How gifting and selling candles helped one agency impress clients
As holiday sales return, now’s a great time to start thinking about how ancillary products might help your margins. Debbie Ward finds out how scents made sense for one Yorkshire agency.
Like many good agencies, Travel Experience in Huddersfield was used to giving added-value touches, welcoming clients home with a card and some tea bags (Yorkshire, of course) or a gift if it had been a big booking or special occasion holiday.
However when one customer set up Aroma Holiday and started producing scented candles that evoked certain destinations, he suggested they tried them as a new treat. The presents went down well and the agency ended up selling them in the shop.
“If we have a client coming back from a destination Aroma Holiday features we tend to send them a candle instead of flowers or a bottle of wine and customers love them,” explains manager Ruth Littlewood.
The agency then started using the tinned version of the candles as a gift incentive for every booking that customers made in January. When this proved popular, it introduced a display stand to sell the candles in the shop with a few other candles and diffusers in the window and around the room. It restocks once or twice a year.
Coming up roses
The spicy notes of Agra and Istanbul, earthy Dubai and floral Paris prove the most popular with customers who tend to choose them based on the scent.
The candle tins cost the agency £4.91 and it sells them for £9.95. It sends the more expensive three-wick candles to clients as gifts after special occasion holidays. “They just tie in so nicely with what we do and the product packaging is lovely,” explains Littlewood.
It is the first time that the agency, which specialises in higher-end holidays, had considered ancillary products. While profits are small and limited space prevents it making an enticing display in the window, the initiative has appealed to clients. The candles even have their own repeat custom.
“The people that buy them now are the ones that have had them before for gifts or through the promotion in January,” says Littlewood.
Destination dreaming
Mark Jordan, owner of Aroma Holiday, explains the inspiration behind his candle concept
A frustrating Christmas gift shopping expedition in 2014 led to the creation of Aroma Holiday. Mark Jordan wanted to find a scented candle for his wife but none felt meaningful enough.
He had travelled a lot when he played football in the US and New Zealand in his youth and this gave him an idea. He took a candle-making course and began experimenting with fragrances related to the countries he and his wife had visited.
“Everybody loves holidays, I’m reminding them of enjoyable times and happy memories,” he says.
He now works with a perfumer and the Aroma Holidays range encompasses 18 destinations.
During a pop-up in John Lewis, the citrus-based Rome candle proved Aroma Holidays’ bestseller. Among other options, London has a “classy, grassy, springtime scent” to evoke its parks while the New York candle smells of coffee, chestnuts and cinnamon. “That candle should remind people of sitting in a coffee shop, eating a bagel and watching people go by,” says Jordon.
If you would like to sell Aroma Holiday candles, or give them as gifts, contact Mark Jordon on sales@aromaholiday.com.
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