We recently connected with Victor Ledbetter and have shared our conversation below.

Victor, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I love candles. Prior to Covid, I had a closet full of candles and would burn them constantly burning them when home. I was a business consultant at the time, so I would literally burn them from Thursday night when I flew in until Sunday night. When Covid hit and we were on lockdown, I ran out of candles. So there was no random pick ups of candles while running around the city. My then fiancee had just moved in (for the lockdown) and we had taken a candle making class about a year prior. The place that we got our favorite candle was closed, so we decided to research where to buy products and decided to experiment with creating the scents. So every weekend we were mixing fragrances trying to create our favorite and then started making other scents. We started giving them away for gifts and people feel in love with them. People asked if we would sell them, but I felt bad because I had another friend making candles. Although she lived in a different city, I still felt a certain kind of way. We were making candles so much, we were spending hundreds of dollars each week and it was kind of therapeutic. I was casually talking to the friend telling her that I didn’t realize it was so expensive to make candles, and she suggested that we sell them. With the frequent request and the rising cost to make them (Candle making supplies were (still) jacking up the price, it was becoming a expensive hobby that we needed to get some return. We started manually taking orders and they were coming in so fast, we had to launch a website and it took off from there.

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?

I have worked in the financial services industry, more specifically insurance and consulting for the last twenty years. I graduated from Hampton University with a degree in Finance and moved to Cleveland, OH and started working in banking while going to graduate school. I received my MBA from Case Western Reserve University. I transitioned to insurance while in grad school and eventually became the leader of the Underwriting practice for top 5 international insurance company. When I wanted to move to Atlanta for personal reasons, after a year of waiting, my company at the time could not find me an equivalent leadership role in the Atlanta office, so I started my career in consulting where I could live wherever I wanted. While consulting for a number of years, I got tired of making money for other people and stopped to open up a cupcake shop. I did that for a few years and eventually went back into consulting and then during Covid, a friend who had left my prior firm asked me to come join her to help grow the insurance practice as a business developer and I have been doing that for the last three years. During the course of this journey, I met my business partner and now husband and we have been on this journey together. We both love our current jobs so I don’t have a desire to do candles full time. Plus, we would have to take the price up much higher to compete with our current occupations. :-)

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

The best source of new clients for us has simply been word of mouth and Facebook. Between friends telling their friends, Facebook (my college friends and fellow alums have been super supportive) it has taken off. We haven’t gone heavy on advertisement just because of our current jobs and we have consistent sales. We have done Pop ups and a number of organizations have given them as gifts to the clients and giveaways (they pay for them) at charity events. I guess when produce quality products, people become repeat buys and tell their friends!

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We created a site to sell our candles (www.bougiescentedcandles.com). We have currently stayed away from other platforms because we make the products ourselves find this a better way to manage our inventory. Eventually we might look at other platforms as we expand, but right now, this works for us and allows us a stable “work-life balance”.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bougiescentedcandles.com
• Instagram: @bougiescentedcandles.com