About this idea
Candles can change the world, by saving one dog's life at a time!
Riley’s Candles is on a mission to save as many dogs, who need emergency surgeries, to save their lives as possible.
Riley is our founder, Chief Beagle Officer, best friend and currently a 14-year-old rescue beagle.
When Riley was 3, he was paralyzed for the first time, his parents were newly married and could not afford the roughly $10,000 in surgery and recovery it would take to save his life. However, the only other option was to put him down. In desperation, the charges were spread over every credit card his parents had available.
Riley Survived!
This, unfortunately would not be Riley’s last time being paralyzed, he has been paralyzed a total of 4 times and needed 3 emergency back surgeries to save his life.
He is now a healthy 13-year-old, that loves smelling candles, and is on a mission to use that love to save as many of his four-legged friends as he can!
Over his decade-long relationship with animal neurologists, veterinarians, and their amazing teams, Riley has met too many animals who have had to be put to rest because of money. Their parents desperately wanted to save them but could not afford the surgery.
Riley decided he had to do whatever he could to change this, so in 2017 he founded Riley’s Candles! This was a passion project until 2022, when an LLC was formed, a retail store was opened, and an e-commerce store was created.
Per Riley’s instructions a portion of all proceeds raised by the sale of his candles, but this is a for-profit business to bring jobs to the community Riley loves and develop a sustainable social impact model for other mission-driven businesses to follow.
Riley loves all his Candle family and friends and with all of your help, he believes:
Candles can change the world, by saving one dog's life at a time!
Impact
While Riley's Candles is on a mission to save dogs... The true impact is the human impact on keeping the family dynamic together through what is often a challenging point in human lives.
Since opening our retail store in Traverse City on Halloween of 2022, we have been able to save the lives of 17 dogs, inject $53,000 of payroll back into the Northwest Michigan Economy, and bring awareness to pet insurance programs to help alleviate the stress of being unable to pay for a traumatic injury of your beloved pet.
What I'll do with $5,000
We are at a moment of inflection within Riley's Candles, we had a pivot about 3 months ago where we were invited to provide candles to every attendee at an Insurance Conference in Plymouth, MI. We were asked to give a keynote speech about the importance of Social Impact Businesses in Michigan.
This was the largest single candle order in our 1 year of being in business and it opened the door to other speaking opportunities and large orders from businesses in MI, we are currently working to partner with Kapnick Insurance Group and their client Motor City Casino to provide 1,000 candles and deliver the Riley's Candles story to all of MotorCity Casino's employees for their Light up Life event in December.
These business-to-business deals are where we envision our growth for the next 12 months and beyond. We need to greatly strengthen our behind the scenes system to grow fuel this growth.
This $5,000 and the relationships from being involved with Start Garden will be used to pay for a Business grade CRM system HUB Spot, email marketing platform development in Klaviyo, and a redesign of our website focusing on B2B ordering vs our current direct-to-consumer model. We have the pricing in for these 3 key upgrades and it prices out to almost exactly $5,000 for a one year runway on these platforms.
Links
