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

Hi Stacy, thanks for joining us today. Do you think folks should manage their own social media or hire a professional? What do you do?

I do all my own social media. Three instagram accounts, over five Facebook biz pages, a couple fb groups, Snapchat, and tik Tok. It is time consuming but each platform generates a different customer base and I change it up on each platform. Many times I can make one story and share it to every platform. Stories is where it’s at and much quicker because you don’t add a comment to it, and you don’t have any comments to respond to! So much easier all around. I have found I have a very active Facebook stories account, but my snapchat following is over 90% active! So almost every snapchat follower watches my stories daily. It’s cool to follow the insights and observe what the customers would like to see and what they may not care to see also!

Stacy, 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?

My business really started as a creative outlet. I married at age 19 to my High School sweetheart who had enlisted in the Army. So at age 20 I found myself living in Germany, married with a cute baby boy. In my free time I would make crafts and sell at craft fairs. I loved being able to make things (to this day I have an internal NEED to be producing something with my hands!) and I had a steady income by doing these occasional craft fairs. For the next 20 years, I would find myself looking for the next trendiest craft to sell or making items I could “mass produce.” I did everything…. wood working, painting, china painting, sewing, making stuffed animals, painting tiles, basket weaving, ornaments, you name it! Then I finally found something I could make a lot of in a relatively short time, plus it was a consumable item so people kept coming back for more… CANDLES! That was 18 years ago, and I haven’t looked back! I started in our laundry room in our military quarters and barely had room to pour candles. Our living room would be full of boxes of jars that the kids (now four little helpers!) would be taking lids off of and gluing wicks in. My weekends were still spent doing the occasional craft fair. About 4 years into candle making, we moved into our first home where I had a large candle kitchen in the basement. I had an open house in my newly built home and over 300 ladies came shopping!! It was amazing! BUT they all knew where I lived then! I had customers knocking on my door and calling the house all day long for candles! I realized rather quickly that we needed a store front. So I opened a brick and mortar in February 2009, and a few years later moved the Candle making kitchen into the same building. That was 13 years ago, and it has been an amazing ride! We have won many awards but my proudest award was winning the Female Retailer of the Year for the state of Kansas in 2019. We also made an Airbnb above our shoppe in 2008, and it quickly was selected for Airbnb Plus, because of our 5-Star reviews. Which means Airbnb takes over your website and puts your airbnb at the top of their search engines, making it fully booked most of the time! So it is a fun adventure between owning a boutique and running an airbnb also!

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

I think every business owner had to find their inner resilience in 2020. Mine came that spring when all the small businesses chose to close. We were closed for 6 weeks. But I did not rest, and neither did my husband! I had a very active following on Facebook and instagram, so I started posting our daily internal workings, making candles and how we ship. I decided to make some “limited edition” candles and did they every sell! My first candles was #StayHome and it was a vanilla pineapple scent. Everyone wanted it! So I was pouring candles, and Hubby was shipping them, or we would do store pick up and set them on the bench outside our door. Then I made #CleanQuarantine and that went viral. A week later, I made #CozyQuarantine and that went viral! We actually made the front page of the paper with a picture of about 130 packages boxed up waiting for the mailman!!! We were averaging over 50 orders per day during the time our store was closed. The cool thing was, we gained so many new customers and to this day, they are still coming to the store from the entire Kansas City area, or still ordering online around the United States.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I love social media and I love studying it. The cool thing about social media is, the audience always lets you know what it wants. I have found that my customers love variety. If I post the same thing in the same way (lets take a video for example) they will like and comment the first couple times and then by the 3rd in a row, not much traffic. So I need to post a single photo. Next I will post a series of photos. Once in a while I will throw a family member in the video. Many times I will document my day thru the stories. If I am at an event or having an event, I will post about a dozen stories that day of my customers having fun. My views will skyrocket on days like that!! They will watch all dozen videos and it will be record views. So my best advice would be… tell a story. If you are making changes, document that with stories. People love to see progress, or people working, or how a business is run.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.CandleQueenCandles.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/CandleQueenCandles
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/CandleQueenCandles
• Other: www.snapchat.com/CandleQueen1 www.airbnb.com/h/QueeniesLoft www.instagram.com/QueeniesLoft www.instagram.com/QueeniesCrystals

Image Credits
My own photos