Academy spotlight: Creating a community & experimenting in business with Thalia from Wild Books

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Today’s talking point:

In this episode, I am joined by Thalia from Wild Books (formerly Botany & Books) to discuss how she swapped theatre for creating bookish candles, the ups and downs of taking her business full time and how she feels about re-branding.

In this episode, I’m introducing you to Thalia from Wild Books, which until very recently you may have known as Botany & Books. Thalia was working in theatre at the start of the pandemic and started her business on furlough. It’s been an honour to watch it bloom through her time in the Academy. She is a candlemaker who is dedicated to creating a beautiful, mindful escape for readers through book-inspired candles. In this interview, we’re chatting about her business journey.

What we talked about:

Every Busy to Boss interview starts by talking about why we do what we do. For Thalia, escapism is intrinsic to this. We discuss how helpful and important it is to understand that why and how it’s guided Thalia through ups and downs in her career and business.

“I've always kind of connected with the why of providing a place for people to escape to, and being able to go into a theatre and experience something that gets you out of the day to day. And I'm still very much driven by trying to help people find escapism in their day to day, but it's kind of shifted as well over the last few months”

Thalia shares how she started her business – pairing secondhand books with scents inspired by their locations.

“So the idea is that as you read your book, you like your candle and you're activating your senses. And when your senses are linked to the amygdala in your brain, which is responsible for emotion and memory. So it's like it's actually using your brain to engage with the reading experience in a different way”

taking it full time

We discuss how Thalia transitioned from work to full-time business. She says there was no point where she fully felt ready, but her day job became too grating on her mental health.

Thalia made the leap shortly after joining the Academy.

“The first Q&A call, I asked a question. And my question was “When can I leave my job? Like, how do I know?” Because I was I'd had such a bad day. You weren't shocked. You weren't like ‘oh my god, she wants to leave her job, what she thinking’, which is what I was thinking. But it was just very accepted. And it was very much like ‘you could do this, you could do this’. And it was just it made me feel very safe. And very empowered to make my own decision. Because I was all of a sudden I was surrounded by other people who had done it.”

Finances was one of Thalia’s biggest challenges when moving to full-time in her business, and she shares that consistently paying herself is a big focus for 2022.

She shares some of the lessons she’s learned in the past year of running her business, especially around developing and launching products.

Community and impact

We also discuss how Thalia embodies her brand values in her actions within her brand, including donations to charity. She also explains that the community that has grown around the book subscriptions has felt life-changing.

“I thought maybe like that I maybe I could make an impact on individuals, by helping people to give themselves space to read and rest and recharge. I had a big mental health breakdown in 2019. And I went on such a long journey of learning how to look after myself, essentially, and how to rest and how to do things for me do things that I love. And so there was a lot of that in kind of wanting to help people on an individual level. But no, I don't think I would have thought that this would be the direction the business would go in. And yet now it just feels so right.”

Thalia says having a community of other business owners has also been a huge support. Recently, she has started a book club within the Academy.

“So often you'll just be reading on your own and it will just be a very solitary activity. But there is something so magical about people getting together and talking about books it like, it makes the whole experience of reading balloon, it becomes so much deeper and richer.”

Make sure you follow Thalia on her journey with Wild Books on Instagram!