Hey No Coasters!

Hello everyone! It’s Seth with No Coast Candle. It’s been a few months since you all have heard from me. I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, I am not a writer so bear with me as I write another blog for you 😉

There are a couple of topics I would like to cover but we will cover them in their own individual posts. The first one is regarding a question we often get asked at craft fairs: what sets us apart? Honestly, this one is getting tough to answer. If you attend craft fairs or happen to have posts pop up on your social media, you will see that the market is extremely saturated with candle makers. And we are seeing new ones pop up almost weekly.

Let’s talk about No Coast Candle and what we love about it. We’re a locally owned company in southwest Iowa. Both Brenton and I were born and raised here. I was raised in Stanton and only moved away for 3 years for college before returning home. Brenton has lived in Shenandoah his whole life as well; with the exception of the time he was in school too. This is our hometown, and we invest in it just like the residents invest in us. We sponsor local clubs and donate to non-profit fundraisers. We try to buy what we can from other small businesses with a focus on being local businesses.

We also want to be environmentally friendly. This gets tough to do as we aren’t a multi-million-dollar company that can invest thousands of dollars in sustainability. But everything we do is a step in the right direction for us. We go through a lot of cardboard doing this (that’s the understatement of the year) and we attempt to recycle it all instead of setting it on the curb on trash day (and trust me, that would be so much easier for us instead of loading up the van multiple times). The labels we use on candles, wax melts, and car diffusers are made with 100% recycled material. Our printer paper is made from recycled wood chips as well. This does increase our costs slightly, but we believe it is for a good cause.

Another reason we love No Coast and believe it does set us apart, is we do everything in small batches in our kitchen. Customers always seem to be amazed that we do everything out of our house, and we don’t have a facility or warehouse anywhere. Don’t get me wrong, I would absolutely love to have a building dedicated to No Coast Candle so we can have the capacity to grow. We don’t have a huge inventory count though. We don’t want to pour 100 candles of 1 scent and have them sit on the shelf for 5 years. When we pour, we try to pour 4 candles at a time (per scent) and we pour 15 wax melts at a time (per scent). If we are prepping for a craft fair or fair season in general, we will pour more on scents we know are popular. This keeps us busy, but we want to ensure we are providing the best quality product that we can.

We will talk about this in a later post, but I will touch on it here as it does help set us apart. We have very limited ingredients in our candles. Our candles are made up of a wick (or 2 for the big candles), 100% soy wax, and fragrance oil (not essential oils). We don’t add any other additives to our products.

Okay, I’ll wrap it up now. I could keep going but we will continue on another post later on. We love No Coast Candle, and I could talk about it for awhile with customers. So, if you see us at a craft fair or out and about and want to know more, just ask! This started out as a hobby for us to cut back on how many candles we buy. We thought it would be cheaper to make them ourselves (SPOILER ALERT: it’s not). This has turned into a full-fledged business with customers in over 25 states. It’s taken our blood, sweat, and tears (and countless days and nights working on stuff). We also both work full-time jobs on top of managing No Coast so time management gets tough, and we try to be as responsive as we possibly can be.

We hope you love No Coast Candle as much as we do, and we hope we provide the customer service and great quality products you expect! If you do, we would love if you could interact with us on social media (yes, our Facebook is kind of boring, but we are working on new material!), leave us a review on Google or Facebook, or share our stuff with your network. We truly do have the best customers!

Until next time!

-Seth