Most founder playbooks assume you’re comfortable picking up the phone, working a trade show, or at least making eye contact at a networking event. Krysten Kauder is decidedly not. She deals with anxiety, avoids public speaking, and describes herself as the opposite of outgoing. But that hasn’t stopped her from building successful businesses—first a personalized bracelet brand and now Candier, a candle brand known for bold, funny messaging and hand-poured soy wax candles with names like “Girl, You Need to Calm the F Down” and “Matcha My Freak.” Over the past eight years, she’s built Candier into a nearly $14 million business stocked at Ulta Beauty, Whole Foods, and Target. Her secret weapon isn’t charisma; it’s a relentless, methodical cold-outreach approach she developed precisely because she’s an introvert. Here’s how she did it.
On learning to pitch by DMing magazine editors:
A lot of people don’t know what mastheads are, but they’re the first couple pages in a magazine that tells you all the editors. So I’d go to the store, get magazines, find the editor on Instagram, DM them, and be like, “I’d love to gift you a personalized bracelet. What would you like on it? What’s your shipping address?” And if something came of it, amazing, but if not, whatever.
I also watched the Today show and Good Morning America and figured out who the people were that talked about trending items. I’d find them on Instagram, DM them the same message: “Just keep us in mind for any features you think we’d be a good fit for.” And we got on, literally, like 10 times each for the Today show and Good Morning America. That kind of just blew us up.
On the math behind the hustle:
I would email—oh my gosh, I’m not exaggerating—like 50 people a night. And maybe one or two people would get back to me, and one would say no, and one would say, “Sure, send me a sample.” I learned that if people aren’t getting back to me in my category, I’m going to try someone in a different category and see if they’ll forward me on to somebody else who might say yes.
If I get a no, it’s not going to let me down. I’m almost more like, “Oh, I want to get this.”
On keeping pitches short enough to actually get read:
Short is definitely the best way to go. These editors get pitched a million times a day, and you just need to get to the point. I always keep mine literally three or four sentences, and the last sentence is always, “I’d love to send over the product if you’re interested.”
The other thing is pay attention to who’s writing what. Go on Popsugar or wherever and see which editors are covering your space, because they usually write for multiple websites. Find that person and pitch them directly.
On why cold outreach beats a PR firm:
We tried working with a PR firm. They did get us a few features, but it just wasn’t worth the money. Sometimes even without me reaching out, we’d get features before working with a PR company. Like, we got on Forbes as one of the best candles—that was our birthday candle—and we didn’t pay anyone for that.
When you’re first starting out, you don’t have the money for a PR firm. But even when you might have the resources, it still might not be the best approach. The personal route has just proved more advantageous for us this whole time.
On landing Whole Foods without a sales team:
Whole Foods I got myself. Same principle—I just tried to find the buyer in my department, which was home décor, and you can also try adjacent categories. So I emailed, pitched ourselves, and name dropped people who’d worked with us.
Whole Foods was different though. Very professional. They were like, “OK, you have to go through the portal. You have to make an actual PowerPoint of each product: one candle, everything about it, the pricing, what it’s made of, the case pack.” I was like, “Oh man, this is gonna take forever, and they’re probably just saying this to blow me off.” But I did it, followed up on my samples, and they just emailed me back: “You’re approved, and this is how many candles we want to order.” I didn’t need a sales rep or anything for that.
On saying no to Walmart to protect the brand:
Walmart wanted to work with us, but we weren’t going to go from our 100% soy wax to some cheap wax just to get the price down. They were going to order huge quantities, which our manufacturer wouldn’t have been able to handle. And to get to Walmart’s pricing, we were going to have to make our candles smaller and not have any molds.
At that point it’s like, Well, no one’s really going to recognize who we are there. You’re losing the soul.
On pivoting away from her first business:
I do miss that era. Alphabet bead bracelets are my baby; it was my first product. We had brands like Nike and Victoria’s Secret ordering custom-message products from us. But I got to a point where I realized this isn’t really scalable. I can’t just keep making custom bracelets all the time.
And then I saw a competitor that was growing very fast, and some retailers started saying, “Oh, we already carry that brand, so we don’t need another alphabet bead company." That was a bummer. But when candles came along, it was like, Duh. The through line was always messaging. You can only put so many letters on a bracelet. On a candle, you can have a longer message.
I still get bummed when I see that competitor out there and think, “That could be us.” But candles are my new baby, and luckily, I don’t see any other candles with our fun, sassy messaging and personality.
On building a business with anxiety:
Honestly, if I wasn’t on Lexapro today, I probably would’ve not shown up for this call, and I’m not lying. I got on it maybe five or so years ago, and it really, really helped.
I’m not the type of person to go to networking events. So I figured if I’m not going to do it in person, I need to do it via email. That was the whole logic. It’s safer with a screen between you.
There’s a reason why people say the whole “face your fears” thing. Because if you don’t, the fear’s just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. I’m terrified of flying too—my dad was in the Air Force, which is funny. I tried having a drink, I tried Xanax, nothing helped. The only thing that finally helped was just doing it more often. I should take my own advice, because I’ve only done a couple of podcasts. But facing your fears does help.
On why the scrappy approach still works at scale:
It’s worked for us the past eight years. We’ve gotten celebrities through DMing. We did a candle with Tiffani Amber Thiessen—I got on a FaceTime with her and about died. One of our first celebrities was Giuliana Rancic. She posted her bracelet that said “Duke,” her son’s name, and it just blew me away.
There might be pressure out there to be very professional and corporate-y, but no. We got our success basically from social media. And if you offer a sample, people aren’t going to say no. Then you follow up and say, “I saw you received our samples. Let me know your thoughts." That’s it. That’s the whole playbook.Hear more from Krysten on Shopify Masters, including how she and her husband, Sean, divide creative duties as a married founding team, the manufacturer relationship that gives them flexible payment terms, and the upcoming fragrance launch with a major influencer she cold-DMed.
