We were lucky to catch up with Maddie Howe recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Maddie, thanks for joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

If you asked me even 5 years ago I would have never guessed this is where my life would be. Before we started our business in 2020 I was working in a bar as a host (one of my favorite jobs working for someone else) and I came home from work to sit and enjoy some time to decompress with sage and my pets. We started talking about starting a business just for fun and I asked him “Well what kind of business should we start?” and he said “Well you really like candles” and everything just kind of exploded from there. I had already been using different candles, stones, and herbs for different things in my life and had done a lot of research into what these things can do to help heal in different ways. I had seen some candles out there that had herbs and stones but didn’t see very many that were scented or that would give you a clear guide in what to do with your candle so I started thinking about what I wish I had when I had started my path into using these different things to help me find myself. In the end the idea came from thinking how can we make this more useable for the people around us and to be able to help those who have no idea what they’re doing or how to meditate and how to bring those who are really experienced something easy that they can follow for when they’re feeling stuck on what they should do. Being able to bring people joy or help through the rough times in there life has been the most amazing thing I have ever experienced and I can still hardly believe this is what my life is now.

Maddie, 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?

We make Vegan Spell candles. our candles are made in glass teacups we find in thrift stores and include herbs, stones, are scented, and come with a card for a meditation that goes along with the candle. We have 15 different candles depending on what is going on in your life, we are always happy to receive questions and give recommendations. Sometimes we get messages about a specific problem someone is having and help them by making a candle specific to there problem to help them get through it, or making one of our candles to suit allergies different people have had. We have gotten a lot of requests of different candles to make, but some of the customs I’ve loved making the most are for fertility or to get through past trauma. Everyone has gone through something traumatic in there life and no matter what it is we have always felt that everyone deserves to have someone at least listen. It doesn’t take a lot to offer a listening ear or to give a hug to someone going through a hard time and the fact we can be there to help someone know that someone is out there who does care is one of the biggest cores of why we do what we do.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Our business has turned into a full time career, it started with selling our candles to a couple of local stores right before the coronavirus pandemic started. The bar I had worked in closed like so many other businesses out there and so I started honing in ideas on how to continue to grow our candle business, by the time the bar had opened back up again we were so busy with our business I didn’t have time to go back, 2021 we did our first event and just kept riding the wave of doing events, building the website and finding more stores to consign with. I think the biggest things to help us grow were to find our amazing stores we consign with and to start doing events. We aren’t the best at using social media so having those places we go to is really what’s made our business bigger each year. As of now we have 5 stores in Utah that we consign through, our website, and events we do from year round.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

One of our goal has always been to keep our candles as eco friendly as we can, our wax and fragrances are vegan, our cups come from thrift stores, Our herbs come from a local apothecary, our stones mostly come from local rock hounders, gem faires and sometimes stores in our area or for something specific we go through reputable websites. Everything is handmade and hand poured by us so we’ve been able to maintain the same level of quality from where we started while keeping true to our core beliefs on what we wanted our business to be. Overtime some of our recipes have changed but they always have changed for the better whether it be finding new ways to strengthen the energies we pour into every candle or to be able to bring our customers our products with the quality they know and love.

Contact Info:

• Website: witchywix.com
• Instagram: @witchywix
• Facebook: @witchywix

Image Credits
Juli David