Diamond Candles is not your average candle company — it’s a unique hybrid gift company that sells candles with the delightful hidden surprise of a ring inside every candle. The value of the ring varies from candle to candle, and that’s where the fun part comes in. Each candle has a ring valued at $10 along with a special “Ring Reveal” code — and some have rings valued at $100, $1,000 or $5,000. After the customer burns their candle and gets their code, they go to the website to discover the value of their code.
The company started from a creative idea for an anniversary gift, and now Diamond Candles are a popular gift for everything from birthday parties to baby showers. People love the thrill of getting their Ring Reveal code, and some people can’t stand the suspense, so they’ll go as far as using a hairdryer to melt down the candle and get to their code faster!
Since tiny details like codes make up the core of Diamond Candles’ business, they needed a solution to keep all the details organized. The founder of Diamond Candles discovered Airtable and started using it to manage the information that makes their business shine.
Here are the ways that Diamond Candles uses Airtable to power their company:
One Place for Everything
Diamond Candles first used Airtable as a project management tool for prioritizing and tracking different initiatives. They moved on to using customized bases for prioritizing company-wide projects, making comparison spreadsheets for freelancers and partners, and brainstorming lifestyle photography needs. Next, they decided to use Airtable as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for their wholesale account and slowly ramped up their usage. Now the company relies on Airtable for label-planning for their line of 40 to 50 fragrances and has created a database to organize their visual assets.
Airtable is a solution that can scale as our team grows while maintaining collaboration and transparency and not constantly micro-manage account permissions
Prior to Airtable, their organization system lacked, well, organization. They used to have information spread out across countless emails. Now, with Airtable, they have their information stored in one place in a system that’s used by everyone at the company — any member of the team can modify the info when needed. The company has also made use of the Airtable API and Integrations to automate routine tasks.
“Airtable is a solution that can scale as our team grows while maintaining collaboration and transparency and not constantly micro-manage account permissions,” says Lauren Ulmer, Product Manager at Diamond Candles.
Visual Organization
Diamond Candles has a rich library of visual assets that need to be shared and updated regularly across a large team.
Labels are a key component of the candle experience and careful crafting goes into producing and planning those labels. Diamond Candles needed a system that would let them easily share large image files and transfer them back and forth between the designer and the in-house team.
They previously used Google Sheets to include a link to the photo. They would have to copy links from Google image search and then format in a tool like Google sheets. In addition to causing headaches, the links would eventually expire making their efforts an exercise in futility. Airtable smoothed out their workflow, making it much more efficient. Now, they’re able to easily drag and drop the photo right into the database and share it with the designer. The designer can access it easily, and when they make updates, they simply update the file in the database.
Our designer loves it. Now, he can pull up the image on his computer and he can easily view any relevant notes on his computer or on his phone.
Streamlined Organization
When the company was in the early stages of development, their wholesale business and needed a CRM-type tool to manage the wholesaler application process. With the click of a button, they used Airtable’s Form view to create a form for applicants to fill-in. This gave the team a direct connection between the form and the applicant database.
Next, they created different tables and views for stages of the process and created a customized Integration to trigger email messaging to each applicant as they moved through each stage of the pipeline, which cut down time spent on admin work and back and forth emails.
“With Airtable, we can easily make changes to our workflow as our business continues to grow,” says Ulmer.
Airtable: Organize anything you can imagine.
Airtable works like a spreadsheet but gives you the power of a database to organize anything. Sign up for free. Are you looking for a flexible way to manage your projects and workflows? Check out our templates here!