We recently connected with Carol Owens and Marilyn Klein and have shared our conversation below.
Carol and Marilyn , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.
As a mother and daughter small business, we get asked quite often about how we get along. And honestly, we truly are best friends. Something Marilyn always hoped and prayed for was being able to have the relationship with her daughter that she didn’t have with her own mother and we are blessed to have that. We started our soy candle business out of a need to supplement our income as two widows and there was never any question about ‘would this hurt our relationship’. Being family made it easy and that aspect has touched and encouraged many of our customers. They’ve reached out and shared that our little Mother/Daughter duo is part of why they love supporting us. That, and that the uniqueness and quality of our products. Carol’s oldest daughter, April, helps with all of the IT aspects of the online shop. So, it’s definitely a family affair.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
We’re a Mother (Marilyn) and Daughter (Carol) duo that are creatives to our core. We say it quite often that my mom, Marilyn was Martha Stewart long before being Martha was even a thing! She loved design, home decor, entertaining, gardening, cooking and creating a beautiful home for our family. All of those qualities trickled down the gene pool into me and I took it a step further and majored in Human Ecology; just fancy words for Home Economics and Interior Design. After both my father and then my husband passed away within 3 months of each other, we found ourselves drawing even closer together because we now had this commonality of grieving our husbands at the same time. We knew we needed to find a way to bring in more income and that’s when our brainstorming began. But, how could we make our soy candle business stand out from all the others? We chose to use unique vessels like bowls, vintage crystal, glassware, silver and brass containers that could be used time and again in our customer’s homes after they enjoyed burning their beautiful candles.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Our integrity means everything to us, so creating a product that we can put our name on and stand behind was of utmost importance to us. We started small; making only a few candles and had the idea to gift a beautiful blue and white chinoiserie bowl to another Instagram Creator friend that hit a milestone of 50K followers. That was Marissa from HerrHome. She fell in love with the candle and shared it with her community of followers even though we didn’t give her the candle to promote it. It was truly a gift of, congratulations and to say how proud we were of her. The word began to spread and as it spread, the demand for us to offer more and more unique and beautiful candles began to grow. As customers bought and experienced the clean and natural fragrances along with the beautiful vessels, the word spread. So, social media played (and continues to play) a huge factor in us reaching new candle lovers across the country. Our repeat customer base is strong and proof of how much we value maintaining a quality product as we have grown.
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
We LOVE our customers! They share photos of their candles in their homes with us and give them as gifts, too. But, the one thing that creates an even closer relationship between us and our sweet customers is how we name our candles. As we’re preparing to list our candles on our website, we head to our Instagram Stories. That’s where we ask our followers to submit names of people in their lives that are special to them. It could be a loved one that is no longer with us, a new baby in the family, someone that mentored them, etc. These sweet followers share these precious names with us and we randomly (we receive hundreds of submissions) choose them and individually name each of our candles. This little gesture touches everyone! It’s amazing how something as small and simple as naming a candle after someone brings so much joy.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.itsmorethanahome.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsmorethanahome
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/itsmorethanahome
