We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chris Dillenbeck a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Chris, thanks for joining us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?
Our biggest challenge with Tree Line Candle Co has been figuring out how to scale the business incrementally. Scaling a manufacturing business is definitely a chicken and egg problem. You simply can’t go after the bigger customers if you don’t have the production capability, and it is hard to justify and afford to grow the business if you don’t currently have the sales. Basically, at some point we had to decide we believed in the business enough to take the risk of expanding our facilities. With the bigger facility we were able to fulfil the orders quicker and more efficiently, which did lead to the increase in sales we expected. It also allowed us to go after those clients that would have been beyond our capabilities in the past. We just finished our latest expansion this year, but we are always looking to the future and identifying what next steps will be needed to scale the business again. In a growing business you definitely have to be proactive in determining how to keep up with the growth, the last thing you would want is to grow so quickly that you start falling further and further behind on your shipments.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
For the last ten years my wife Lindsay and I have owned and operated three retail stores in the Steamboat Springs area. One of our stores, Moose Mountain Trading Company, specializes in unique gifts from all over the world. We are always on the lookout for special products to bring into the store which is how we initially got involved with Tree Line Candle Co. We were one of the first wholesale accounts with the company, and a couple years later when it was offered for sale we jumped on the opportunity. At Tree Line Candle Co we manufacture hand poured soy candles that are 3D topographically accurate representations of mountains. We offer the candles wholesales to stores around the U.S. and have an ecommerce site to sell directly to the customer. Having our retail background has been instrumental in focusing the wholesale aspect of the candle business.
Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?
The Tree Line Candle Co website is powered by Shopify. We found the process of setting up the shop to be very straight forward with Shopify. We are currently working with some developers to build out some new custom features for our site. However, out of the box Shopify handles most everything you could want with an ecommerce site. We especially appreciate how easy it is to integrate the store with our shipping partners and social media platforms. The biggest downside to having our own site is we have to figure out on our own how to drive traffic to our site. We simply don’t get the audience that you do on Etsy or Amazon.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process./
We do manufacture the candles ourselves. We were fortunate in that we purchased the company after the candles had already been invented and we were able to start off with a lot of the basic knowledge of how to manufacture them. However as the business has scaled and we have hired more employees the manufacturing process has definitely evolved. With more employees you have to have processes in place that insure the same steps and procedures are being followed to end up with a consistent quality candle. We have also had to invest in new machinery to expand production capacity. As well, we hired the engineer who invented the candles as a consultant to help figure out ways to streamline the manufacturing process.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.treelinecandleco.com
- Instagram: treelinecandleco
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/treelinecandleco
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