How PhoenixCandleCoLtd got started
Introduce your Etsy shop and tell us your story. How did you begin and decide on what to sell on Etsy, and how do you create your products?
We are Charlotte and Antony, and we are a married team from the heart of Sherwood Forest (Mansfield, Nottinghamshire). Antony started the business back in 2005, when he met a few witches who mentioned how difficult it was to get beeswax for spell candles. The market (which was relatively nonexistent at the time) consisted of paraffin-spray candles but no beeswax. He decided to have a go at making them and, after sourcing postal boxes so they could fit through a letterbox, created his first product that fit in the box: our 40 Mini Spell Candles Set. This is still our best-selling product nearly 20 years later, and it showcases a range of 20 beautiful colored beeswax spell candles.
Antony listed them on eBay, and they did very well. He developed a few more products and ran the business part-time until 2018, when I came onboard. When Maplin Electronics went bankrupt, I was laid off as a store manager, and we decided to run the business together while working other jobs. I opened our Etsy store in 2017, and the business took off straight away. We found our forever home there. Fast-forward to 2019, when I was pregnant with our first child together, and we decided that I would run the business full-time from home and care for our daughter rather than put her in a nursery. When the pandemic struck in early 2020, our company grew from strength to strength, aided by the closure of high-street stores and the subsequent shift to online shopping. Over the past 4 years, we’ve expanded our range from 10 products to over 100, and we are always developing new products to match the growing community of modern and traditional witches. We even make our own anointing oils and soaps now! We source our beeswax from two UK suppliers; our boxes and packaging are sourced with the environment in mind; and all of the artwork in our boxes is designed by myself and then sent to the printers.
Favorite items
What are your favorite items? What makes these so special? Why do you think these items might be selling well?
Antony: My favorite product is the Ultimate Sabbat Collection Set. This was one of the first products Charlotte created, and it features over 10 pieces of her artwork. I’m so proud of her for creating this beautiful product, and it’s a great resource for new witches looking to start their journey into witchcraft! It’s a great seller around the holidays and always receives positive feedback. I think our customers appreciate the effort that goes into creating it, from the individually wrapped candles to the artwork. It’s just amazing.
Charlotte: My favorite products are the Moon Magic line and the brand new Solar Magic line.Our Moon collection includes black and white GLITTER candles that are meant to be used at specific times during the lunar cycle.Our Lunar Cleansing Kit also contains two soaps and a specific guide to completing spells during this time, using the moon’s magic as a boost. These products sell extremely well, which I think is due to the popularity of Moon Magic as a concept.
Our Solar Magic range was created in October 2022 and came out of a desire to harvest some of the sun’s energy (you know that magical feeling you get when you stand in the sunlight on a summer’s day? ), and then release it in the winter or on a dull day. In the UK, we only have on average about 62 days of sunshine per year, and I thought, what if you could enjoy that sunny, happy feeling even when the sun is nowhere to be seen? Both solar products have done incredibly well, especially in the UK, and I think our customers appreciate the artwork, the beauty of the gold glitter candles that store the sun’s energy, and the practical nature of what they do.
Getting sales on Etsy
How long did it take for you to earn your first sale and how do you currently attract customers to your Etsy shop?
Our first sale came the day after our store opened. We didn’t leverage advertising in those days or have an EtsyPlus account. The spell candle market on Etsy at the time was very hand-made, with images taken of candles in poor light on the sellers’ tables or blankets. No disrespect to them, but we strive to be the best of the best, and we have a reputation on Amazon and eBay for producing professional-looking products with high-res, stylized images. So I think our images and the products themselves far outshone the other offerings (and still do).
Currently, we only advertise a listing when it is brand new for about a week. If it gains plenty of sales, we turn off the advertising, and it then carries itself in terms of search results due to its conversion. If a listing doesn’t do well within two weeks of being advertised, we switch off the advertising and allow customers to discover it naturally. Generally, all products follow the first example. We backlink heavily within our listings and link to our store’s homepage at the top of every product description. Due to the nature of marketplace browsing, a customer may see one of your products, click on it, and decide it isn’t for them. They’ll click "back" and then leave your store to browse your competitors' stores. If you backlink to similar products and your store homepage, you keep them within your little universe, and they are more likely to find what they need with you and not someone else. We also run Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok accounts with mixed results. It's difficult to devote time to them for what we see as little return. So we like to maximize our listings to keep customers shopping with us rather than finding us on social media.
Managing PhoenixCandleCoLtd
How do you manage your shop? Are you running solo or do you have any team members? What tools or services do you use to run your shop and how do you handle fulfillment?
Charlotte: I manage our shop, and I don’t use any apps to help me run it. I think the Etsy platform is very well designed and intuitive enough to be able to run it without the need for apps. The Etsy workshops are invaluable too. I took part in quite a few last year, and the advice that came from them was invaluable. I’d recommend every seller join a workshop at some point. We make, pack, and dispatch every order from our studio at home. We use Royal Mail Click and Drop, which is synced with our store and collects every order. It also adds tracking and dispatches orders on the Etsy platform when we create manifests. Royal Mail collects our stuff five days a week.
The future of PhoenixCandleCoLtd
What goals do you have for your shop in the future?
We’ve recently surpassed 3000 sales, so we’d like to hit 5000 sales by the end of 2023. We are currently revisiting our product descriptions and rewriting them so Google features them better in search results. We’ve also recently updated all of our images to be more informative and beautiful. We’d like to focus more on the digital download market this year too, as it's a growing one! We’d also like to leverage the Explore section more and produce content for that while also pushing our Tiktok presence. We also can’t wait to regain our Star Seller status. We carried this for 11 months last year and lost it in December due to a misunderstanding of the tracking and purchasing needs of lower-priced items. Nevermind! Every day is a school day!
Advice for new sellers
What’s your advice for a new seller starting an Etsy shop?
Research your competitors and the current market that your products fit into. How are your products different? Our ethos is "Don’t be the cheapest, be the best." You’ll bankrupt yourself trying to be the cheapest, but you won’t if you develop your products to be the best in your market. Spend time on your images, titles, and product descriptions. Keyword research is a must. And, above all, give the best customer service you can. Our customers deserve it when they are shopping with us. They keep our businesses alive, so they deserve the best.
Some sellers really get inspired by hearing numbers. Feel free to share these if you like.
Question: How much is your monthly revenue?
Answer: £3000
Question: What is your average profit margin?
Answer: 30%
Question: What is your shop’s conversion rate?
Answer: 2.7%
PhoenixCandleCoLtd
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