We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Diona Limas a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Diona thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

I’ve always had this idea that it took months, even years to execute a business idea. Since starting my own business I realized that the timelines I had thought were concrete things weren’t concrete at all. Often times my ideas are completely random and the whole theme of things just starts to unravel themselves. I can have an idea at 3 AM and within a couple of days I’m working on a new label, ordering new fragrance oil blends, and testing out a new candle recipe. This is one of my favorite things about candle making, you can play with and execute your idea as fast or slow as you want. Of course in between there’s testing of wicks, oils, and vessels.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Diona, a creative candle maker, and creator of STATUS GLOW. Some of the things I bring into the world are: hand poured candles, incense, and decorative candles. I’d say I specialize in ‘making candles you connect with.’ What sets me a part is the freedom I give myself to be somewhat “all over the place” in terms of color, scents, and style.

If there was one thing I’d want people to take away from my brand it’d be the reminders that everything that makes you different is what makes you great and that taking time to be present, light a candle, + enjoy the moment is equally important as putting in the work.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I think building on social media is simple when you are sharing in a honest, real, and relatable way. For example not all of my content/posts are rainbows and butterflies. There’s plenty of times where I get raw and real with current emotions and thoughts. Yes, on my ‘business page’

It can be easy to over complicate social media but at the end of the day if we are all a little more honest and start communicating like human beings with real connections and real feelings we will find ourselves more connected to our people.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Candle obsession is a REAL THING, While I absolutely have regular customers that purchase year round, there are also a lot of people who purchase in a more seasonal way and that’s okay. Being a smaller business you definitely feel the hit of this pretty hard, though. Simply put there are a lot of major ups and downs. What you do when you’re ‘down’ makes all the difference in how you will succeed in the future.

I don’t have a particular story that can demonstrate my own resilience because resilience has been my experience in general–tackling a small business alone without any guidance or mentor in my life. Honestly the people I’ve connected with online inspire me and motivate me to keep going. It’s beautiful how you can kind of create your own communities and support networks with people you’ve never even met.

I can say that getting over my own anxieties of public events and actually participating as a vendor at shows that I align with has been a huge benefit and I’d encourage anyone considering doing in person events to just take the leap and do it. Start small, be yourself, and as I love to say, “Do the best you can with what you have.”

Contact Info:

• Website: statusglow.shop
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/statusglowww/