Things 4 Good
Updates on our family’s candle‑making fundraiser for charity. I share insights on costs and materials, celebrate the growing impact and donations raised over four years, and invite readers to help us choose new scents.
- 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.
I’m feeling pretty smart ordering candle supplies for next year’s Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser during Makesy’s 25% Black Friday special! 🤑
1,000th candle
We were talking over dinner about the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser and thinking we should make note when we sell the 1,000th candle. It turns out we already did — this year!
| Year | Candles |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 134 |
| 2022 | 180 |
| 2023 | 226 |
| 2024 | 264 |
| 2025 | 321 |
We’ve already sold 1,125 candles!
So who got the 1,000th candle? We had 804 sold before this year’s event.
The 196th candle of the 2025 sale, the 1,000th candle, was in the 40th transaction of the event!
POAP 7529255 at Things 4 Good – 2026 Scent Survey.
Having fun preparing for the Things 4 Good 2026 Scent Survey. I have 10 new scents ready for folks to check out and share their feedback over the holidays. A special POAP to all who participate. This is how we added Charcoal Rose last year.
Things 4 Good Five Year Impact
We’ve now done our Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser for five years. With the amazing support of this community we have raised $31,787 for non-profits! Thank you so much. This year was an incredible jump from last year selling 321 candles! ❤️
Last year we did the first day of the sale at Mount Olivet Holiday Boutique and that resulted in a lot of new people finding our candles — and a lot of transactions. This year we returned to our at home model but still saw a lot of people participating in the fundraiser with 73 unique transactions!
I also noticed this year that I felt like the distribution of funds between the non-profits seemed much tighter than usual. I went back and did the math and sure enough it was. The “range” between the four non-profits was only 2.4%, less than any previous year.
Here is another look at this data. In a completely even distribution each non-profit would get 25%. Here we look at the percent over-achievement of the highest performing organization and the percent under-achievement of the lowest. The first year had the highest range ever.
This event has become a treasured tradition for our family and I think it has for some of the folks that come as well. Sign up to our family mailing list and check “Candle Fundraiser” to be notified of future sales.
See Four Year Impact.
Things 4 Good 2025 Candle Fundraiser Insights
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.
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.
Here is the same data but using a different visualization.
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:
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.
Realized we had some big usability issues in our donation tracking sheets for day 1 of Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser (right side). I designed a complete redo of it for today’s sale (middle) that I tested this morning and is much better. I also created a candle guide to include with the candles! 🤩
We are ready to host our fifth annual Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser today! We are supporting Animal Welfare Institute, Border Angels, The Food Group, and Sandy Hook Promise this year.
Making more candles for the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser for next week! I got the labels a little faster so we can put those on before pouring making it a bit more efficient. ⏱️
