundreds of articles and projects on candle making, chocolate making, leather carving, plaster craft, and soap making.
