We have wrapped up the 5th annual Candle Fundraiser. I’m proud to say that we raised $9,048 in donations! That is a $2,000 jump (29.1%) from last year’s results. Amazing!

Last year we made 252 candles and we sold out on Sunday. This year we sold 321 candles and only had 10 remaining after the sale. We didn’t necessarily set out to make 321 candles. It was a struggle to get the components that we needed to make all the candles. Vessels were all out of stock so I would order any vessels as soon as they came in stock but it was dribbles. Scent was also challenging. On Wednesday before the sale we had no Winter Wonderland candles and had made a bunch of True North to compensate. Then an order of 8 lbs of scent arrived a few days early and we got to making a bunch of candles!

Many people buy candles as gifts so we tend to see some larger orders. Our largest order this year was 16 candles. You can see folks tend to by in pairs — even numbers are more common than odd. We also saw a big difference this year versus last in the number of single candle sales. Last year at the Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique we had 32 sales of one candle, and this year there were only 9 sales with one candle.

A bar chart shows the distribution of transactions by count, with most transactions occurring at a candle count of 2.

This year we had eleven different scents, three more than last year. The new scent was Charcoal Rose. We also introduced two new “types” of candles — T4G Labs and Rekindled. Both of these candles were in a random scent distribution, requiring you to smell each one since they were different. The Labs candles are the result of our scent experimentation. Rekindled were all made using vessels that had been returned to us and then reused. Here is a look at rolling inventory as sales were happening.

A line graph titled Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser: Rolling Inventory displays the decreasing inventory of various candle scents over a series of transaction counts.

Here is the same data but using a different visualization.

A stacked area chart displays the rolling inventory of various candle types during the Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser, with labels indicating the number of candles and transaction counts.

This year was also the first year we offered XL 24oz candles for a $50 donation. I had no way of knowing demand for this so we only made 12 of them to start with and thankfully the preorders allowed me to oversell them and get more made the week after the sale — totally 22 sold. This added $1,100 to the fundraiser. (Note: XL candles are not in the graphs above.)

The last new thing this year were lids. We have been asked in the past if we have lids and I decided we should just have some available. These were $10 each, are very high quality, and can be used repeatedly on different candles. We sold 40 of these. These seemed to be mostly sold when people were giving them as gifts. This added $400 to the fundraiser.

Other observations from the sale:

  • Having T4G Labs and Rekindled both be random scents did not make any sense. Next year the T4G Labs will be our experiments and include a list of scent lookup so folks know what each one is, using a number. Rekindled will likely become a consistent and reused scent just for that candle. We are thinking something that smells “fresh and clean”.
  • The XL candles were hard for us to pour because they are double wicked. I have ideas how we can set the wicks next year to make that much easier.
  • I’m not sharing the payment preferences as I did in previous years because we really steered people to Venmo this year which made the reconciling of payments much easier.
  • Adding more products completely broke our sales checkout process and I did a refactor of that for Sunday that was so much better.
  • For years I’ve wanted to create a handout to include with the candles for folks that have questions. I finally made this for Sunday and also have it online — Burn Instructions.

We are already busy thinking of improvements and how we will run next year’s sale! We hope to see you there! Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified.

Also see 2025 Fundraiser Results.