The Importance of Customer Experience with Shortie’s Candle Company | EP. #168

Are you struggling to stand out as a brand in the competitive e-commerce landscape? On the 168th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff sits down with Georgia Vanderville, Founder and COO of Shortie's Candle Company, to discuss how they have built a successful business by focusing on branding and customer experience.

Georgia shares her experiences and insights on how Shortie's Candle Company has differentiated itself from other brands in the market. From utilizing customer testimonials to creating a consistent brand experience, Shortie's Candle Company has been able to build trust and loyalty among its customers. If you're a brand looking to improve your online presence and customer experience, this episode is a must-listen.

Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

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 The Importance of Customer Experience with Shortie’s Candle Company

Andrew Maff and Georgia Vanderville

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Georgia Vanderville

Georgia Vanderville is an award-winning entrepreneur, best-selling author, and TEDx Speaker renowned for her international work with youth and the Women Owned Small Business community. Named one of the Most Influential Women of the Sierra Nevadas, she chairs NevadaWorks, representing manufacturing across seven counties in Northern Nevada. Georgia has empowered women entrepreneurs globally, helping them expand their reach. Her extensive travels through the U.S. and Europe, coupled with her passion for listening to diverse stories, inspired her to found Shortie’s Candle Company in 2002. With a mission of "Scenting people's lives to create happiness," Georgia has built a world-renowned team and a thriving business. In her downtime, she enjoys snowboarding and hiking with her family.

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And I would say the number one thing that's gotten us from there to here is not quitting, it's continuing to go even when it's hard. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by the amazing Georgia Vanderville who is the founder and COO of shortest Candle Company Georgia. How you doing? Ready for a good show? I am ready for a good show. I am jazzed and excited to be here. I am so excited to have you on the show. It's a very interesting product line. You have a crazy background that is amazing and always very interested to see how entrepreneurs are running their businesses. Everyone does it very differently. So we're gonna have some fun. I'm very much looking forward to this. I like starting these off kind of stereotypically. So if you wouldn't mind telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, how you got into shorties Candle Company, and we will take it from there. Well, thank you for asking. My name is Georgia Vander Ville, and I'm known as the fragrance aficionado, because over the last 22 years as a candle designer, I have produced and sold over 6 million candles. Wow. And yeah, it's a it's a lot of fun. We started with a tiny little pan in our kitchen, and I started it with a tiny little pan in the kitchen, not knowing exactly what I was going to do or I didn't have a plan, and I didn't even know that I was starting a company. If I could be honest with you, I remember getting to the line in the business office just to get a business license so I could sell candles to people. And the lady asked me, she said, and what's the name of your company? And I went, Oh, you need a name. Okay, I'll come back tomorrow. I didn't even know, but I was 21 and you know, it all stemmed actually from being 15. When I was 15, I overflowed the bathtub in this house that we lived in, and the house was so incredibly old, like no human should ever have lived in this house, and this smell came out of this carpet that no human should ever have to endure. And I tried to rip out this carpet. I did the best I could. I was 15 years old. No one was home. I didn't know what to do, and I ended up calling my work, and I said, I don't know what to do. I've just done this. And one of the ladies at work, she said, Go get a scented candle. So I walked all the way down to the bus, and I took the bus all the way to this store called shopco, and I went inside, and I went through the entire candle aisle, and I smelled every candle. I was probably in there for an hour because I wanted the one that would smell the best for me, and I spent my life savings on this candle. I was 15, and I was all the way home, and I walked all the way back up, and I got inside, and I lit this candle, and it did nothing. It's like nothing. And I thought, that's not even fair. That's the rudest thing on earth. I hate candles. And then at 21 I met a boy, made him a candle on this tiny, little stove with my 25 cent pan, and it had a scent throw. And I thought I had just, by all means, I had just invented scented candles. I was 21 and I had to get this invention out to the world. So let's start there. Wow. So that's very interesting. So it's all coming from a subtle grudge to whichever Candle Company screwed you over at that time. So good. Thank you for the idea. I had thought about it as a grudge, but now, hey, it worked. So tell me a little bit about the business in itself. So Ed, you had started it in your kitchen, and now you're obviously well into being a business, a seven figure brand. So it's it's definitely grown. What How did you get from there to here now? Well, 22 years is a long time, and I would say the number one thing that's gotten us from there to here is not quitting, it's continuing to go even when it's hard, even when you're in tears because you have 18 cents in your bank account and you're not sure how you're going to pay for your mortgage. But it's continuing to go and just trusting that it will be there and still taking the steps toward it. We've done a lot of different things. We. Pivoted every time we needed to. We had in 2008 everyone, well, depending on their age, when 2008 autonomy went through what everybody went through. And because of that right, we had to close our warehouse, and we ended up moving back to our property, and that felt like it was soul crushing and we were going backward, but we ended up pivoting and making some slight adjustments to our plans, to how we ran the company, and those pivoting moments really helped us. So we did shrink. We shrunk massively, and then we hit the row all over again. And I'm so grateful for those opportunities, because we are where we are now. Yeah, so tell me a little bit about the business, where it's at now then. So where, where are you primarily selling? Is it mostly online? Are you in retail? Tell me a little bit about that. We are mainly online. That is really we started with farmers market, straight to the consumer, and then we went online pretty much right at the same time. So we've been online since the very beginning, and it's grown and grown and grown. I would say our biggest retailer would be Amazon, and then we are on walmart.com, and for wholesale accounts, our biggest wholesale account would be Whole Foods. We are in just one whole foods right here in Reno, but we don't actually focus any of our activity on retail right now, but that will be coming up in the next year, so you'll be able to see it nice from the online space. I know that it's not a I guess you really wouldn't call it a CPG brand, but it is a similar element, where it's kind of like it's difficult to sell, because you can only explain a scent in a certain way right then, to really sell it, they've got to smell it. So how are you kind of bridging that gap, to explain to the consumer the scent and actually be able to get them to convert a lot of times? It's based off of testimonials from other customers, and it's based off of trust. So when a company tries one of your products and it's really good, they go, ooh, let me try another. And just recently, we started adding putting samples into orders. We bought some machinery that makes some really nice samples, and we can put them into our order. So when customers place an order, then we've had that. We've also done this thing for years, and we call them scent sniffer tabs. And it's literally a little tiny piece of paper with a little bit of scented wax on it. And we could put those into the mail and mail them to a customer. So we would send people scent sniffer tabs so they could try out products before they purchased them. Oh, interesting. Are you charging for shipping for those? Or is it kind of a if you just sign up, you just get one, if people called or if they emailed and asked about something, then we would send them to the free of charge. It was a stamp and an envelope, and yeah, we'd send it to them. Interesting. Do you publicize it? Or they have to just ask you about it, kind of thing. It was just something that we would do if people asked we never really publicized it. We might have had, actually, that's not true. We did have something somewhere, and it might still be on our website, if I'm being honest, I'm not really sure. But yes, we did publicize it at some point. I just know exactly where it was. Yeah, nice. I mean, it's definitely a genius move, because I know sometimes that can be the biggest hurdle of actually getting people to try something that they're either going to be smelling or feeling or touching or just tasting very interesting. So of with everything being primarily online, what's your major like channels? Are you primarily on Amazon? Is most of the business coming from your website? Tell me a little bit about those sales channels. Well, we have a ton of business coming from our website, so most of the time, people will find us elsewhere, and then they'll come to our website after that. And then so we ship a ton out every day that comes into our website. And then we do sell a lot on Amazon. Amazon does a great job, and they ship our products very quickly. So a lot of times, we're shipping into Amazon, for Amazon Prime, and then Amazon ships it out. And then for Walmart, we are shipping that for them. And I would say for the retailers, Amazon would be our biggest retailer. Yeah, interesting. So how are they? How are these people finding you, if they're primarily going to your site, is it from paid advertising, social media. What's, what's that approach? It's all SEO, search engine optimization, really. So most of your sales are coming from SEO initiatives. Yes, wow. Interesting. I would think for a candle brand, it would be pretty heavy on the social media side. So that's, that's awesome. Very interesting. So, and then you obviously mentioned that you're you get a good amount of traffic or a good amount of sales from the Amazon side as well. The Amazon side is that also just from having your listing option listings optimized, or are you also running any kind of advertising or anything like that on Amazon? Our listings are apt optimized, and then we do run ads on Amazon as well. Yes, beautiful. Big is the team who's helping you kind of manage all this stuff. We have 10 full time. We have two part time, and then my husband and I, so we have a 14 full now. Interesting, where are you? What's the goal with the business? Where are you trying to take it? The goal with our business is to be the largest candle manufacturer on the West Coast. Interesting. How far I don't know whose biggest one is right now. How far off are you from there, or are you already there, and you hit your goal bigger than where you are right now. We are, in all of my research. We are the third largest candle manufacturer on the West Coast right now. That's in my research. I could be wrong, and there might be another company that I just don't know about. Maybe they're not out there really, but then maybe they wouldn't be bigger than us. I'm not really sure that's the information I've been able to gather. So that's awesome. How many I looked I started looking and lost count. How many different scents Do you have? We have 59 different fragrances. Okay, all right, that's a little bit more tolerable than I was expecting when I first looked. Was like, whoa. We've got a lot of different scents on here. That's awesome. How do you so that's obviously a lot of skews. How do you kind of manage that? Is that, is it made to order? Is it something you pre make ahead of time? Like, what's that process? Like all of our orders are made to ship the exact same day. So we have inventory and we have some software. My husband has actually developed some software for us, and it's actually the most incredible software on Earth. I just have to plug him for a second, because every small company, every company, if they are manufacturing something, even if they aren't manufacturing something, they should be have this software. It is so incredible. But anyway, with this software, it forecasts for so it says, you know, this is what you sold during this point in time last year. This is what you're going to need this year. So then we pre do things. So all of our stuff is roughly a 60 to 90 day in advance product, and that way it can be manufactured. It can make it through all of our warehouse, onto the shelves. It can make it into Amazon, where it needs to go, and then everything is stocked. So that is our, our process. It's very interesting. That's pretty cool, is he, are you going to also start selling that software next? Well, I would love to to be honest with you, I'm not sure there's more than just me in that decision, so, but everybody we did a tour in our warehouse the other day, the other day, on last Wednesday. There was a week ago today, there was a company that came in, and they, or a state organization, came in, and I gave them a tour, and I ended up everyone wanted to see the software, so I gave everyone a tour of the software as well. They were just blown away. So I keep telling him, and he goes, What's his response? Obviously, for everyone who knows, for the show, sometimes we have, you'll fill out like a form, just kind of give us a little bit of insight into the business, just so I don't just so I don't make sure I'm speaking out of turn most of the time. One of the things you mentioned is that the company in itself came from your passion, through traveling through you, the US and Europe, right? So tell me what happened there. Where was that kind of, where is that inspiration coming from? What really happened in in the US and in Europe? So I learned when I was traveling the United States, my goal was to hike the highest peak in every state I came to. And some of them you can actually just drive over the top of, but others, you know you're hiking, you might be camping while you're hiking. And I recognized that when you have a goal, you can make it to the top if that's your goal. So set your goal and hike and keep going. And that was really one of the biggest lessons that I learned, as well as being able to and especially in Europe, being able to connect with everybody from all of these different cultures and from all of their different backgrounds, and the love of the love of fragrance, but the love of the feeling that fragrance brings to you. So when you meet a local and they bring you into their house and they say, you know, you are a lot of fun in the square today to chat with, would you like to come home with me? And not that sounds weird how I just said that, would you like to come have dinner with my family and I, and then saying yes to those opportunities and being able to meet locals and being able to play with kids and have a good time and smell the different smells around the world that really, that really connects you to that fragrance, and when that fragrance, yes, it does help you relive memories, but it also brings this. You might not then recognize it, but when you smell one fragrance, and you've been joyful when you smelled that fragrance, when you smell that fragrance again without even recognizing it, you will become joy. Full again, and that's why I love fragrance. Very interesting. So is that, is that kind of how you get the inspiration behind each of the different fragrances that you offer? A lot of it is how I feel. Yes, yeah, it depends on the joy that comes from that fragrance. And I'm not the only one. We actually have a squad. We call it our scent squad. So we will, when we are coming out with a new fragrance, we will take it, we'll test it. It has to pass me first, and then it has to go through a few different other pieces of criteria, and then it will go out to our scent squad, and our scent squad will give me feedback on it. So yes, something might bring me joy, but if I'm the only one, and everyone else is like, then we're gonna have to revamp it. We're gonna have to figure that out. But when we get a really good response and people will go, I love this. I need more, then you know that you are doing a good job and you're moving in the right direction. It's those testimonials, you know? Because I'm not the only one. We have a lot of people on this planet, yeah, do you get a lot of repeat purchases? Oh, yes, you'll go in. It's crazy, especially on Amazon. Amazon, a lot of people on our website, they'll buy, say, once a month. But then on Amazon, you have people, because it's so easy to order stuff, you'll have and they'll order every other day. You're like, wow, really? Ascented candles? Yes, I clicked on someone's and, well, we sell more than just the jar candles. We sell melter packs, tea lights, votives and jars. And I clicked on someone's order the other day, and they were buying two to three melter packs every two or three days, and they had 137 orders in there? What in the world? And I've seen that more than once. I mean, people will have an incredible amount of orders. Didn't expect that. That's awesome. That's a good thing. So you mentioned you're thinking about venturing into retail this year, correct? Or at least further into retail. What's, what's the steps you're taking for that? What's that approach looking like? Well, right now, just in the last month, we've revamped our wholesale packets, like our wholesale information so our in house designer, he went through and he modified everything and made everything look really nice and kind of made it a little bit crisper and clearer than it was before, and we've gone through and just set up all of that, and then the right people have that information now, so we've been able to clear out so everything doesn't have to filter through to me. It can go to the right people in the business, and then they can take care of it. Because sometimes, as the owner, I have a lot of hats I wear, and if I can take one of those hats off and share it with somebody else, then they look really cute in their hat and they can own it. I love that. I want to start using that every time I give someone else a job to do and be like but look how cute you look in your new hat that you've got the it's gonna come off passive aggressive, no matter what I do. But it's fine. I'm still gonna do it pink one. Make sure it's Yeah, exactly. Oh, man, good. It's the joys of working at home. Mine do it too all the time. They always take little they get little cameos on the on the show all the time. My pups, you're also a you're a best selling author, you're a TEDx speaker as well. Am I right? Yeah. What can you tell me a little bit about that well? As a best selling author, what I did was I wrote a compilation book. So I wrote a chapter in that book, and then it ended up becoming a best seller on Amazon. And then as a TEDx speaker, I actually started as a TEDx speaker coach. So I love being on stage. I love speaking to audiences, and I love making a change. And what happens inside of people, inside their minds, really, because that's where we live 99% of the time, you know? And if we can make a change in somebody's mind, then they can have a better outcome, and they can go through their day with confidence and this incredible feeling inside. And I believe that the TEDx stage will take you. I believe that the TEDx stage has some really great messages, and the people who've been able to share their messages on the TEDx stage, they're able to share something that makes a difference for other people. And I was, I was a TEDx speaker coach, and I was talking to one of the organizers, and I had told her about a speech I was preparing for a different stage. And she said, Oh, please come and share that on our TEDx stage. And I said, okay, and I stepped into it, and that's awesome. The TEDx talk, that's amazing. I can tell by your your your storytelling, and the way that you kind of articulate everything. I'm like, okay, yeah, being a best selling author TEDx like, makes sense. We're in for a good one. This was great. I really appreciate having you on the show. This was awesome. I'd love to give you the. Opportunity, where they where everyone can hear more about you, and, of course, more about shorties candle wonderful. You can find me on Facebook. I think that would be our number one place that I am. And I'm under Georgia, Vanderville, and shorties is under Shorties Candle Company, perfect. Thank you so much for being on the show. Of course, everyone that tuned in. Thank you as well. Please make sure you're the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to theecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you all next time. How we going?

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