Remember Hannah Clark, of hand-poured soy wax business The Scented Barn? Well, her products found their way into the February issue of Vogue magazine! Here she offers sage advice to anyone else thinking of starting their own business
Since our last feature back in July last year, I think I can say my business has expanded and developed lots! Vogue being our main achievement, but also our own hosted event we held at HQ in November as a mini-Christmas event which was a roaring success, and we cannot wait to host again this year! And, of course, the many new customers we have received along the way including reaching 8k followers on our social media.
We have been busy, busy, busy, but we are learning to cope with our forever growing depend, as well as our three current stockists of our products, and creating room to take on even more!
Our largest new product that we are hoping to release in the coming months, is certainly underway. We are currently in the process of creating our very own candle range which is very exciting for us and our customers. We have been updating our socials with little sneak peaks as we are doing the quality testing and we can tell the demand is going to be phenomenal! But we value our products for their high quality and luxury packaging so we want to make sure we create the very best before they launch so are not setting a deadline but working on them each day.
We are currently featured in the February edition of Vogue, under the campaign of ‘at Home with Vogue’. This is the most surreal thing to happen to The Scented Barn, and one I will cherish forever. To have even been seen by those working for Vogue is insane but to have been contacted to be featured is another. At The Scented Barn, we tried to create a business that not only has products that are loved for their quality but that would be classed as a fashionable item to have in your home. We have created items that have a simple yet stylish aesthetic. Well, I guess this confirms it – we did it, we are good enough to be in the world’s biggest fashion magazine. How am I even saying this?!
I think I was lucky in that Covid made me redundant from my job I thought I would be at for a long time, and therefore I was thrown in the deep end but also given the biggest opportunity. After my working life was literally turned upside down, I knew I needed to get up and get on. My Dad kindly took me on at the family business to support me while searching for a job, or to potentially train up to do that full time, but I decided to go on a completely different route I had ever done before and investigate creating my own business. I quickly went part time to allow myself to put as many hours into the business as I could to really give it my all! As my business grew, I was full time before I knew it, and to say that I created a full time small business within six months is beyond me and I could never have imagined to be where I am with it today!
I will never regret changing my working life from working for someone else, to working for myself. I just wish I started before I did, I wish I knew my capacity, my drive, and my determination for my passion and to have gone solo sooner!
The advice I would give is to start before you are ready. If you have the passion and the belief to start creating something you love, and are debating whether to break free, you should have already started! You will not regret it if you put your all into it! There is no right time to ever start, so don’t wait for it, every day is a learning curve, and you develop as you go. I could not have learnt what I know now about running a business before I started.
What I wish I would have known before I started is this: You will not have free time; you will be working much longer hours; you will be going to sleep with a notebook beside you to jot down those new ideas that arise at 12am at night; if you sit down for a cuppa for five minutes you will just be thinking of your next task to do. Your job will become your life as you are developing your business, but you have to put every hour of your day into it to make it work and to create the best you can do!
The gratification you will receive for having down this is far greater than any job working for someone else could give! I will never look back. So do it today – if I have done it, so can you!
For The Scented Barn, our focus is to really drive our products, and to become seen and recognised by many people, and to eventually become a household name! This year we hope to pick up a couple more stockists of our products, we already have a new business requesting to stock us in the pipeline currently. We would love to double our current demand for our products to then be able to start looking into our expansion for 2023: of a larger workshop and to hire staff and create a team. And our main goal is to open our own store to welcome our customers in to browse and shop and to smell our gorgeous products in person in a few years to come. And a huge thank you to all my customers, new and old, as I wouldn’t be writing this article if it wasn’t for them. The Scented Barn would not be where it is today, without them!
Visit The Scented Barn
Leave a Reply