We were lucky to catch up with Bobbi Wenzler & Kathy Michalski recently and have shared our conversation below.

Bobbi & Kathy, we appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

There were 2 inspirations behind our business.

1. Spending more time together! We live in different states. Bobbi lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Kathy lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We wanted a way to have more time together doing something we loved.

2. Being a business that gives back. Early on we knew if we were going into business together it was so important to make an impact. As we discussed what we wanted to focus on, it was immediately clear mental health. Our father has schizophrenia and we wanted to give back to causes that support mental health and get people talking about mental health so we can help end the stigma.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

So knowing we wanted to do something together and give back to mental health was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out what we wanted to make and sell. We made lists of things we both loved and candles were high on the list!

Ironically, we had never made candles before so we set out learning all we could about waxes and fragrances. We decided on soy wax since it renewable and grown from American soy beans. Next we set off to learn about fragrances and found out some included chemicals called phthalates that studies are showing aren’t so good for us, so any fragrances that included those were out!

We now offer over 20 different fragrances for our candles in various sizes and each product includes a beautiful box that makes gifting easy. We fell in love with many of our fragrances so we expanded our line to include room sprays using a body safe base and skin safe fragrances.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

We have been so lucky to be part of the amazing events Hayley puts on with Minneapolis Craft Market. It’s hard to buy a candle or room spray from a description online, so that really helped us by having a place folks could get a better idea about what our products smell like before buying them.

We are also grateful to be in several stores that feature local makers: Mainstream Boutique in Waconia, MN, Argyle Moose in Hugo MN, and Doodle Bird in Minneapolis MN.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

It’s been hard for us to learn we won’t get everything “right” the first time. The best example of this was our labels.

We loved our first labels that we printed ourselves, but they bubbled over time which didn’t match how candles looked in stores. So we iterated and decided to switch to permanent labels. Those didn’t bubble, but then they’d occasionally smear and be really hard to take off if we needed to fix one. At that point, we realized it was time to buy our labels professionally.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.esperersisters.com/
• Instagram: instagram.com/esperersisters