RETAILERS’ PANEL

Becky Abbiss Owner With Love

Oakwood Leeds

We stock home fragrances from Stoneglow Candles, The Country Candle Company, Janie Wilson and Wild Olive. Stoneglow sells amazingly well and is a top class product in on-trend packaging. Janie Wilson has just introduced a lovely new glass candle range which is receiving great love and selling quickly. Janie is based in Leeds, which helps our ‘local supplier’ sales. The products come in gorgeous packaging which suits all colour schemes as it’s white glass with gold And I’m just about to receive an order of hand creams from The English Soap Company - I discovered them at the Harrogate Christmas & Gift. They’re really pretty and bright, with colourful packaging.

Stoneglow provides testers for candles and reed diffusers. We display products in sealed packaging, plus one tester on display for customers to smell and touch (this helps keep the unopened items in tip-top condition). And we display bath bombs and bath tea bags from Wild Olive on a large cake stand, which is very effective.

Sandra Powell Owner

The Candle Tree

Gloucester

Gloucestershire

Home fragrance is an essential part of our shop. It forms a huge part of what we sell. Our four key brands are St. Eval, Lily-Flame, Crumble & Core, and The English Soap Company. Candles are our top seller by far, but we also do aroma diffusers, reed diffusers and to a lesser extent wax melts.

Customers’ favourite scents depend on the seasons. In spring/summer, Grapefruit & Lime are popular and in autumn/winter, heartwarming aromatic spices like Orange & Cinnamon sell best.

When displaying home fragrance, I try to keep the same brand’s products in one section. That means that if a customer likes St. Eval for example, its candles, dinner candles, and reed diffusers are all together so it’s easy to choose and looks better. I have an electric aroma diffuser on my counter and change its essential oils daily, so the shop is fragranced constantly, and we hear comments about it as customers come through the door. They say, ‘ooh, this shop smells lovely’ - so we must be doing something right!

When customers go out shopping, it’s an experience. Compared with shopping online, it’s instant. They take the lid off the candle and say ‘hmm, that’s me, that’s what I want’ - because fragrance is so important in our daily lives. It can make you feel happy, lift your spirits, relax you, bring back memories… I think scent is powerful.

Kate Tompsett Owner & Director

Happy & Glorious

Canterbury Kent

I sell Heaven Scent’s room sprays, candles and diffusers; The Clovelly Soap Co.’s candles and diffusers; Bramley’s room sprays, diffusers and candles; and Kitchen Scents’ wax melts and candles.

Owner

Loveone gift shop

Ipswich

Suffolk

Home fragrance is a very important part of our gift offer, and is also a popular personal purchase for many. The added bonus is that it makes the shop smell lovely, which customers always comment on.

We sell Plum & Ashby, FieldDay, Maegen, WXY and Wildlight (which is a local producer). We discovered FieldDay last year while visiting Belfast. Its products are hand-poured and made in Ireland. We met the company at Top Drawer and now stock its products. Overall, candles still sell better than diffusers, and Plum & Ashby is one of our best selling brands. We have a specific home fragrance section in-store, but some candles are worked into seasonal displays or colour-themed displays. We use testers, and invariably there is a candle lit on the sales desk for maximum customer exposure.

At this time of year, Citrus or Ozonic scents are popular, closely followed by Geranium and Florals.

Bill Nettelfield & Sarah Charlton Joint Owners

Bill & Bert’s

Colchester

Essex

Ashleigh & Burwood, Freckleface and Lily-Flame are our core home fragrance ranges. We occasionally try other brands but I find this trio are the standout winners.

Freckleface wax melts and Lily-Flame candles in tins - along with anything from Ashleigh & Burwood - sell constantly every day.

Which scents are popular? Anything with Oud or Lemongrass, and Basil is great. Testers are a must for diffusers and candles. Freckleface has got the pick-and-mix with its wax melts down to a fine art because customers can pick up and smell.

Home fragrance is a relatively inexpensive way to create comfort at home, and this is so important at a time of uncertainty. The shop always smells great and people want to recreate it!

Candles tend to sell best in the winter months, and fragrance diffusers are a yearround best seller.

Claire Hembrough Owner

Strawberry Blue & Collectable

Bradford on Avon

Wiltshire

I stock UK brands: Evoqua, which is based in Herefordshire, and Wiltshirebased Kitchen Scents, which also makes my own-brand candles and diffusers for my second shop, Collectable (a lighting and lifestyle emporium in the basement of Strawberry Blue).

Which products sell best? Diffusers are very popular but candles win hands down. The top-performing scents are Gingerlily & Ylang Ylang from Evoqua and Rhubarb & Mint from Kitchen Scents.

We display the diffusers with testers, and remove lids from the candles. We did try displaying them under glass cloches but this proved confusing for customers as they thought the cloches were included with the candles!

Lindsey Scott-Walker Owner

Feather Robins

Duston

Northampton

I stock wax snap bars and candles from a local supplier in Northampton who offers a white-label range so I can brand them as Feather Robins. I’ve introduced a pick-and-mix botanic range of wax melts, and so far it’s been well received by customers. I’ve also placed an order with Bombay Duck for a range of Letterpop mini fragrance candle jars and reed diffusers.

The wax snap bars sell best and I’ve launched a loyalty card scheme for these and the wax melts. The most popular wax snap bar fragrances are Honey Clementine, Marshmallow Roast, and Velvet Rose. For the pick-and-mix wax melts, the most topperforming fragrance is Lavender and Neroli, followed by English Pear and Freesia. I have a ‘fragrance of the day’ with the name written on an ornate chalkboard, and I burn the corresponding wax melt. Fortunately, I have a small shop, so the scent fills the room!

Nicola Scarff Director

Noah Home & Gift Boutique

Two stores in Glasgow: Silverburn and Braehead

We have stocked a range of sentiment-led candles from Best Kept Secrets and Dekassa Fine Fragrance for a number of years, and we recently introduced a small selection of wax melts from Sassy Shop Wax which have gone down well - the bright colours are eye-catching on the shelf. Sentiment-led candles definitely work best for us and sit well within our product range. When it comes to scents, our customers tend to choose the sentiment first and foremost. But for everyday candles, Pink Pomegranate from Best Kept Secrets’ Seriously Scented range has been selling well. Depending on the range, we use testers when appropriate or we have one glass jar candle out of the box for display, but we swap this over every day/second day to keep the products in saleable condition.

We found that having a specific display candle didn’t work, because over a short space of time it looked grubby due to dust collecting on the wax, and we therefore had a lot of stock loss. So we put a dust cover in place which we cut to size ourselves from tissue paper. We don’t light the candles.

Laura Cooper Owner

Handmade Design, Ashbourne, Derbyshire

We sell a number of different home fragrance brands including Heaven Scent, Ethel & Co., Coinneal Candle Co. and Candle Wise. Wax melts are our best sellers and have been for several years now.

We find different scents perform well at different times of year. Something light and fresh tends to sell best for us at this time of year. And if our customers are unable to smell the product through the packaging, we put one out at the front of the display.

Susie Thomas & Jeanette Crawford Co-Owners

Rocket and Bird , Taunton, Somerset

Fragranced soy candles sell incredibly for us. They make a great gift or a treat for yourself. We only stock soy candles from Smiths Scents: a local Taunton-based candle maker. The range is incredibly popular and customers keep coming back for more. Which scents sell well? It really depends on the time of the year. At Christmas time, Christmas Spice is a best seller and in the summer, floral scents such as Sweet Pea and Gardenia are popular. Fragrances that sell well all year round include Lavender and Wild Mint and Lemongrass and Ginger.

The candles are displayed in a way that customers can easily smell the fragrance to help them make their choice. They are unboxed and not wrapped, so you can literally pick them up and smell them… nothing fancy. We always display the candles near the door so people are greeted by the scent when they come in.

Susi Mason Owner

Casa Fina, Salisbury, Wiltshire

Home fragrance is a popular gift and the candles and diffusers together mix to create our own signature scent. We’re often called the nicest smelling shop in town!

We stock Bramley, Illumens Candles, Cotswold Pure, St. Eval and the Irish brand Inis - which is our only supplier outside the UK because we want to sell British-made products where possible.

Our best sellers are candle tins, jars, and diffusers, and our customers’ favourite scents are Sea Salt, Rose Geranium and Sweet Orange. We include testers of each scent in our displays.

Samantha Gibbs

Owner Nest

Three stores in Leicestershire: Broughton Astley, Thurlaston, Stoneygate

We are huge Pintail candle fans. We have stocked them successfully for 20-plus years and customers return again and again for them. We also stock wax felts from a local maker called Fig Tree Home Fragrance, and diffusers from Widdop & Co and Candlelight - and I’m so excited by Ashleigh & Burwood’s Christmas offering that I’m planning to introduce it as our new 2023 home fragrance offering.

Wax melts are the biggest growing products in this category by far, followed by diffusers. Although here in Leicestershire we are very landlocked (!), coastal, fresh scents always go down very well, plus anything linen-based. And Gin and Prosecco scents continue to be really popular.

We always use samples in the shop and then the ranges sell themselves. I appreciate it can be costly, but I really feel it’s part-and-parcel for having home fragrance available to customers and, as I always say, bricks-andmortar shopping is all about enjoying the experience. When we are shopping we want a sensory overload, a therapy, and 10 minutes out of our usual day. So if the shop smells divine, there’s all the more reason for customers to stay and enjoy the experience for a couple more moments.

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