Come to Your effin senses
“I was the only one working during the pandemic because everybody else… my husband, my kids, were all in the service industry. Everybody was home driving me crazy. The kids wanted gifts for their friends for Christmas, but nobody was making any money. So my husband, who had made candles before, said, ‘I’ll make some candles and then we’ll have gifts.’
We made some candles, and our friends were like, ‘You guys should sell these.’ Before that, I had never even purchased a candle in my life! I posted some for sale on Facebook Marketplace, and 15 minutes later, we had our first wholesale client. It just blew up from there! Now we’re in every single state. We’ve shipped to Australia, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, and we have almost 30 retail partners throughout the U.S.
We started in our basement but outgrew that in three months. In the back of this storefront, is a big space. That’s our production site. We moved there first because we ran out of room in our house, and then this space became available and we use it as a storefront.
Ron is our candlemaker and he is incredible. He’s amazing for everything. Basically, every single candle has its own recipe, and we have over 70 scents. Every time we fall in love with a scent, Ron goes through and tests it for burn time and quality. There are so many things that go into that. If he says, ‘It doesn’t meet the test’, we won’t sell it. While the names are fun, but we also want them to be *great* candles. When we have people who say, ‘I used to buy my candles from so-and-so, but yours burn so much better’, that’s because of Ron and he should be so proud of that.
It’s been really fun. At the beginning, I had some cutesy candle ideas and names in mind. Then one of my other daughters, Kennedy, was like, ‘Why are you doing that? That’s not us at all.’
She was right, and she’s the one who came up with the idea for the name, ‘Come to Your Effin Senses’ and the vibe has grown from there. We’ll come up with names for the candles and customers will suggest some…some we can print and some we can’t!
Seeing the cheeky names, people try to put you in a bucket or put you in a box. But we believe that you can love people and say bad words, do good in your community and have a potty mouth. You can be all the things. And that’s what we are.
When we first started, we definitely had people who were like, ‘This is not for me.’ But then we have followers and people who have been with us from the very beginning, people who drive two to three hours to come to our store. We have so many people that come in here and say, ‘I’ve had the worst day at work. I just want to laugh.’ That makes me melt. It almost makes me want to cry. We just love the human connection. We’ve been invited to customers’ weddings and their baby showers. It’s what I call the side effect of having this business; never anticipated, but completely loved. That’s my favorite thing about the business: people.”
—Amy Proffitt and Madison Blando
Come to Your Effin Senses
124 S. Main St., Brooklyn, MI 49230
