We were lucky to catch up with Ariel Bruckner and Gary Bruckner recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Ariel Bruckner and Gary Bruckner thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Gary and Ariel (husband and wife) dreamt up Wash and Wik while poolside on a mini vacation. Ariel said she wanted to start a hobby. We eventually found an article on soap and candle making. Super intrigued by this, it consumed the rest of the vacation and 72 hours later, Gary created a logo and filed to start a company. Wash and Wik was born.
Soon soap was being handcrafted and candles were being hand-poured. Ariel hand blends every scent for both their soaps and their candles using the knowledge she has acquired over the years as a Certified Sommelier (Professional Wine Nerd). She blends essential and fragrance oils from their trusted partners to get the scents just right. Who else can say they have a Certified Sommelier blending their candle scents?
Hand-poured with love in Orlando, Florida, they are proud of every single product created thus far; everyone is unique to Wash and Wik. They have chosen quality over quantity, which is reflected in the ingredients in their products. Today, they partner with a local soap company to produce their soaps, but they still hand-pour their candles, wax melts, reed diffusers and make their air fresheners.
Ariel Bruckner and Gary Bruckner, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Ariel and I have a combined 34 years in the hospitality industry, most of that tenure in operations. I believe the constant pursuit of perfection, figuring out the following cool industry trend, and our competitive drive led us to where we are today. Having a pair of degrees in Hospitality Management from the University of Central Florida (’12), which drove our passion for the great City of Orlando, helped solidify our business’ home. base.
Wash and Wik separates themselves from other candle companies in a few unique ways. Ariel’s professional wine knowledge is just incredible and she blows me away every time she talks about it. That directly translated into her ability to blend all the amazing scents our customers smell today. This leads me to number two, and that is our passion for creating custom and private-label candles. We hand-poured (yes, hand-poured) 40,000 candles in 2022. Of that, more than 75% of them were for private labels. Companies all over the country trust us to represent their brand and we are so grateful for that.
A candle maker, known as a Chandler, could just pour a candle to pour a candle and slap a label on it, but we take a different approach. We believe it is our job to create something that will invoke a memory, an event, or an experience. We want you to light your candle and remember that AMAZING cookie you had from that Bakehouse at Disney Springs while on a family vacation. We want you to light your candle and remember that fishing trip with Grandpa or that time you and the whole family went to that awesome Pancake House in New Jersey. It is our job to take you there.
Our candles also use the cleanest and best ingredients. Premium 100% soy wax for an eco-friendly burn, lead-free, cotton wicks, and clean fragrance and essential oils so they contain no harsh chemicals.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
We all face challenges. August 1, 2023 (Wash and WIk day as we lovingly call it) will mark five years of business.
Taking you back to the times of Covid, years three and four (2020- 2021) were a challenge. We had experienced a growth of about 827% amidst the uncertainty of Covid. Everyone was working from home and, as sales can attest, people wanted to make their workspaces smell nice.
“Supply chain” may have become one of my least favorite words. Scaling a business during all of this was probably our most challenging obstacle to date. We have had to create our own supply chain and purchase our raw materials in huge quantities just to ensure we could keep our candles on shelves. This required a lot of upfront capital as well.
When we first started, we were pouring on a stovetop, two candles at a time. We quickly learned we needed more space and converted a spare bedroom into our “candle room”. In November of 2020, we realized yet again that we needed more space so we converted our garage to a 400 square foot workshop. With the ability to pour almost 200 candles in one sitting and just over 575 candles a day, we thought we were set. We were wrong. We then invested in larger melters and larger pouring tables and we eventually, albeit very slow thanks to the supply chain, got to where we needed to be at the time. We have since upgraded our space and equipment again. As of this writing, we still hand-pour six candles at a time and hand-label every candle. This takes a lot of time, but this attention to detail is something that makes us proud.
On top of all the above, in 2020 we had a company try and use our trademarked name and we learned real quick all the legalities behind that. This was definitely something that kept us up at night. We won and I am very well-versed in trademark law now.
2020 was also the year, among everything else, we decided to rebrand our look. This was a big undertaking and took a lot of time and money to get it just right. This proved to be worth its weight in gold as we now sell our Wash and Wik branded products in all 50 states in small boutiques across the country.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Our initial, first day, capital investment in ourselves was about $2,000 and we were learning as we went. We decided to limit our starting inventory to just one 6oz tin candle in 6 different scents (scents 001 – 006 today) and 3 different soaps. We signed up for all the markets that would let a new, unknown company, sign up and we brought what we were able to make on our stove top in the days and nights before. Back then we even hand-stamped our labels to save money. All the money that we made went right back into the business. We were both working two full-time jobs at the time and we didn’t even take a paycheck for the first 3 years of business. I know this strategy could not possibly work for everyone, but it was what allowed us to grow into what we are today.
To this day, almost five years from the day of our first sale, we have been completely self-funded. We borrowed from ourselves a couple of times during the supply chain difficulties so we could keep inventory, but have never needed an outside investment. This is an incredibly difficult thing to achieve as you scale up a business that requires such an investment in raw materials. Especially one that does most of its business in wholesale quantities. At any given time, we have tens of thousands of dollars worth of products, somewhere out in the world, on their way to us. We have to keep the raw materials coming as sometimes it takes months to get to us and we could not afford to shut down the production. Our customers depend on us to deliver.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.washandwik.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/washandwik
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WashAndWik
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/washandwik
Image Credits
Gary Bruckner