Hi, we’re Katie and Eric Roering; the founders of Fontana Candle Co. In 4 years we took our hobby of making candles in our basement, and selling them at craft shows and makers markets and we turned Fontana into a nationally recognized eCommerce brand. This year we are doing 7 figures of revenue and have 9 employees. So how did we do it?

Welcome to The Candle Couple Podcast, where we will share the nitty gritty of scaling our e-commerce brand quickly. We are spilling the tea, so hopefully we can help you scale your brand quickly too.

The biggest operational challenge with scaling is ensuring your processes are able to handle the growth. With increased volumes, your procurement, inventory of raw materials, demand planning, production scheduling, finished good inventory, and cash management processes need to become more robust. You need to be able to also scale your marketing efforts, and your customer service to both generate large volumes of traffic, and then also serve the volume. Yes, you could hire more and more employees to handle the volume that comes with growth, but we have learned that you also need to have the right technology in place.

Today we are sharing the technology we used in the last year to generate a million dollars in revenue, and were also sharing how much we spent on the different software and apps.

Welcome to Episode 8: Our Tech Stack that Made us a Million Dollars (and how much it cost us!)

Timestamps:

1:40 Technology fuels growth

2:15 Our eCommerce platform: Shopify

4:35 Shopify help as you grow

4:55 Shopify Capital for working capital

6:52 Route Package Protection

8:17 Bundle Builder App

8:45 Recharge Subscriptions

9:19 Wholesale: Faire

11:13 Task Management: Asana

12:35 Finance & Payroll: Quickbooks

13:57 Employee Time Management: UAttend

14:32 MRPeasy

15:34 Customer Service: Gorgias

18:35 Shipping: ShipStation

20:10 Graphic Design: Canva

20:20 Video Editing: Splice & Adobe Premiere Pro

20:59 Email Marketing & SMS: Klaviyo

23:50 Total Cost of our Tech Stack

25:30 Making Changes to our tech stack to help us double revenue

Resources:

Shopify: https://shopify.pxf.io/x9V6Wx

Faire Wholesale: https://www.faire.com/apply/fontanacandleco

MRPeasy: https://app.mrpeasy.com/ctrl/partner/link/170

Gorgias: https://www.gorgias.com/ (Tell them Fontana Candle Co. referred you!)

ShipStation: https://mbsy.co/6rH6Dq

Klaviyo: https://www.klaviyo.com/

Disclaimer:

Everything shared in our videos is from our own personal experience, and is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Always seek legal guidance from a business attorney and certified public accountant. Everyone is responsible for their own business structure and business practices, and we will not be held accountable.

Since we love the companies we talk about so much, we may have an affiliate relationship with them. If you make a purchase through the above links, we may earn a small affiliate commission. There is no additional cost to you.