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Welcome to The People of Work, the podcast where we explore the unique journeys that bring people to their careers. Every episode is a deep dive into the twists, turns, and surprises that shape how individuals find their career paths—whether they’re engineers, artists, baristas, CEOs, or anything and everything in between.
It’s not about the destination; it’s about the story. Through honest conversations, we’ll uncover the moments that define careers, the challenges overcome, and the lessons learned along the way. These are real stories from real people, celebrating the diversity of work and the individuality of the people behind it.
Join us as we break down stereotypes, embrace the unexpected, and shine a light on the human side of work.
[00:00:00] Brittany Whitenack: We’re making 2000 candles a day. It sounds like a lot, but in candle world, we’re like, we’re a small company. We are puny. We’re a team of about 40 people. We’re making the candles, we’re shipping the candles, we’re responding to customers. We don’t have AI doing that. We don’t have someone overseas doing that. We do almost all of it, just the 40 of us, and it takes a lot of work. It takes a little village to make that happen.
[00:00:24] Ami Graves: You are listening to People Of Work, the podcast that dives into the real stories behind what people do for a living and how work shapes who we are. Hey everybody. Welcome back to People Of Work with your host, Ami Graves, and my friend and Founder and CEO of Antique Candle Co., Brittany Whitenack. Brittany, thank you so much for being here. Can’t wait to dig in, learn all about you, hear your story.
[00:00:50] Brittany Whitenack: I’m so excited to be here, Ami, thank you so much for inviting me.
[00:00:53] Ami Graves: Yeah. First of all, I just want to say for the listeners that oftentimes I find guests through just previous interactions I’ve had with people or people that I know that are in my circle or sphere. For some reason, Brittany, I just want to share, has been kind enough. I reached out to her completely out of the blue and just said, Hey, I see you and your entrepreneurship journey, and I have all the questions that I want to learn from you. I reached out, asked for coffee. We met up. It was such a great conversation. I just loved everything about it. I mean, the way you shared just who you are personally, you’re a woman of faith. I think it’s awesome.
So I’m just so excited to have you here because now I feel like everything that I got to learn about you in that day when we met for coffee, you get to share with the world and all your followers and all my listeners and who knows where it’ll go. So thanks again, Brittany. Appreciate you being here.
[00:01:44] Brittany Whitenack: That’s awesome. Thank you, Ami. Yeah, such a fun conversation. I’ll get coffee anytime. Anybody wants to get coffee, I’ll go.
[00:01:50] Ami Graves: Yes. Yeah, right. That’s right. We know you are the Founder and CEO of Antique Candle Co. We’re going to get to all the kind of cool, fun things you’re doing with that. But I want to rewind a little bit and kind of take it back. So Brittany, talk to me a little bit about what the conversation was like in your home growing up around work. What examples did you have? Were you thinking about what you wanted to be when you grow up? What was that dynamic like?
[00:02:17] Brittany Whitenack: I grew up in a household with four younger brothers and then my mom and my dad. I would say the story we told ourselves as a family, the story I told myself as a little girl, was work is so important. Having a good work ethic is important.
My dad was a Radio Shack manager and he worked at Radio Shack until their end days, and he worked so hard for that company, and I just remember these moments where he would come home and he would talk about work, his boss, the things he was doing, with so much admiration and excitement. He never came home and said, work sucked today, or work is terrible, or I’m so upset about this. He just really had such a positive posture around work, and so did my mom, mostly a stay at home mom, but even my grandparents.
And then I’ll never forget, my first job was at Subway. I was a sandwich artist. I’ll never forget getting my first paycheck, and I remember just getting so, I don’t know if addicted is the right word, but this is awesome. I have my own money. As a 16-year-old now, I can go to Hollister and buy a shirt that I want to buy, and I don’t have to go to Kohl’s for back to school shopping.
[00:03:36] Ami Graves: My mom refuses to buy it. Too expensive.
[00:03:39] Brittany Whitenack: Right? Yes, yes. So yeah, definitely a positive posture towards work for sure, and I still have that today.
[00:03:46] Ami Graves: I love your dad’s take or your interpretation of your dad’s take on work because I have similar experiences. My dad, often just a very hard worker, owned his own business, kind of instilled in us that grit. It’s what we call it around our home today, and I talk to my kids about having a work ethic.
And my dad too, we still talk about that word. That word seems to be the word that we all kind of circle around. It’s just grit. You have a commitment level to your work that doesn’t feel burdensome. It’s just kind of part of who you are. Right. I love that.
[00:04:22] Brittany Whitenack: Absolutely. Great word. Grit.
[00:04:23] Ami Graves: Yes. It starts young. It starts young.
[00:04:25] Brittany Whitenack: It totally does.
[00:04:26] Ami Graves: Thanks dad, and thank you Radio Shack. We appreciate that. We can’t forget either the stay at home mom of five kids, please. I mean, just listen. I mean no harder job than raising kids, first of all, and then raising them as a stay at home mom of five children.
[00:04:44] Brittany Whitenack: Huge.
[00:04:44] Ami Graves: Huge undertaking.
[00:04:46] Brittany Whitenack: And I have to give her credit too because a lot of my dad’s work was commission-based being at Radio Shack. So when there was a not great year, or it wasn’t a great economy, my mom would watch the kids, the five kids growing up, and then Dad would get home and then she would go to work. Meijer used to have a pizza part of their grocery store. She would go there. She did that for years, would work at the schools. So yeah, sometimes, yes, she did it. It’s like grit. It’s doing what you got to do.
[00:05:11] Ami Graves: Right.
[00:05:11] Brittany Whitenack: Doing what you got to do.
[00:05:12] Ami Graves: That’s right. That’s right. So let’s talk about Subway. You’re the sandwich artist. This is your first job. You’re making your money. It’s great. Were you thinking about as a teenager what you wanted to be, what you wanted to do? Was college like something you were, “I’m definitely going,” or was it talked about in your home?
[00:05:31] Brittany Whitenack: I think when I was 16, I thought there’d be a good potential I’d go to college. No one in my family, at least from the generations before me, had made it to college and graduated. So if I did go to college, it was going to be kind of a new thing. It wasn’t a regular talking point in the household growing up, but at some point I decided to apply to a few colleges.
I applied to Purdue University, Indiana Wesleyan University and the Ivy Tech campus in Lafayette. I was accepted to all three and decided to go to Purdue. At the time when I was in high school, I was in the TV production class, so we had morning news by students and I thought that maybe I wanted to go into TV production or news. I found that so fun, and I think the degree I applied for at Purdue was as a communication major.
I was planning on being an employee for sure. There are no entrepreneurs in my family. There’s a few who had their own businesses, but it was more solopreneur. They owned some real estate and they were renting, not with employees, not a full-blown enterprise by any means. So yeah, I was thinking maybe TV news anchor, TV production, maybe a social studies teacher.
[00:06:43] Ami Graves: Very few of us really know when we’re 16. We’re just like, we’ve got this cafeteria plan of options that we think we want to explore, and then you learn about those careers and then you kind of take a gamble. Not everybody says, I want to be a pediatrician when I grow up, or whatever, and that’s what we go do.
Okay, so you decided Purdue. Purdue, you were accepted into Purdue, you picked a major, you start college. Talk to me about it.
[00:07:08] Brittany Whitenack: Purdue was so incredible, Ami. I love that campus. I love the energy. I still live in Lafayette to this day. When I was a student, I switched my major more than one time. So through that journey I realized I was really interested in this notion of business. I had worked at some small businesses, then I started taking some business classes, accounting, marketing, operations, business law, and for the most part I found them really interesting, just the basic, all the things of business. So that’s what I ended up graduating with, was a business degree.
I ended up meeting my husband at Purdue University too. We both graduated around the same time and I took a job as an assistant store manager for a SuperTarget in the Chicagoland area. So I ended up leaving Lafayette and we moved to Chicago.
[00:07:56] Ami Graves: So talk to me about that. I think that this is a really good perspective because, number one, I mean you want some really hands-on, first-job-out-of-college business experience, choose one of the biggest retailers in the nation. So talk to me about your experience there.
[00:08:12] Brittany Whitenack: Target is amazing. They give you 10% off as an employee plus an extra 5% off everything at Target with your Target RedCard. That was amazing, getting 15% off Target. I had worked Subway and then at Eli Lilly as a high school intern, and then had two jobs in college, worked at Plato’s Closet and then I worked at a library. So I had worked while going to school from 16 to 22.
And so this idea and this thought of, man, I could just focus on work and look at this big girl pay. But when I was there, the expectation was 50 hours a week. Retail, did that, talked to people all day, totally can do that. Get 50% off, work with a lot of people. It was great in so many ways.
But as a 22-year-old, fresh out of college, managing a team of over 70 people in a Target store, having very…
[00:09:09] Ami Graves: At 22, let’s just, one, two, 22 years old, responsible for managing 70 people.
[00:09:15] Brittany Whitenack: 70 people.
[00:09:17] Ami Graves: Yes.
[00:09:18] Brittany Whitenack: And the expectation was to open the store once a day and close the store once a day. So when you’re the opener, you’re getting there at like 5:30, and when you’re the closer, you’re not getting out till after midnight. So as a newlywed in a new city, 22 years old, managing a team of 70, it just was overwhelming.
The emotions I felt at the time were disillusionment, deep sadness and just failure or not good enough.
[00:09:48] Ami Graves: Was the deep sadness because you felt overworked or emotionally drained, or was it, I don’t think I’m meeting expectations, or a combination of both?
[00:09:57] Brittany Whitenack: Yeah, I think in all facets of my life, everything was new and it was overwhelming. So kind of being a wife for the first time, moving to a new city, meeting new coworkers, managing a team of 70, and I really struggled with finding my footing and then hitting the success factors, the KPIs in the workplace.
And when you feel like you’re just not able to pull it off, at least in my case, I started to look inward and, what’s wrong with me? I’m not good enough. Why can’t I figure this out? Or is this just what it’s like to be an adult and this is the job to get the salary? You have all this really interesting dialogue.
And I remember thinking to myself, I can’t do this if this is what the next 45 years looks like. And that just overwhelming deep sadness. I mean, I am so upset. I didn’t know what to do with it, Ami. I did that for about maybe a year. I was able to make it work, and I remember talking to my husband at the time, and luckily he had a good job too.
The only thing I could think to do at the time is, I just got to escape. I got to get out. And I just quit without any job lined up. I walked into my boss’s office, gave him my resignation letter. I worked out my two or three weeks and then I didn’t have a job.
[00:11:10] Ami Graves: A couple thoughts just come to me with that. Number one, were your parents like, what the hell are you doing? I can tell you there’s a couple of points in my life where I have quit my job to do other things, whatever the reason. And one of them, I didn’t have a follow-up job lined up, and my dad literally said to me, what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you quitting working at Disney World, or Disneyland?
I wasn’t actually at Disneyland, I was in the NCAA at the time, but in his mind, there was no better place on the planet. They’ve got benefits. They paid for all your insurance premiums. Those are the kinds of thoughts, right? Yes. And so he literally said those words to me, which made me think, oh shit, is he right? Have I lost my mind? Leave it here, but this is a done decision. I didn’t consult you, dad, before I made that grown up call.
So you’ve got those kinds of thoughts and then you’re also like, yes, I can’t imagine your boss is like, are you sure, Brittany?
[00:12:03] Brittany Whitenack: Yes. No, for sure. Yeah, I could tell I disappointed my boss at the time. That was upsetting. We had a really great relationship. I respected him so much and he’s still successful to this day. I can’t recall what my parents thought, since it’s been like 14, 15 years ago. I don’t remember having that conversation.
I will say, Ami, yes, I’m a woman of faith. I love Jesus, but at the time, I was in a faith ecosystem that was highly, highly conservative. What I mean by that is I remember some of my family kind of being like, oh sweet, now Brittany can kind of be the stay at home mom, and then Dan and her are going to have some kids and dah dah dah.
So I think maybe there was more support emotionally than more “don’t be a quitter” and dah dah. So things could be just a story I’m telling myself, but I don’t see myself as that person. I just love work and I love that feeling of having that creativity and that autonomy in that way.
So I was unemployed for about six months and there was no way I was in a mental space to enter another workplace. I remember that summer I laid out by the pool at our apartment complex. Again, very blessed that I did not have to go back into work or I had the luxury and the privilege to quit.
And after I laid in the pool for the summer, I started doing creative hobbies. I would bake bread, I would do all the domestics. I tried to get back into painting. I was in art club in high school. And then the other thing I did is I had always bought candles. So I remember buying a candle making kit. I’m like, oh, you can make candles. That’s kind of a fun hobby. Maybe I’ll try soap too. I don’t know.
So I ordered a candle making kit and I really enjoyed that. I loved the creativity of mixing the fragrances and picking the fragrances and mixing them with wax. And then I got really creative with it because I would go to these antique malls or vintage malls now, I would find old teacups, old Folgers tins, blue mason jars, and I would just turn those into candles instead of just a jar candle. I thought those were really neat.
And after doing that for a while, about six months went by, I talked to my husband, I said, Hey, I think I’m ready to go back to work again. So I was spiffing up my resume, looking at jobs, applying to jobs, and then I had this thought to myself, and at the time, this is 2014, the maker movement was really big. So websites like Etsy.com were becoming really popular.
[00:14:30] Brittany Whitenack: And I had this thought to myself, I wonder, this candle making bit is really cool. I wonder if I can sell candles online. Maybe I can work up to the salary I was making at Target. And I talked to my husband about it. I made a little business plan, not unlike I’d make in business, and thought to myself, yeah, I think I could get there in three to four years, and I think we can make that financially work.
He looked at it, we talked about it, and the startup costs were really low. And I thought to myself, what if this fails? Then I’m just stuck with a couple thousand dollars worth of candles. I mean, I’ll use those and then I could go back to work anyways. We’re not investing our life savings here. Can we make this work? And we decided, sure, what the heck? Why not?
[00:15:19] Ami Graves: So you were applying for jobs, but also considering just giving it a go with making some candles.
[00:15:27] Brittany Whitenack: I eventually just decided to do my own website at the time and build my own email list and start a social media account. I honestly probably would’ve had more success if I had done Etsy early, but I did not decide to do that for whatever reason. But that’s the start of, I guess, choosing to be an entrepreneur.
I say that because it wasn’t a very intentional thought. It was just more like, I like these candles, these are fun, and I think other people would like the smells too. And let’s see what happens.
[00:15:54] Ami Graves: In your mind, was it like, I am going to build this amazing Antique Candle Co., it’s going to be great, I’m going to have employees, I’m going to ship all over the world? Or was it, let’s make some candles and see how it goes, and it totally was kind of wing it?
[00:16:10] Brittany Whitenack: Yeah. Ami, it may not surprise you, but it was more of the wing it. I’ll say there were written plans. So in my mind I was like, hey, if this kind of works, I could maybe work up to the salary I was making at Target, and I would probably need a few part-time employees, candle makers, helping make the candles, because of the volume I have to be doing.
So I did kind of imagine a small space that we’d be renting out, some cool historic space. We’d make candles, we’d ship them, we’d have a great time, we’d design new fragrances, and eventually we got there and I’m like, okay, now what? I didn’t think past that.
[00:16:48] Ami Graves: Tell me, I’m just curious. Number one, did you start making candles and selling them prior to branding your company, or did you, first thing, say, let’s name this company?
[00:16:59] Brittany Whitenack: Yes. I had a brand before I started. The company used to be called Antique Candle Works, and I just designed my own logo pre-Canva, in Adobe, made this really ugly flame on the top of the antique. I mean, I have one original candle at work, and sometimes when new employees are coming on board and I’m giving them tours, whatever, I’m like, look, this is what the candle looks like. And they’re like, oh, wow, good job.
[00:17:28] Ami Graves: Right? That looks great. So you got the brand right, Antique Candle Co. Talk to me about how you transitioned from making candles at home to getting your first space where you really start to see some volume pick up that requires the overhead.
[00:17:43] Brittany Whitenack: I baked candles in my kitchen and then eventually outgrew that space, and I actually moved to my basement. Very non-glorious, but the basement was big. It wasn’t finished, but it worked. I think somewhere in 2015, it was just too much in the basement.
And I found this really cool old space, not great, but it was, I think it was 900 a month in rent. It was right in the town. And again, I don’t have any business partners, I don’t have any employees. And so my brother was living with me at the time, and my husband and I just talked to him like, Hey, you guys, what do you think? I think we’re ready to afford this. What do you think? And they’re like, don’t do it. This is a bad idea.
[00:18:27] Brittany Whitenack: I remember taking that risk. I’ll never forget signing that first lease. I’m like, well, I’m on the hook. If this business doesn’t make money, we’re going to have to afford 900 a month. And I don’t know how we’re going to do that, but I did it, and that really helped. It gave me more space for storage. I was able to buy more supplies to increase the margins on the candles.
I was afraid of hiring employees at the time. Ami, I know you come from the HR world, and they don’t teach you this stuff in business school. What I mean is, okay, if I agree to pay somebody an hourly wage, I know that taxes are taken out. I was an employee, but I don’t know how you calculate how much, and then I don’t know where you send it to. There are just all these things that nobody tells you about that you have to do. You’re breaking nothing up and getting in trouble with the government.
[00:19:04] Ami Graves: That nobody…
[00:19:05] Brittany Whitenack: …tells you about.
And so I was reluctant to hire an employee until I absolutely needed it, and my brother helped out beforehand until I got to that point.
My first employee was a candle maker. I ran some Facebook ads, got some really great applicants, interviewed her, hired her, and she worked about 20 hours a week.
[00:20:10] Ami Graves: Isn’t she still with you?
[00:20:10] Brittany Whitenack: She is, yeah. As of the time of this recording, she is. It’s been nine years we’ve worked together. But she worked 20 hours a week and she was a Purdue student, and that freed up 20 hours of my time, and I greatly underestimated how valuable that would be. And that gave me time to work on our marketing, growing our organic social media, focusing on our email list.
And every time we increased production, I would hire another part-time candle maker. It was the easiest part of the business to train somebody on how to do, teach them the recipes, the quality control components, and then produce the candles.
[00:20:34] Ami Graves: So I imagine that signing the lease was kind of the moment of, that’s kind of our “oh shit” moment. We’re doing this. We are signed on the dotted line. There’s no turning back. We have committed. And then that second gate, we’ve hired an employee, now we’re responsible for another person’s income and how they help sustain their livelihood. There’s so much responsibility in that.
[00:20:53] Brittany Whitenack: So much responsibility. I think when I got up to six or seven employees, I really started to feel the burden emotionally. I don’t know how else to put it. To where it’s like, okay, I need a safety net in the bank account at all times.
[00:21:10] Ami Graves: Yes.
[00:21:11] Brittany Whitenack: Yeah. Just to make sure.
[00:21:11] Ami Graves: Right. Just to make sure, just to feel better about myself and the business.
[00:21:19] Ami Graves: Yep. Tell me about a mistake that you feel like you’ve made or something that’s happened in your business that you’re willing to share, that there’s kind of a very big aha moment. I mean, every single entrepreneur and business person, we’re all human. We make mistakes.
[00:21:34] Brittany Whitenack: Totally.
[00:21:35] Ami Graves: But as an entrepreneur and a business owner, tell me one that’s been impactful that kind of shifted how you think about business and how you operate.
[00:21:49] Brittany Whitenack: This is maybe year six of owning Antique Candle Co. March 2020. We knew a shutdown was coming, and I immediately felt this overwhelming burden as the employer. We don’t know when we’re coming back. I don’t believe in the two weeks. And some of these people had bought houses, had bought cars. At that point in the business, I think I had about 25 to 30 employees, and I felt really responsible to make sure that we could show up.
I had calculated our value of our inventory both in raw materials and finished goods, and I looked at our cash reserves and I just had this overwhelming thought of, okay, here’s the shutdown, the shutdown’s in 48 hours. I need to convert as much of this into cash as fast as possible, and I don’t have a choice. And I did that, and the way I did that is I ran some type of flash sale for our customers. We had a huge social media following. We had a huge email list at that point, and I think we sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of candles, so many candles, Ami.
[00:22:26] Ami Graves: Wow. Wow. Just from that flash sale.
[00:22:28] Brittany Whitenack: Just from a flash sale. And I gave my team no heads up, no preparedness. I said, here’s what’s going to happen. Here’s how well we have to do it. We are going to fulfill these orders before the shutdown, before the government sends us home. And they’re like, okay.
And it worked. We were able to liquidate almost all of the candles, but I underestimated the amount of work substantially. And what I mean by that is people were working almost around the clock, and at one point I realized the workload was so high, I think maybe 10 or 12 hours in, and I said, hey, tell your spouses, call your friends and family, get them in here, dah dah dah dah.
We have people working in the middle of the night, packing candles, making candles, trying to meet this deadline all just so we could have this liquid cash reserve. And there’s this one employee, she still works at Antique Candle Co. to this day, and she’s one of the most jolly, positive, cheerful coworkers that I have. She loves the Lord. She is just an incredible person.
We were all so tired, and I just remember how short she got with me. I’ll never forget it. It was in the middle of the night and she just got so snippy with me, and in that moment, it hurt. It deeply hurt.
[00:23:45] Ami Graves: Of course.
[00:23:46] Brittany Whitenack: And it wasn’t like a snippy comment. I don’t remember exactly what she said. I can just remember her face. I can remember where we were standing and I can remember how I felt, and at that moment I had realized I had demanded too much from my team and I felt really icky and it felt wrong. It felt like logically this is the right thing to do, but on the human level, you’re asking too much. They’re so tired, they’re so scared. They’re working too fast. And in manufacturing, even if it’s light manufacturing, that just felt horrible.
We did it. We got them out. We got the cash in reserves. No one was furloughed, but 36 hours of that, it was horrible, Ami.
[00:24:28] Ami Graves: Yeah, it’s interesting. I recently gave this talk at an HR conference, and the talk is really about crisis management and there being kind of three pillars, if you will, or kind of three legs of the stool, is how I was framing it, which is having the right kind of technology or automation and process in place as one leg, right? The other leg being trust amongst your team, and the third leg being, you’ve got to have really strong leadership attributes, I’d say at all levels, but particularly at your people-leading levels.
And you can have all of those legs of the stool, you can kind of get through most hard things, whether it’s a personal crisis or an operational crisis in business. And you were foreseeing a crisis coming, and it sounds like you got the processes down, you had the team trust, you had the right leadership. I mean, just kind of framing it from my own perspective, based on your story, that even though people got snippy and you realized mistakes were made, you got through that because you had all three legs of the stool.
If you didn’t have the trust already built within that team, it very likely could have blown up in your face in a really horrible way. It’s not to say it wasn’t difficult. People were getting snippy, they were tired, maybe cutting corners in some ways, but you got through it, right, because you had those three legs of the stool. Right?
[00:25:49] Brittany Whitenack: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think that moment sticks with me, and so I notice I’m a little bit more emotionally attuned as a leader in what I say and how I say it, and just how much is appropriate to ask from a team, truly how much is appropriate to ask.
[00:26:05] Ami Graves: Yeah, we’re all learning. It’s important to share those types of mistakes because if we don’t share our mistakes as leaders, our employees will hide theirs too. So I think it’s great that you are just saying, man, I could have done that better. That’s how we learn, right? It’s great.
Absolutely. So I want to talk about the process of making a candle just because I’m so intrigued. You’ve got this entire company, you clearly have a very well managed and robust manufacturing process. So I’m not asking for “tell me each step into manufacturing,” but I’m curious about, in general, how did you even know where to even start with manufacturing?
[00:26:46] Brittany Whitenack: Long story short, I didn’t, and neither did anybody at Antique Candle Co. at the time, when we were trying to figure out, okay, we know how to make 500 candles a day, but okay, how do we make 2,000 candles a day? And you can’t make 2,000 candles in one single day the way you make them in a kitchen. It just doesn’t work.
We had to hire a manufacturing consultant to come and work with us for a year. What part do you invest in and what part do you not? Are there faster ways to do this? Are there not? That was kind of really key to that.
I actually have a candle here. This is the mason jar candle. This is actually Pineapple Coconut, but this is like a mason jar candle, and this is kind of our bread and butter. It’s like the perfect size. But making candles is quite simple. I mean, every candle has a wick, and hopefully your wick is centered, it burns evenly. There’s some type of wax base and fragrance in it. And then if it’s a container candle, a jar, and then a lid.
[00:27:47] Ami Graves: I’m curious about this. How do you select and name your fragrances? I also always think that would be a fascinating and really super fun process.
[00:27:57] Brittany Whitenack: The way we select fragrances is actually really fun. There are all kinds of ways you can do it. For us at Antique Candle Co., we like to start the conversation with our customers, our candle lovers, either on social media or our email list.
For example, spring, we like to think of fruity or clean scents. Hey, what do you guys think? We narrow down, maybe we’re thinking something really peachy or something really citrusy. And then we’ll work with our fragrance houses at sending us 15 to 20 different samples, and then we will test that with our recipe.
We use soy wax for our candles. It burns cleaner, it lasts longer. So there are some specific recipe parameters around that soy wax base, and we’ll go from there. There’s all kinds of testing, Ami. We call it hot throw testing and cold throw testing.
So if you think about it with a candle, when you’re shopping for candles, you smell it before it burns. It’s giving off a throw, and that’s called a cold throw, so how the candle smells cold. And then you light the candle in the room, let it burn for a few hours, and that’s called your hot throw. And sometimes the cold throw and the hot throw can be a little different, but you want to do testing. We do testing at our candle factory for both.
One of the perks of being an Antique Candle Co. employee is you can sign up to be on our panel if you want to help with the testing process in the factory. That’s something that I think about 15 of us do. Super fun.
Sometimes we’ll narrow it down to four fragrances, and then we will invite our customers to become candle testers, and that’s a paid experience where they actually will burn those four candles in their home to help narrow it down to the winning candle that eventually launches on our site, which is really neat.
[00:29:42] Ami Graves: That’s awesome. So you’re shipping out these candles to a handful of customers and saying, here, four scents, we’re choosing for spring 2026, tell us which one you love the most, and that’s the one we’re going to go with.
[00:29:53] Brittany Whitenack: Yes, and since we actually have, for a candle, we call it candle testing round, we have anywhere from about 3,000 to 4,000 people who will sign up to be a candle tester, and they pay for the shipping, and then they pay a discount for the candles, and then we’ll send it to them and we’ll go from there. It’s so fun, Ami. It’s the funnest job ever.
[00:30:14] Ami Graves: And then naming them. I feel like that’s a whole other level of, then you pick the scent and then you’ve got to give it this cute little fun, creative, catchy name that connects with your brand and your client, but also resonates with the smell, right, or the experience.
[00:30:28] Brittany Whitenack: Yes. It’s not uncommon for us to have 10 to 15 different name options for the same scent, and that’s why testing the candles is so important because you want to note-take, what are the notes I pick up on? Because you don’t want to name it wrong. You don’t want to be misleading. You want it to be as accurate to what it smells like in a hot throw and a cold throw, which is really hard to do.
[00:30:50] Ami Graves: What’s the most, the top selling scent you have for your candles?
[00:30:55] Brittany Whitenack: Our bestselling candle by far is called Mama’s Kitchen. It’s kind of one of my most ambiguously named candles, which I always thought was interesting. Mama’s Kitchen I’ve been making since I was making candles in my kitchen. It has been around for 12 years.
My goodness. Basically the same recipe. It smells like a baked apple pie with a little bit of pine, so think green apple, cinnamon, nutmeg, a little bit of butter and some pine mixed in, sugar.
[00:31:26] Ami Graves: I mean…
[00:31:26] Brittany Whitenack: It sounds like you could eat it.
[00:31:29] Ami Graves: Okay, that sounds amazing.
[00:31:30] Brittany Whitenack: So good. Yeah, it’s a bakey scent. It’s a year-round candle. It sells so well year-round, Ami. There’s only one or two fragrances that have lasted 12 years because you make new fragrances, you discontinue fragrances when they start not doing well. And Mama’s Kitchen is one of the very few that have lasted 12 years.
[00:31:48] Ami Graves: That’s amazing. That’s great. So you’re getting ready to head into the holidays. What’s your biggest concern, worry, thought? What’s on your mind right now as you head into the Christmas season? I imagine this is a big time of year for your company.
[00:32:00] Brittany Whitenack: Making enough candles and making the right candles and getting them out on time. When we order online, we all want to get our shipping notifications as fast as possible. And so while we’re making 2,000 candles a day, it sounds like a lot, but in candle world we’re like, we’re a small company. We are puny. We’re a team of about 40 people. We’re making the candles, we’re shipping the candles, we’re responding to customers. We don’t have AI doing that. We don’t have someone overseas doing that. We do almost all of it, just the 40 of us. And it takes a lot of work. It takes a little village to make that happen.
So my biggest concern always is like, let’s make the candles as fast as we can and let’s get them out to the customer and the shopper as fast as we can. And can we do it all? Typically we do. And it’s always a great year.
[00:32:45] Ami Graves: 2,000 candles a day sounds like a lot to me. I hear you. Small company, it’s not a lot. That sounds like a lot.
[00:32:52] Brittany Whitenack: Yes. Ami, you’re welcome anytime. Our candle factory is in Lafayette, Indiana, and some days we will do more than 2,000, we’ll kind of get up to 3,000, but we like to stick around two to 3,000. And it is a lot, but there are about six or seven of us working full-time.
[00:33:29] Ami Graves: Do you still go out and get your hands dirty, make sure?
[00:33:29] Brittany Whitenack: Very occasionally. I love it and I miss the candle making. I actually find myself working in shipping a lot more than I would expect, so I’m usually helping pack orders and getting them out the door, but yes. Oh my gosh, every day you leave smelling like a candle.
[00:34:03] Ami Graves: I love to hear you say that because I think this is the other reality that Instagram doesn’t show. When we go online and we’re like, oh, I’m going to be an entrepreneur and I’m going to start a business and it’s going to be glamorous. That’s exactly what people really need to hear and understand, is that there is a lot of work that goes into it, and even as the owner of the company, the founder and the owner and the person in charge, I am still out here packing candles to get out on time to our customers.
It’s the behind-the-scenes work that people don’t see on the reel, right?
[00:34:39] Brittany Whitenack: Totally. Yes, Ami, you’re so right. And so we started recording this at 11:00 AM. So here are two things I did this morning as a business owner that no one’s ever going to see. So I filed our business NED report, which has to be done once a year for the candle company. And then the other thing I did this morning is we have to collect sales tax in a lot of states in the US to be able to sell candles to them and ship them to them.
So we collect sales tax and then we actually pay those states the sales tax we collect, but we also file sales tax returns. So just like, I would much rather ship candles and make candles, but that’s not what this morning had for me.
[00:35:02] Ami Graves: Brittany, that is definitely not on the Instagram reel when people think about entrepreneurship, but it is the reality. And I just love that you’re sharing that because that is the daily grind. That’s the truth. It’s all those types of things that you’re working on behind the scenes to keep clients happy and keep customers receiving orders. Nobody gets any of that if these behind-the-scenes operational things don’t happen, right?
[00:35:06] Brittany Whitenack: Yep. Keeps us legal, keeps us compliant, keeps us making candles.
[00:35:15] Ami Graves: That’s right. So I’m curious, what’s next for Brittany? What’s next for Antique Candle Co.? What are you guys thinking about doing next?
[00:35:15] Brittany Whitenack: Antique Candle Co. is planning on making lots of yummy candles. I would love to see, eight years from now, Antique Candle Co. can say that we’ve blessed a million homes with our cozy candles and that we’re the greatest and most caring workplace in greater Lafayette. That would make my heart so happy.
And there’s a part of me that thinks I could start another business someday. I love candles. Candles will always be a part of my life. I love Antique Candle Co. I started it when I was 24. I’m 36, but I have so many other creative ideas and thoughts, so maybe one day I’ll be pursuing some of those.
[00:35:50] Ami Graves: I love that. I love that. And when that happens, we’ll have you back on the show and we’ll hear all about that part of your journey and adventure, right? That’s what it’s all about, is embracing the pivot and embracing the journey wherever it takes us. So I love that.
[00:36:03] Brittany Whitenack: Thank you, Ami.
[00:36:04] Ami Graves: Okay, couple of quick hits, just some fun questions. I’m just curious. I think it’s always interesting to hear different people’s perspectives, especially for those that are in entrepreneurship. So, morning person or night owl?
[00:36:17] Brittany Whitenack: Morning person.
[00:36:18] Ami Graves: My…
[00:36:18] Brittany Whitenack: Alarm is set for 7:00 AM, but I will get up by 4:45 or 5:00 AM.
[00:36:26] Ami Graves: Oh my gosh.
[00:36:26] Brittany Whitenack: I know. I feel like a psycho saying that out loud, but it’s so cold.
[00:36:34] Ami Graves: Coffee or tea? Are you a coffee drinker? I mean, I imagine if you’re waking up at 5:00 AM, you got to be a coffee drinker.
[00:36:49] Brittany Whitenack: I’m not. Again…
[00:36:49] Ami Graves: Oh my goodness.
[00:36:49] Brittany Whitenack: I am a person who naturally wakes up at 5:00 AM. I’m so weird. I love tea. I love Earl Grey tea or good green tea for sure. I try coffee every few years and we make some amazing coffee candles and latte candles, but I just can’t do it.
[00:37:10] Ami Graves: My guess is if you’re not a coffee drinker, you might’ve been on that panel and got outvoted on what to name it or what the scent was going to be like. Some of your employees or customers were like, no, Brittany, you don’t even drink coffee. Let us take this one.
[00:37:28] Brittany Whitenack: Okay, absolutely. You’re right.
[00:37:28] Ami Graves: Do you like to read, and if so, what book are you reading or what’s the most recent book you’ve read that you love, you’d recommend?
[00:37:51] Brittany Whitenack: I just got done reading Sister Wife by Christine Brown. So if there’s any Sister Wives fans out there, her book was incredible. It was an incredible faith book. Yes, because she grew up in the Mormon church and she found Jesus by the end of it. It’s an amazing book.
[00:37:56] Ami Graves: Okay, we’re going to wrap it up with one piece of advice that you would give to somebody who is considering entrepreneurship or making a pivot out of corporate, and maybe they’re in that situation that you were in, where you’re like 50 hours a week, crazy metrics and performance expectations, everything’s new, what the hell am I doing, what am I going to do next? What would you say?
[00:37:51] Brittany Whitenack: You’re going to be okay and you are loved. You’re going to be okay and you are loved.
[00:39:01] Ami Graves: I love that. Man, we could just spend the next 30 minutes picking that apart, but isn’t that so true? I think that that’s so important because oftentimes we get paralyzed by just the fear of, not even the fear of what we think is going to happen, it’s the fear of the unknown, and we create all these scenarios in our mind of all the things that we could fail on.
But I often ask myself this question, which is, it’s meaningful to me, I don’t know if it’s meaningful to anybody else, which I say to myself, why not me? We see tons of people that have success stories, and I use that term a little loosely depending on what success looks like to each individual person. It’s different for all of us. I’m not just talking like money or finances. I’m talking just in general.
But I often say to myself, why not me? I could do that. I could do this. I don’t subscribe to the idea that success, in whatever way that looks like for us, is only meant for others. It’s meant for me too, and it’s meant for you too, depending on what that looks like for you and how hard you want to work for it. Right.
[00:39:03] Brittany Whitenack: I love that, Ami.
[00:39:03] Ami Graves: I love that.
[00:39:05] Brittany Whitenack: Yeah. It blesses my heart.
[00:39:35] Ami Graves: Yeah. Well, we’re all just doing the best we can, one step in front of the other and one candle pouring at a time, Brittany. Honestly, I think that’s just the story of work, and this is why I created this podcast, is that we all have a story to tell. We all have a journey. It does include pivots, it includes those moments where we say, what the hell, is this my life, I think I want to do something different. And sometimes that something different is really scary, but it’s exactly what we need to land in our purpose. Right?
[00:39:36] Brittany Whitenack: Absolutely. God’s got us.
[00:39:43] Ami Graves: That’s right. That’s right. Any parting words, Brittany, anything else you’d like to share?
[00:39:45] Brittany Whitenack: Thank you for hanging out. Thanks everybody for listening. If you made it this far…
[00:39:45] Ami Graves: Bless you.
[00:39:45] Brittany Whitenack: Thank you.
[00:39:45] Ami Graves: Yeah. Thank you for hanging out, Brittany. It’s great to have you. Appreciate your time.
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