I didn’t start Say It With Wax because the world was crying out for another candle brand.
I started it at 53 because I’d begun thinking seriously about what I wanted the next part of my working life to look like.
I already had an established career that I cared about, but I also knew I wanted to build something creative of my own. I wanted something that could grow gradually alongside the work I was already doing and, eventually, give me more choice about how I worked in the future.
Candles became the answer, but not because I simply wanted to make nice-smelling things in jars.
What really interested me was creating candles that felt personal. The sort of candle you see and immediately think, “That is so me,” or, when you’re buying for someone else, “That is exactly her.”
That idea eventually became Say It With Wax: funny, thoughtful candles that smell as good as they sound.
Why I started a business at 53
I’ve spent many years working as a massage therapist, specialising in pregnancy and postnatal massage, reflexology and scar therapy.
It’s work I genuinely love, but it is also physical work. As I moved through my early 50s, I started thinking more seriously about what I wanted the next ten or fifteen years of my working life to look like.
I wasn’t looking to walk away from everything I had already built, and I still work as a therapist now. What I wanted was another option growing alongside it.
For quite a while, starting something new sat in the “maybe one day” category. Then I reached a point where I started asking myself what would actually happen if I stopped thinking about it and tried.
There can be a strange feeling that by your 50s you should have everything settled. You have your career, you know what you’re doing, and that is apparently that.
I don’t think it has to work like that.
Starting a business in my 50s has actually felt quite freeing because I know myself much better than I did twenty years ago. I have a clearer idea of the kind of work I enjoy, what matters to me and what I have absolutely no interest in building simply because somebody online tells me I should.
I’m also much more comfortable admitting when I don’t know something.
That has been useful because starting a handmade business involves learning far more than how to make the thing you’re selling.
Why I chose candles
I’ve always loved what candles do to a room.
You light one in the evening, put the lamps on, make a cup of tea and somehow the day begins to feel finished. They become part of all those ordinary little routines that make home feel good: reading on the sofa, having a bath, watching something comforting on television or simply making a grey afternoon feel a bit cosier.
I also love candles as gifts, but that was where I started noticing something.
A candle is an easy present to buy, but sometimes “easy” can drift into “I wasn’t really sure what to get you”.
I wanted mine to feel more thoughtful than that.
I wanted you to be able to look at a candle and recognise the person you were buying for before you had even started worrying about which fragrance they might like.
I wanted funny candles that still felt like proper gifts
The more attention I paid to the candle market, the more I noticed that products often seemed to sit at one of two ends.
There were beautifully made, sophisticated candles with lovely fragrances and packaging, but sometimes they felt quite anonymous.
Then there were funny novelty candles where the label was the main attraction and the actual candle seemed a little less important.
I wanted Say It With Wax to sit somewhere between those two things.
If you’re giving one of my candles to a friend, I want the wording to make her smile because it feels completely accurate, but I also want you to feel proud giving it to her. It should look like a proper gift and smell gorgeous when she lights it.
That thinking eventually became the simplest way I could explain the brand:
Funny, thoughtful candles that smell as good as they sound.
The name might be the thing that catches your attention, but it can’t be the whole product. Once the joke has landed, there still has to be a candle you genuinely want in your home.
I wanted people to choose candles by personality, not just fragrance
This became the idea that shaped Say It With Wax more than anything else.
Traditionally, candles are sold by scent. You browse vanilla, rose, amber, lavender or sandalwood and decide which one sounds nicest.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and fragrance matters enormously, but I don’t think it’s always how you shop when you’re buying a gift.
If you’re trying to find something for your friend, sister, mum or colleague, you’re probably thinking about who she is rather than whether she has a documented preference for cedarwood.
You see something and think, “That is her.”
That moment of recognition is what I wanted to build the range around.
So Social Battery: 1% is for the introvert who loves her friends but would also quite like everyone to leave her alone for a while.
Book Boyfriend is for the reader who becomes far too emotionally invested in fictional men and has made peace with that being part of her personality.
And Mum’s Got the Heating On came from that very specific British experience of someone taking control of the thermostat as though household civilisation depends on it.
For me, the personality or feeling always comes first. The fragrance then has to support that mood and make the candle feel complete.
I don’t expect you to know whether your friend prefers patchouli to sandalwood when you’re buying her birthday present. I’d much rather help you find the candle that immediately reminds you of her and then make it easy to understand what kind of scent sits behind it.
That’s the idea behind Find the candle that feels like them. You can start with the person, mood or moment rather than trying to make sense of a list of fragrance notes.
The funny label was never supposed to be the whole product
When I first started making candles, I don’t think I fully appreciated how much testing could sit behind something that looks so simple.
You melt the wax, add fragrance, put in a wick and pour it into the jar. On paper, it sounds fairly straightforward.
The wick testing quickly taught me otherwise.
Different fragrances can behave differently in the same wax and vessel, so I couldn’t simply find one wick that worked and use it across everything.
I tested different wick types and sizes, let the candles cure and then burned them repeatedly to see how they behaved. Some combinations burned too hot, while others didn’t create the melt pool I wanted, so I would change one element, make another candle, wait for it to cure and start the process again.
It also isn’t enough to light a test candle for ten minutes and decide everything looks fine. I needed to see how it performed over repeated burns and at different stages of the jar because a candle could behave one way near the top and quite differently later on.
That process took weeks of testing, waiting, burning and comparing before I felt confident with the wick choice for each candle.
It was probably one of the first moments where I realised quite how much work would happen behind the scenes that a customer would never see.
You might only see the finished candle and the funny name, but I know how many test burns, wick changes and slightly obsessive flame-watching sessions happened before it reached that point.
That matters to me because if I’m putting my name behind something, I want the part you can’t see to have had just as much care as the part you can.
The personality might be what first catches your attention, but the quality is what should make you want to come back.
Building Say It With Wax while still working
Say It With Wax has been built alongside my therapy business and normal life, rather than during some beautifully uninterrupted period where I had endless hours available to work on it.
Candle making itself is only one part of running the business, too.
I’ve had to learn about Shopify, SEO, product photography, email marketing, packaging, social media, Google Search Console and, more recently, YouTube.
Before starting this business, some of those things were completely unfamiliar to me.
That has probably been one of the most surprising parts of building something new in my 50s. It has reminded me how capable we still are of learning things we’ve never needed to know before.
I don’t necessarily learn everything quickly, and there have been plenty of things I’ve had to revisit more than once, but I no longer see being unfamiliar with something as a reason not to try it.
When I started Say It With Wax, I couldn’t have told you much about search intent, wick families, conversion rates or website structure. Now they are all perfectly normal parts of my working week.
The business is still developing, and I’m still learning what works, changing what doesn’t and getting clearer about where I want it to go.
I actually quite like the fact that I’m still figuring parts of it out. It feels far more real than pretending I had a perfect five-year plan from the beginning.
What starting a business in my 50s has taught me
I’m still building Say It With Wax, so I’m not writing this from the other side of some enormous success story.
What I can share is what I’ve learned so far, especially because these are the things I would have found reassuring when I was first considering starting something new.
You don’t need to have everything figured out before you begin
Say It With Wax today isn’t exactly the business I imagined at the beginning.
The branding has evolved, the range has become more focused, I understand my customer much better and I’m far clearer about what makes the brand different.
I could have waited until every one of those decisions was perfectly made before starting, but I suspect I would still be waiting.
A lot of the clarity came from doing the work. Making products, seeing what felt right, noticing what didn’t and gradually understanding what I wanted the business to become taught me far more than sitting with a notebook trying to plan everything in advance ever could.
You aren’t starting from zero
This is something I think can get overlooked when you change direction later in life.
At 52, I was new to candle making, but I wasn’t new to working with customers or running a business.
Years of being self-employed had already taught me about customer service, communication, reliability, problem solving and the importance of making people feel looked after.
You take all of that with you.
If you’re thinking about starting something new yourself, you might be entering a completely different industry, but that doesn’t mean everything you’ve done before suddenly stops counting.
Your starting point is simply different.
Starting later can have advantages
One thing I’ve noticed is that I feel less pressure now to chase every new idea simply because somebody else seems to be doing well with it.
I want to build something sustainable, recognisable and genuinely enjoyable to run.
That means being willing to try new things, but it also means being comfortable saying no when something doesn’t fit.
I don’t need hundreds of products or to be on every social media platform. I don’t need Say It With Wax to look exactly like another successful candle company either.
At this stage in my life, I’m far more interested in building a business that feels right for me and the people I want to serve than building something that looks impressive from the outside.
If you’re thinking about starting something in your 50s
I wouldn’t presume to tell you that you should leave your job, start a business or completely change direction just because I decided to build something new.
Your circumstances will be different from mine.
But if you’ve been quietly wondering whether you have left it too late, I can at least tell you that being in my 50s hasn’t felt like the barrier I might once have imagined it would be.
I’m still learning, still getting excited about new ideas and still doing things I’ve never done before. If anything, starting Say It With Wax has reminded me that reaching a certain age doesn’t mean you have to stop asking yourself what else you might enjoy doing with your life.
You don’t necessarily need a dramatic reinvention either.
Sometimes it starts much more quietly. You have an idea, learn the next thing you need to know, make a few mistakes, adjust what isn’t working and keep going.
That is more or less how Say It With Wax has been built.
What I want Say It With Wax to become
I want Say It With Wax to become somewhere you remember when you need a gift that feels right for someone.
Not because you simply need to buy a candle, but because you want to find something that makes the person receiving it feel understood.
If you’re shopping for your introverted friend, I want you to see Social Battery: 1% and immediately know why it suits her.
If the person you’re buying for would rather spend her evening emotionally invested in fictional people, you might find her in the Book Lover Collection, where the candles are built around all those familiar reading habits and feelings.
And if you need a birthday gift, friendship gift, little pick-me-up or something that simply made you think of someone, our Everyday Edit is designed around those everyday personalities and moments.
The reaction I’m always hoping for when someone opens one is, “This is so me.”
That’s really the whole point of Say It With Wax.
The best gifts aren’t always the biggest or the most expensive. They’re often the ones that make you realise somebody has been paying attention.
Find the candle that feels like them
If you’ve landed here because you’re trying to find a candle for someone, I’d forget the fragrance notes for a moment and start with the person.
Think about the little things that make her who she is.
Maybe she’s happiest when she has a book, a blanket and absolutely no plans. Perhaps she needs a recovery period after socialising, or there’s a candle name that makes you laugh because you can already imagine her face when she opens it.
That’s exactly why I created Find Their Candle.
It takes some of the pressure out of trying to guess which fragrance someone might like and starts with something much easier: the person you already know.
That’s what I wanted Say It With Wax to do from the beginning. Not simply give you another candle to choose from, but help you find the one that feels like it could only have been meant for her.