Reaching a market that lives after the purchase

CandleScience sells fragrance oils, wax and the rest of the supplies that go into scented products. It’s a niche market, and a fast-moving one: which scents are on vogue and which sit still shifts on a rhythm the sales data alone can’t explain. And the sales data anyway only captures the first half of the story. The part that shapes what a customer will want to buy next happens after the order arrives, in a home studio, while the crafting is going on.

A funnel report or an NPS score wasn’t going to reach that far. We built a SenseMaker™ study that lived publicly on the website itself, open to any customer who wanted to contribute a story. The instrument didn’t ask people to rate their purchase. It invited them to describe what actually happened once the ingredients arrived, and then to tag their own story so the meaning came from them and not from our interpretation of it.

Around 300 crafters contributed narratives over the course of the study. Some of what came back was genuinely new: patterns in how people improvised around a scent that didn’t quite fit, adaptations we hadn’t seen in the sales data, workarounds that pointed to real gaps in the range. Some of it was old news: hypotheses the team had held internally for a long time but had never had qualitative and quantitative material to back up. Both types of finding moved decisions. The second type is often the one that matters more, because “we already suspected this” is what unlocks the confidence to act.