Purity Belle Candles and the Importance of Creative Renewal

I do have a series of posts dedicated to running a small craft business and I plan to do an accounting post soon (thrilling, eh?) but other than that, my posts can be about pretty much anything really.

In this one, though, I wanted to talk a little bit about creativity and why it needs to evolve constantly to stay fresh.

I began my candle business because my day job is monumentally dull, frankly, and gives me no scope to express myself or explore creativity in any form.  Which is fine, it is what it is and it pays the bills and doesn't purport to be anything else. Having other interests and aims is essential for me, though - I feel a little bit of myself die inside after days of office work and unending bureaucracy.  It really is a case of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole and no amount of changing myself will ever make it work.

This isn't to say that my kind of job is valueless.  Lots of people get huge satisfaction out of their jobs and there are lots of jobs that offer challenges, but for me, I'm just restless and miserable if I don't have a project to put my energies into. And so Purity Belle Candles was born.

My business has really come a very long way from my first feeble attempts at candle making and I'm very proud of all that I have achieved but in the last year, it all started to become a bit of a struggle for me. A lot of this was being ill and not really having the energy to do things but also I was losing interest in what I was doing.  This year, the light has kind of dawned for me - I was really searching for something and couldn't quite put my finger on what it was.  I think what had happened was that the creativity had taken second place to the business aims. Now, initially, when I set up Purity Belle Candles, I wanted it to be a successful business and spent huge amounts of time doing online networking, reading articles, promoting on social media and generally doing what I thought was required to make the business work and to get it out there.  It worked to a large degree, my business is small but well established and I like to think I have a good reputation for quality products and excellent service.

However, in that whole process, I lost the joy of creating - the emphasis subtly changed to mass produced instead of individual and dealing with shops means dealing with deadlines and invoices and whilst it's wonderful to have regular orders, I think I was putting myself under a lot of pressure because I was buying into some kind of business model instead of realising that the creative aspect was what made me happy.

 I was also in a lot of online business groups without being aware initially that they weren't really the place for me and ironically the people I connected with most in these groups were fellow craft business owners :)

Reading a wonderful blog post recently by Amanda Grace really solidified for me a lot of those floating thoughts that were going on in my head. Here is the post - it is so beautifully written and for me, it answered a question I didn't even really know I was asking :) The Critic and the Light.

I suppose it kind of gave me permission to be who I am and to be unapologetic about needing to be creative in some way.

And so to the main point of the blog, I guess (although I seem to have headed off on a tangent a bit!)  - if you are creative and something drives you to create, in whatever way, it also leads to a need to renew and change constantly and explore.  It's that exploration and trying and having a million ideas in your head all scrambling to get out and find form that gives the satisfaction and thrill. Once it becomes stale and old, it ceases to have that satisfaction and then it's time to try something new!

And that whole process of renewal doesn't necessarily have to have the stamp of business success on it, if it makes you happy, that's point enough in itself :)

So I've gone, lately, from seriously considering giving up my candle business to now thinking that I will continue but make it increasingly my own, take the pressure off and do more of what I enjoy.

And so I have decided to remove some ranges from my shop (and I'll be having a sale of these soon). 

The vintage teacups for example are really far more trouble than they are worth and I make very little money on them, so they will be phased out. I want to focus more on upcycling and offering individual candles and I have started a shop section with candle accessories because I would like the shop to have lots to offer.

Here are some of the latest additions to my shop and now that I'm feeling a bit more invigorated, hopefully there will be lots more.

Purity Belle Candles Shop

Upcycled Fig & Vanilla Soy Candles