Candle Connection

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The saga of our online and offline candle stores.

For the first two years of wicksworks.com’s existence it offered a fairly limited candle selection, and all orders it received were fulfilled elsewhere. In 2003 we opened WicksWorks Candle Emporium, a conventional retail candle store located in Coos Bay, Oregon. Since we were also a distributor for M.B.’s gourmet candles, one feature of this development was that it gave us a unique venue for selling them and for developing new members for our team of distributors.

We had to expand our offerings and keep a substantial inventory on hand for the physical candle store, and one day we had the revelation that our new candle store could be utilized as a warehouse for wicksworks.com. It wasn’t long before we began selling most of the candles we kept in stock at the online store as well.

Having a conventional candle store impacted wicksworks.com in more subtle ways, too. We began to translate lessons we learned about ergonomics, product display and promotions offline to our online candle store. Many hours were spent redesigning the website to make it as easy as possible to navigate, with like products consolidated in natural groupings. In-store customer requests and feedback prompted us to add products that we had never even considered before, and to understand what people really want as opposed to what we think they want. Our popular buy-four-get-one-free promotions were first introduced at WicksWorks Candle Emporium.

Although we still maintain our wicksworks.com domain name for continuity and to make it easy for customers to remember and type, WicksWorks Candle Emporium is our company name now. The logo we commissioned for the physical candle store has replaced our old wicksworks.com banner, although for obvious reasons it has been modified by deleting our slogan The Best Smelling Store in Coos County.

Visit WicksWorks Candle Emporium or Easy Fun Home Based Candle Business

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Our evolving take on the benefits of blogging.

To blog or not to blog, that was the question. And the answer had nothing to with a quandary involving nobility or slings and arrows.

When blogs first began to emerge, our perception of them (without actually visiting any, of course) was that they were glorified newsletters. That was tantamount to guilt by association because, in our experience, newsletters often were mostly rah rah and self-serving propaganda. Not only did we not want to spend our time engaged in shameless self-promotion, we didn’t really think we had anything to write that wouldn’t be the equivalent of blather.

Well, time does more than heal all wounds or wound all heels, it also changes your perceptions and perspectives. These days, blogging is ubiquitous and, on the whole, a more mature and diversified enterprise. As a consequence, our initial prejudice against blogs has dissipated. Of equal importance, though, the breadth of our experience and knowledge has expanded to the extent that creating and maintaining a blog now strikes us as a natural extension of our Web presence. Such is life!

Visit WicksWorks Candle Emporium or Easy Fun Home Based Candle Business

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