We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Charlotte & Allison Millington & Dixon a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Charlotte & Allison, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Myself and my mum (business partner) was in her kitchen one day and just started talking about how cool it would be to start making wax melts. So that evening we ordered a starter kit from Amazon and within the week we were making wax melts… not very good ones at that 🤣

But we loved doing it, it was kind of therapeutic! We’d gone through our starter kit within days so ordered more and started researching everything to do with wax melts. We quickly learnt that there was more to it than we first thought. There are lots of guidelines you need to stick to and rules to follow.

It was trial and error in everything we did. It didn’t come easy at all.

Charlotte & Allison, 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?

After months of practice we decided to do a bootfair to try and sell our products. It was a complete flop! Everyone there wanted to buy second hand and get a bargin.

We had one person come over to our stall who told us about a local market who were looking for stall holders to sell their products. That evening we contacted the market and got a spot the following week. We’d never done a market before so this was completely new to us. We did our best at displaying our items and we made £80! Selling something we’d made sparked a fire in our bellies and we wanted more!

From that moment, 2 and half years down the line and we’re still at this market. We have built up a clientele down there and we love trading there and seeing our regulars come back time and time again.

We’ve extended our range in the past couple of years. We started off with just wax melts, but now we offer candles, reed diffusers, decorative candles, wax melt burners, and home decor items.

What sets us apart from everyone else? Our passion and determination to be the best we possibly can be. We are competitive with our pricing, we want everyone to be able to afford our products and for them to be used on a daily/weekly basis. We don’t want our customers to be scared to use our products because they cost too much money to buy! We also keep up with trends as much as we can. We’re constantly on the look out for something new to add to our business but also what people are buying and we try and adapt to this as quick as we can.

We are most proud of our regular customers. They aren’t customers anymore, they are friends. We’re passionate about building relationships with our customers as they’re committed to coming back to us as a business and repeatedly buying from us.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to fund a business, we can only talk about our experience and what has worked for us.

We didn’t have a huge chunk of money to put down to start our business. Myself and my business partner brought bits here and there for our business as it started out as a hobby. We never brought above our means. If we had a good day trading at the market we saved this money and only every brought what we needed rather than what we wanted.

I think it’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of constantly buying new products/ingredients when you’ve made money but you need to pace yourself and only buy what is really needed.

We still now only buy what we need and our business is currently paying for itself which is a great place to be and we’re
grateful to be in this position.

But we know this isn’t always the case for small businesses so we’re incredibly lucky to be in the position we are. This is what has worked for us but it won’t necessarily be what works for everyone else as everyone has different businesses.

How did you build your audience on social media?

This is something we’re really passionate about. Social media is key to anyone’s success. You only need one video to go viral on social media and you can gain thousands of followers within hours.

Social media isn’t easy, you need to work at it, you need to figure out what is it your audience wants and looks for, what’s going to catch their eye when they’re scrolling. You need to be posting all the time to keep up with the algorithms and it’s not easy when you’re working all day.

You need to keep coming up with fresh ideas and you need to always be thinking “how can I create content”.

We were fortunate enough to have a video go viral on Facebook which saw us gain 5K followers in a matter of days.

Keep working at your social media and make sure it’s unique to your brand and business. We’ve had people out right copy our content on social media and copy our products. It’s a hard pill to swallow as you spend years perfecting your products and social media for someone to steal your ideas. But at the end of the day, you’re doing something right as people want to copy you.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.loulouswaxmelts.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/loulous_waxmelts
• Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/loulouswaxmelts