For some companies, environmentally friendly and sustainability are merely marketing buzzwords but, when it comes to Lucky Penny Candles, these taglines embody the spirit and vision the company has for a better world. The makers of unique, environmentally friendly products, Lucky Penny Candles’ Dom LeRoux sat down with us recently to discuss the importance of candles within the larger cultural space, the need for sustainable practices, and how melding the art and science of marketing and messaging has allowed Dom to build the firm from the ground up into the success it is today.
Crafted from the gift-giving perspective, Lucky Penny Candles are all unique experiences unto themselves, specifically designed with both the ideal occasion and person in mind. In fact, the company’s growth has moved beyond the consumer realm and into the corporate space. A recently introduced line of products designed to “extend kindness” to the world of business encapsulates this new initiative. Beyond kindness, however, Dom LeRoux reminds us of the powerful symbolism of the candle and the powerful marketing impact it can have for days and weeks after giving.
If placing your brand, messaging, and identity before your clients, employees, or potential customers is important to you, then Lucky Penny Candles offers the most bang for your advertising and gift-giving budget, placing a unique, beautifully crafted object of art with your logo and branding on it in a conspicuous place where it will be used for days to come. Discussing corporate marketing strategy and the broader impact of Lucky Penny Candles’ messaging, Dom tells us about the company’s relationship with LinkedIn guru Shay Rowbottom and how her insights helped accelerate the company’s growth.
Concluding our conversation, we move on to an in-depth chat about the company’s manufacturing process, the importance of sustainability, and how this filters down to every level of the corporate identity. Towards this end, we talk about design and product implementation. Finally, we discuss prospects for future growth and where things are heading in the near term as well as a look down the road into the dynamic future plans for Lucky Penny Candles.
Dom, Lucky Penny Candles sells unique, environmentally friendly products. What was your inspiration for starting the company?
The company came alive through the combination of my love for candles, passion for kindness, and my education and expertise with e-commerce & printing-on-demand.
Candles have always played an important part of my life. Growing up, we used candles in all Christian sacraments, birthdays, at upscale restaurants, and we lit candles to bring luck when we knew someone was waiting for an important news or was going through a tough time.
Kindness and gratitude have been important in my life and something I have been working on improving since I was a teenager. By the time I reached middle school, I already read a few books about practicing positive thinking. Someone said do good things and good things will happen to you and I agree with that statement. Life is like a boomerang. Whatever we put in we will get back in return and I believe when you do positive things it comes back your way somehow. And it feels good to be positive in people’s lives. I experience a sense of reward by making people feel special. In fact, one of our main slogans is “Make someone feel special today!”.
For many years now, I have been deeply passionate about digital marketing strategies, e-commerce technology, and project management. My career took a formal start with me working as a web developer and internet entrepreneur in 2000. Since then, I have been studying the field of e-commerce, and been working on a wide array of projects and gaining relevant digital marketing strategies for e-commerce in the field of printing-on-demand.
Lucky Penny Candles was conceived in 2016 combining my love of candles, kindness and the company was slowly developed using my education, expertise and experience in e-commerce to fully launch in 2021.
Can you explain your unique approach to candle making?
Lucky Penny Candles specializes in making candles for every occasion. So, people come to us to buy candles to offer to their loved ones on special occasions or just to show gratitude.
From labeling to packaging our candles, we keep the “gift giving” perspective. Everything we do, we keep our customer’s loved ones’ gift experience in mind.
To do so, we provide our customers with the ability to customize their candles including choosing the candle wick (1, 2 or 3), the fragrance, the lid, the label and allow them to add a custom message on the label.
Lucky Penny produces personalized candles and corporate candles. Can you tell us about the differences between the two products offered by the company?
Personalized candles are for individuals to offer to their loved ones. We offer personalized candles for every occasion including: Birthday, Housewarming, Thinking of You, Congratulations and Thank You.
Our corporate candles are great to offer as personalized promotional gifts or to show clients and employees your appreciation. Our environmentally friendly corporate candles can be customized with your logo and unique message requiring a low minimum quantity and you can expect a quick turnaround.
A new line of corporate gifts was released in 2022. Please tell us about the line of corporate gifts?
We decided to extend the use of candles for kindness in the corporate world. There was an opportunity for us to help corporations to show gratitude to their employees, clients and potential clients.
In February this year, Lucky Penny Candles proudly introduced a full range of candles and related products designed especially for employee recognition. It has never been more important to recognize the effort and sacrifice of the employees who have helped organizations large and small navigate unprecedented challenges. Scented candles are a personal, enduringly meaningful expression of gratitude to the people who make things happen.
Our personalized candles are perfect for corporate gifts and can be fully personalized. Companies can choose the fragrance, customize the labels with their logo, a special message and even add a QR code which points to a link on their website.
We want to make them available to any organization with great employees, so we’ve kept minimum order quantities as low as possible.
Featured Corporate Gift Candles Reviews
“Thank you to Lucky Penny Candles for a wonderful corporate gift to our 100 faculty and staff. They were able to create a custom label for a large candle, package and surprise our staff by sending them to their homes”
– Stephanie Deming. Director, Development Sterling Montessori Academy and Charter School
Why are corporate gifts a popular item sold by Lucky Penny?
Corporate gifts are important and have a major impact on trade shows and corporate events. Let’s face it, everyone loves candles and everyone loves receiving gifts at events. Companies have turned on personalized corporate candles to give as gifts attracting more people than ever at trade shows and events.
Companies like CCMG are using Lucky Penny Candles to attract potential customers. Cathy Gonçalves, CPA at CCMG approached us back in March seeking corporate gift candles to help attract potential clients at an event near Montreal, Canada.
Ms. Gonçalves wanted a way to attract event participants to the CCMG’s booth. She mentioned that being an accounting firm was not the most fun and upbeat topic to attract people. With the help of Lucky Penny Candles, the CCMG booth became the most popular of all boots at the event. Everyone stopped by when passing by as they could easily smell the candles’ amazing fragrance scent.
Another reason corporate gift candles are so in demand is that they burn for 30 or more hours so the gift lasts for a long time after the potential customers bring them to their home or offices. This means they will be facing your logo and personalized message for weeks to come.
Below is a picture of Cathy Gonçalves, CPA with CCMG taken at her event.
In March 2022, Lucky Penny Candles was part of an event with Shay Rowbottom. You credit her with helping the Lucky Penny brand. How has she helped the company grow?
I have been a big fan and follower of Shay Rowbottom. She is a well-known LinkedIn influencer and a digital marketing expert.
I learned that Shay was scheduled to appear in Orlando, and I immediately reached out to her event-marketing agency, Foureva Media. Our conversation quickly blossomed into a full-fledged sponsorship, and we got a direct impression of how Shay’s insights translated into business practice.
Jamar Jones, who owns Foureva Media, and Randy Wilinski, the project manager we worked with, are absolutely amazing. The entire team at Foureva was completely dedicated to making this event a success, and it felt great to sponsor a team that’s as hard-working and focused as we are here at Lucky Penny Candles.
The sponsorship included more than 100 candles customized with Shay’s logo and brand color scheme. The candles were a major hit, and compliments poured in from attendees, along with Shay, Jamar, and their team.
Corporate gifts reinforce people’s opinion of your company one way or another. If they are cheap and cliched, that’s what people will remember about you. If they’re well crafted and thoughtfully customized, though, they make recipients proud to be associated with your brand. That’s what we set out to do with our corporate line, and that’s why Shay’s event was the perfect time to launch it to the world.
The event highlighted our recently launched line of corporate gifts. To mark the occasion, we designed a custom candle for Shay and a special scent to match. Attendees received a free #shayshine candle as a memento of their experience, and as a way to remember what they learned at the event every time they turned down the lights and warmed up a room with the soft glow of a natural, eco-friendly Lucky Penny candle.
There is an emphasis on eco-friendly sustainable products at Lucky Penny. Why is the company so focused on providing products that meet these standards?
Lucky Penny uses an eco-friendly soy blend wax, clean fragrances, and wicks that are made of natural cotton free of lead and zinc. Each candle is crafted in the US.
We are committed to reducing our own environmental footprint, using resources responsibly, and reducing waste.
Our candles are eco-friendly! We use a soy blend candle wax. We use clean fragrances that are free from potentially hazardous chemicals and wicks that are made of 100% natural cotton wicks free of lead and zinc. Each candle is labeled by hand in the USA.
Our Commitment to Environmental Sustainability
# Soy blend wax candles.
# Each candle we make is made and labeled by hand in the USA.
# Our wicks are made of natural cotton free of lead and zinc.
# Clean fragrances free from potentially hazardous chemicals.
Where are Lucky Penny’s products manufactured?
Each candle is crafted in the US. We partnered with a candle wholesaler who is also committed to environmental sustainability. We also make candles In-house.
Our Lucky Penny Candles Office located in Venice-FL:
Where can potential customers purchase products from Lucky Penny Candles?
Online at LuckyPennyCandles.com
We also from time to time offer candle packages on sites such as eBay and Etsy.
We are currently working on a candle collection that will be exclusively offered on Amazon.
How do you design each candle and the scents?
We provide our customers with the ability to design their own candles. This include choosing the candle, the fragrance, the label, and the lid.
We design the labels by occasions using beautiful and positive messages. Our customers add their own unique messages at the bottom of the label and we print customer’s labels daily.
Since our candles are meant to be purchased as a gift, we tend to choose fragrances that are generally liked.
Is there a plan to make the company’s candles available in shops and stores across America?
The company is investigating having some of our candles for special occasions at local shops in the near future.
We are considering including our candles in hospital’s gift shops starting with the state of Florida. This would be a great opportunity for people who visit their loved ones to congratulate them on their newborn, wish them to feel better, or choose for the thinking of your candles.
Dom, how is a day in your life?
My day is splitted between being a parent, working as a consultant with some prestigious leading e-commerce players including the # 1 seller of Digestive Enzymes in the USA, Enzymedica.com, and enjoying sunny Florida with my beautiful significant other.
Outside of work, I am a proud father of 3 amazing children and travel enthusiast with a passion for positive thinking, gratitude, and self-improvement. I am a firm believer in the idea that positive thinking makes a difference. On my spare time, I right positive and encouraging posts and blogs on DomLeroux.com
What is something most people don’t know about you?
I am passionate about music. I had my first guitar when I was 5 years old. That same year I wrote my first song and named it “I will love you till the end” which I dedicated to my mom.
From a young age, my dream was to become a musician. I use to idolize the band Kiss and I frequently asked my mom to put makeup on my face so that I looked like Gene Simmons. After that, I used my guitar, pretending to be Gene on the stage while listening to my favorite Kiss album “Destroyer“. Today, I still play guitar and big fan of the band Kiss.
1980’s
2019
Choose two of your favorite quotes and write them here
I love quotes, two of my favorite quotes include
Work Hard Play Hard
- I know it sounds cliche but I truly believe in it and use this in my own life.
The World is yours
- We all have an amazing amount of opportunity and it’s up to us to grab it or let it pass by.
If you had the power to change just one thing in the world, what would it be?
Actually, in a way, I would not like to change anything because everything happens for a reason. If everything was perfect then people wouldn’t learn from their mistakes.
On the other hand, things I would like to end include poverty, pollution, and racism.
Anything else you’d like to add?
There are so many exciting things going on with Lucky Penny Candles. We are launching our “Photo Candles” where people can create their own label by uploading a photo from their phone or using Canva® Photos and a personalized message. This is scheduled to launch by the end of this month.
Lucky Penny Candles is excited and proud to be a sponsor for the upcoming Lead the Movement Business Conference! (ltmconference.com). This unique event connects inclusion, business, and community through the power of entertainment. and results in diversity, inclusion, and positive culture within individuals, brands, and business.
Furthermore, I recently launched a new Canadian company named Lucky Chandelles offering custom candles also centered on gratitude and kindness. I am looking forward to helping Canadian corporations with promoting their brands with our corporate candles and bringing our specialized candles to retailers across Canada.
Image credit: Christine Nicole Photography
