Tis the season where autumn is steadily getting chilly. The leaves are turning colors of beautiful reds, yellows, oranges, and browns making a colorful picture right before us, before the cold bitter bite comes to freeze us all with winter. Around this season, people love to buy candles to smell up their houses with delicious scents that smell up the holidays. Though this is a difficult time for lots of people due to covid-19, most are making the most out of it. Here’s what Starlet Franklin is doing during this dreadful pandemic. 

Starlet has created a small business called ‘Maybell’s Candle and Soap Company’ during the pandemic. It all started during the early months of Covid-19 when she thought of making scented cones of incense for fun. Then the thought of making incense, since she always liked buying them and lighting them up at home to make the house smell good, though she never made them. She would look at different videos of different ways to make them and what scents would be good to use. Until she stumbled across candles online and knew what she wanted to do as she began to watch the video. To get started some actions of hers were, “deciding what you want to make and then you have to decide how you want to sell it. My first step was trying to figure out my market and setting up a website. There technical and legal stuff you have to do like licensing and we still need to do the LLC and you have to have insurance or your business.” 

 She smiled as she said, “I always wanted to have a business and I think it’s something I do well.” But what most know is that making a business is hard to do, so where did she get her inspiration to create her product? It is “life, internet, and pinterest” that lead her to create new products for her company. Now that she had an inkling of what she was going to make, she now needed a name and to make her products then test them. She said she had “named it after my mother” who had recently passed away early 2021. Once she started to create candles she stopped making scented cones. She started out small by buying essential oils, candle wax, and 4oz jars. Then she would make the candles and wax melts and let them sit and harden. Once they were set she would test them at home. Or give them to family like her nieces, cousins, her aunt, brother, friends, and sister-in-law to test them and give their honest opinion about the products. Some compliments she gets on her products are, “That they’re good. That they like them. I’ve gotten positive reviews.” After having people test her products she would readvise making her product better while keeping them natural. Then was her soaps she would make. Her mother had used to make lye soap back in the olden days never telling how she made her soap. So years later now Starlet is following in her mother’s footsteps and making soap, but for everyone to buy and use. 

 Throughout the next year or so she would keep adding products, experimenting with different oils and scents in her product until she got what she had liked, and find a container she would like to use for her business. Her wax melts would also change from being little triangles to little beads you can put as much as you want in. 

Next she would have to think about her website, packaging and labels. She had used canva to make labels for her products. Measuring the labels and the container to find the perfect size. Finding the font and colors. Once she got the label she would keep, she would already have gone through lots of labels in different shades and shapes until she found the perfect one for each product. For packaging she would go in stores and see what size her products would ship with shipping, buying in the process bubble wrap and saving packing peanuts to use for her shipping. After figuring that out she would move on to her website and build that up. While doing that her soaps would build up filling rackets. The same would go for her candles. Her website would take almost a month to model and publish online her products eligible to buy from anywhere.

In summer of 2021 she would show up at pop-ups around Bowling Green, Ky getting her business out there in the world and black community. Later she would be at Flea Land starting off on Saturday then both Saturday and Sunday selling. Once she hits September 2021 she will be making, “soy candles, handmade soaps, wax melts, sugar scrubs, lotions, body oils, lip balms and we’ll probably be adding more stuff soon.” Her products are “very moisturizing” and all natural. 

She had listed some of her favorite scents she had made,“I like the/my bohemian cactus flower, white tea, umm apple cannabis… I think those are my top ones.” To come up with scent names she would, “ Sometimes I use the names of the actual fragrance oils and sometimes I kinda fudge it and try to come up with something similar.” Since starting the business she is happy making money doing what she loves.

To find her business you can find her online and on social media listed on top.

 “The snowflakes fall from the soft gray skies And cover the earth with a mantle fair; Each tiny flake is a star-shaped pearl From the mystical sea-like depths of air.” — E. Stone