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Creative Candles

30% year-over-year ecommerce revenue growth for luxury retail brand

branding campaign
logo photography
cc storefront
THE ASK

Activate ecommerce revenue for a decades-old brand

Creative Candles has been creating small-batch, artisan-made candles since 1961, preserving the centuries-old art of candle making in a wide range of premium candles. Creative Candles owners initially approached LimeLight to help enhance their brand, attract a wider audience, and develop an ecommerce site and ongoing marketing strategy to drive growth and awareness. What started as a branding and ecommerce launch evolved into a long-term embedded consultative partnership. 

LimeLight was contracted to refresh the brand, build an ecommerce experience, and activate a channel strategy to acquire new customers and maximize the value of existing clients.

creative candles logo
THE PROBLEM

Modernizing the brand and maximizing ecommerce revenue

When current owner Keith Espelien purchased Creative Candles, the brand was experiencing declines in revenue and a mismatched market fit. The previous owners were focused on reaching wedding planners, coordinators, and florists exclusively. They invested heavily in trade shows that didn’t pay off and leaned on the wholesale market.  The brand strategy needed to be elevated to fit with trend-setting luxury buyers. The goal was initially to reach and sell to existing brand fans directly. Creative Candles needed to establish DTC personas to expand brand reach. Under new ownership, the direction was set to sell directly to brand fans and a DTC ecommerce model was needed.

THE SOLUTION

Establish the brand, locate the audience, build the ecomm store, launch marketing

Brand & website development

It all started with the brand — defining the essence of this premium, hand-crafted company and finding the best way to connect with customers who value the highest quality candles. 

That led to an updated logo, color palette, and visual language that would be carried through packaging, marketing, social media, and a new website. 

We designed and developed a new ecommerce site that introduced the updated branding while showcasing their beautiful, artisanal candles. Using Shopify, we created a user-friendly and highly effective content management system that allowed products and content to be updated easily.

SEO strategy

To ensure Creative Candles would see consistently high visits to their site, we created a dual SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) strategy. This worked in tandem with other efforts including social media, blogs, email, print, paid search, and influencer marketing.

Our SEO team implemented improvements such as:

  • Enhanced content on all product pages
  • Optimized alt tags and meta descriptions site-wide
  • New blog posts
  • Implemented schema markup
  • Canonicalized product pages

This culminated in us increasing monthly paid search ad spend, regularly analyzing ad results, and tweaking our approach to maximize the overall campaign effectiveness which led to results that exceeded every metric and all KPIs.

UX optimizations

As traffic increased and we began monitoring conversion rates, we saw an opportunity to increase the frequency of online purchases with just a few optimizations to their ecommerce UX. Via UX auditing, Hotjar reports, analytics, conversion data, and a competitive assessment, we identified several areas of opportunity. This included environmental product photography to aid the shopping experience, color selector buttons alongside each product, revised product descriptions, and more.

dtc branding
THE WORK

Introducing the new brand and online store to the marketplace

Paid Media

Creative Candles has brand advocates and recognition with existing customers. However, the goal was to locate new audiences and grow brand awareness through look alike audiences and persona targeting. LimeLight activated the paid media channel 1 year after the new ecommerce site launched. The channel, when paired with SEO strategy, consistently delivers $8+ ROAS value through niche targeting and strategic keyword bidding.

Email

Paid media did an excellent job of growing initial site visitors and one-time purchasers for Creative Candles. Our list was growing based on the number of sales achieved. Creative Candles activated a list growth strategy to capture audience members hitting the site for nurture purposes.

Organic social

Due to the brand being highly visual and brand fans spending higher than average time on social channels Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, Creative Candles runs a social media content calendar. The highest value engagements come from influencers (Jenna Lyons, Martha Stewart, Oprah) and micro influencers who align to the brand personas.

candle branding

THE RESULTS

40%

INCREASE

in year-over-year conversion volume since site launch

20%

NEW BUSINESS REVENUE

attributable to launch of D2C ecomm site

50%

INCREASE

in year-over-year email subscribers

What our clients say

KEITH ESPELIEN

“I like that we are seeing sales go up. Our social followers have increased, which is fantastic. Awareness building is absolutely critical, but it’s also translated to increased sales. We’ve had, on average, since we started with LimeLight, a solid 30% increase, and in some months, we’ve had double the sales. It’s fantastic to have a group that we work with that feels like we’re all part of one company… that other people are dedicated to our company just as much as we are.”

Keith Espelien

OWNER

CREATIVE CANDLES

Do you have a successful wholesale product and want to open up an ecommerce store? Let’s chat!

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