We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Audrey Paice a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Audrey, thank you for being such a positive, uplifting person. We’ve noticed that so many of the successful folks we’ve had the good fortune of connecting with have high levels of optimism and so we’d love to hear about your optimism and where you think it comes from.
I’ve always admired Winston Churchill’s insight when he said, “There is always always always something to be grateful for”. When I started my candle business four years ago, I made this my this mantra by deciding that I would embrace any experience as a good experience. Every experience is an opportunity to learn, and therefore worth being grateful for. This mantra sounds good, but it has been tested through a variety of circumstances, including store rejections, failed product launches, and empty events.
Most recently, I was invited to a private function that promised significant traffic for me to be able to share my candles with an abudance of new clients. I spent weeks leading up to the event preparing enough merchandise for the projected-sales, along with creating a new product specifically for the venue.
Unfortunately, when the day came the event was terribly attended, and that high-projection-of-sales ended up totaling one. It was a major disappointment. However, in keeping with my mantra, I decided to find things to be grateful for, and I used that time to get to know the staff of the venue better, along with learning what I could about *their* business. This approach changed the outcome of the event from a failure to an opportunity for new knowledge and relationships.
Looking for something to be grateful for in every experience continues to keep me positive even when challenges do come – because, of course, every business has them!
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
Well, I have to say I blame my grandma for my obsession with fragrance. She gave me my first perfume when I was 11 years old and I have been hooked ever since. Perfumes, flowers, lotions & potions – I couldn’t get enough of the high I experienced when smelling something beautiful and it’s a thrill I still experience today. It’s this addiction that led me to my deepest passion – CANDLES. The power a candle has to lift a mood or elevate a space is, in my opinion, unmatched. Growing up, I would scour every clearance-section to be able to store up a stockpile of candles. I wanted to make sure I had enough to steadily keep my home smelling amazing. I took this habit with me into adulthood, where it grew out of control. I had been burning candles in our house for a while before my husband noticed a layer of black soot covering *all* our walls – it turned out my passion had been unknowingly pumping chemicals into our home. I was faced with a dilemma at that point: either cut off my addiction to candles completely – or create a solution.
This need for a solution is how my business was born. I researched, trialed, then perfected the process for creating clean, burn-without-soot candles so that my fragrance addiction can remain strong. Because my candles are made with clean wax and natural ingredients, I love being able to share the experience of a room being transformed by intoxicating fragrance & flickering, without leaving behind black walls.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Like anyone who starts a new business, I had a choice to make of when to actually jump in – choosing between waiting until I had more knowledge to tackle a variety of scenarios, or to accept that I knew *enough* to at least get started. The temptation will always be to wait in order to gain more knowledge, but that can eventually become a blockade to ever launching or progressing forward. Over time, I’ve learned that experience often trumps knowledge. Most of what’s required to run a business is developed on the job, when a situation obligates you to learn something new. If you remain teachable and are willing to consistently grow, I believe you can’t go wrong. The key is not in having confidence in what you know, but in your ability to learn.
I’ve also come to discover that prioritizing people will always be a core value of a happy business. When I launched my candle business, I made the choice to pursue positive relationships over the pursuit of any kind of financial gains. Approaching business in this way has safeguarded me from ever treating people as a means to an end – people are always my top priority.
Because of that, I’ve genuinely enjoyed nearly every interaction I’ve had through my business. Markets aren’t wasted if my sales are low, because I still had the opportunity to share my passion with the few who came. I don’t find myself stressing about hitting financial goals because my focus is on the people I get to connect with more than the amount of candles I can sell to them. I’m happy to say that, by keeping people at the forefront, customers have only multiplied over the years and my sales have only grown.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
As a recovering-perfectionist, I am constantly facing the temptation to focus on my weaknesses and invest all my efforts into areas of lack. However, I’ve come to find this can be counterproductive. *Everyone* has a set of strengths along with weaknesses, and by choosing instead to invest effort into improving our strengths, I believe we can see better results. For instance, aesthetics and design have always been a source of joy for me and areas that I’ve managed to create quality in without much effort. However, managing logistics of sales and complex systems with intricate details do not come as easily to me. When it was time for me to create a website, I had to decide whether to save money by doing everything myself or to pay a little more and have those areas that I don’t understand handled by someone else. In the end, I opted to play to my strengths by designing the website, then outsourcing the areas that aren’t my expertise to templates and backend systems. This decision has saved me hours of headaches trying to wrap my head around details that, for someone else, only takes them minutes. Even though there are times when I’m still required to learn new skills, I’m thankful that the bulk of my time can be spent expanding on the strengths I already have.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.flickeringcandleco.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flickeringcandleco/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/audrey-paice-68262044/
