We were lucky to catch up with Chloe Saldivar recently and have shared our conversation below.
Chloe , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about one of the craziest things you’ve experienced in your journey so far.
One day out of the blue Dani Austin mentioned us in her Instagram story, which we were not expecting.
At the time, she reached out to her because her followers wanted a discount code for the candles. So we did it. Not knowing much about how to work with influencers we did a ton of research to make this happen. We made her a discount code and sold out of all our inventory within an hour.
It was all great news until our industrial wax machine broke in the midst of this all. It was 10pm at night and we were working to crank out these candles in a timely manner and all of a sudden that had been put to a stop because of our broken machine.
We’d be lying if we said everything was rainbows and butterflies. We were stressed, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, were in a massive panic and had hundreds and hundreds of orders to fulfill.
We tried to see what electricians were available this late in the night and we had no luck.
We were lucky to find someone to come by over the next couple of days and had the part overnighted from our manufacturer to make sure this wouldn’t set us back too much.
What we later realized is that the power circuit in our home was not able to withstand our machine with other large house hold appliances. We almost blew the entire circuit and wouldn’t have been able to produce anything.
It set us back a few days but we started cranking away and would spend all day and night working to get these orders out the door.
Chloe , 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?
Big Ass Luxuries was created with love and passion by craft-makers and entrepreneurs Trent and Chloe. Born out of our home kitchen during the 2021 Great Texas Snowpocalypse. The idea came to provide light and warmth, however, we realized that large, long lasting, and aromatic candles were missing in the industry. Not to mention the price of large candles were astronomically high for what other retailers were trying to sell them for and we were aiming to create a luxury good at an affordable price.
In 2021 Trent had been laid off from his job and started pursuing other passions such as getting his pilots license and making really big candles on the side. What started as a hobby real made a name for itself. He started by bringing the candles into stores across the DFW area in hopes that one of the stores would want to buy. A store called Swoozies was the first to buy. They invited us to do a pop up event with them. We sold one candle. A little disappointed we didn’t give up. We would continue to do these pop ups and attend other events in the area that would bring awareness to BAL.
Chloe had still been working a full-time corporate events job during the day and helped with the business at night. Chloe was introduced to an event called Divi Fest where she applied in hopes to be apart of Dani Austin’s event. Dani is a well-known social media influencer in
Dallas with over 1M instagram followers and thousands of followers across other social platforms.
Dani’s event, Divi Fest was an event where 25 small business would be invited to bring brand awareness to their businesses. We were fortunate to be one of those businesses.
We gave her a few of our candles to take home after the event. Not thinking much of it and several weeks passing we see her talking about our candles on her Instagram. We didn’t even think they actually made it home with her after the event but to our surprise we see them lit in her home and expressing her genuine likability towards them.
Dani’s influence truly catapulted our business way faster than we ever imagined and she has been such an instrumental part and pleasure to work with over the past several months. To this day, she is the only current influencer we work with and have no paid marketing.
At this point our business was being taken to the next level and rather than pursuing other potential jobs, Trent had decided to do BAL full-time and shortly after that Chloe quit her full-time corporate job to pursue BAL fully. We couldn’t be more excited to do what we love everyday.
We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
We love to highlight our clients on our social platforms through User Generated Content. What that means is we like to showcase when our customers mention us or speak highly of us that way we can almost create a community across our user-base.
We also pride ourselves in having excellent customer service. We want to ensure everyone is receiving top-notch quality and 5 star customer support. If a shipment arrives late or not to our standards we make the time and effort to resolve an issues and ASAP. Going the extra mile to make our clients happy means everything to us.
As small business owners, we’re constantly learning and improving as we scale and we hope sharing that level of support and kindness is a reflection to our brand.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
As we’ve started to scale, we’d been searching to find a manufacturer that would help us produce all these candles.
We were able to find one. We had been talking to them and working with them to test our formulas for several months. These people were true experts in the candle industry.
After several months of testing and visiting the facility and after we had shipped them all of our supplies, they bailed on us. They had decided to sell their facility and we were panicked. We’d told our customers that we’d have product available by a certain time and now we had to pivot.
Our pivoting strategy was to start making them ourselves in a larger commercial space. We began searching for industrial spaces and looking for people to hire. This process is still in progress today.
While we still face challenges as novices, we believe that the series of events that happened were the best decision for us. We would have more control over our brand and really build it ourselves from the ground up.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.bigassluxuries.com
- Instagram: @bigassluxuries
- Facebook: Big Ass Luxuries
- Linkedin: Big Ass Luxuries
- Twitter: Big Ass Luxuries
Image Credits
Instagram @randimichelleweddings (for product photos)