Follow Your Bliss
A lesson from a coworker that changed my life.
Back in the late 1980s I worked with a single middle-aged woman in Honolulu who had moved there from Brockton, Massachusetts the previous year with no safety net or plan other than “to follow my bliss.” Amazingly, Mary Lou enjoyed a smooth transition despite widespread prejudice against women and mainlanders by employers in Hawaii. I have heard it said that the people and experiences you encounter in life forever change you. In some indefinable way, I suspect being exposed to Mary Lou’s positive experience played a part in my own decision years later to realize a life-long dream of owning a candle store by creating a retail website specializing in candles.
Having previously learned HTML in order to create personal web sites for myself and others, I was able to put together the first incarnation of wicksworks.com on a shoestring. If you could go back in time to view it, the website would be hardly recognizable both in appearance and product content. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this undertaking was finding suppliers. Before Google, searching the Internet was very unfriendly and tedious. But I was on a mission and eventually tracked down a small group of candle manufacturers willing to do business with a newbie.
During my campaign to find candle suppliers, I serendipitously learned of an opportunity to become a distributor for a then-relatively new company that dealt exclusively in highly scented candles made from natural waxes. The downside of this venture was that I wouldn’t be allowed to sell their candles online (that is no longer the case), so I initially passed on it because that did not fit my business model. But the idea captured my attention and I kept being pulled back to it.
Eventually my interest was piqued to the extent that I sought out a distributor and bought a candle. I was so impressed by the strong-smelling, clean-burning candle I received that I decided to become a distributor even though I didn’t have a clear idea at the time how I would market them. With that decision my candle business expanded beyond the virtual realm and gained the potential of building a profitable network of fellow distributors.
In case you’re wondering about it, I am not trying to be coy by not mentioning the name of these candles. Although they are quite well known, I am restrained by the company from using their name online as a quality control measure. However, I can tell you their initials are M.B., the English translation of their name from Italian is My Beautiful, and you can satisfy your curiosity and even buy some by visiting my independent distributor website.
All in all, my adventure has worked out well. It is my hope to pay Mary Lou’s lesson forward by encouraging you to follow your bliss as well.
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