FARGO — Debbi Osowski had no interest in starting a business.

A school counselor, she’d spent the previous 17 years working set hours and following a set path as she helped young people navigate the daily challenges and unexpected bumps of life.

Sure, she was surrounded by entrepreneurial types like her husband, her sister and her dad, but she never really considered herself to also be one.

And sure, the keepsake candles she had made as favors for her daughter Abby’s wedding had been such a hit that she had continued making candles and giving them to friends and family for months afterward.

But Osowski didn’t clearly see her potential as a successful business owner until the day she brought some of her candles to work at Davies High School. As her coworkers buzzed around her candles with Osowski’s personally designed labels, Anita Mahnke, another Davies counselor and one of her best friends, sat down in Osowski’s office and said something she never forgot.

“‘I’m going to lose you,’” Mahnke told Osowski, who smiles as she repeats the anecdote. “It’s funny because I think other people saw it before I did.”

By December of 2019, Osowski had resigned from her counseling job to turn her attention full-time toward her new business, DoGood Adventures .

Today, DoGood has expanded to the point where operations have moved from Osowski's home to a 2,000-square-foot warehouse/office in Fargo last fall. She has three part-time employees helping her with candle-making prep, labeling, order-fulfillment and tracking of inventory.

Thanks to a sophisticated website, vendor shows, local stores and special orders, DoGood also ships orders across the country and occasionally to overseas locations in England, Ireland and Norway.

She sells around 12,000 hand-dipped candles a year — each order carefully nestled in a white box, wrapped with a ribbon and shipped off with a handwritten message from Osowski inside. “I want the whole experience of opening a package to be happy,” Osowski says, while giving a tour of her very bright, very clean new facility at 5256 50th Ave. S. “One of my taglines is, ‘Elevate the everyday.’ And I think that can be done through simple ways … There’s something about getting a white box wrapped in ribbon.”

In keeping with its name, DoGood has a distinct philanthropic bent. Osowski donates 10 to 20-percent of sales to local programs like BioGirls or the Red River Children’s Advocacy Center , which coordinates care and services for victims of child abuse and for which Osowski once worked as a forensic interviewer.

She also offers a fundraising option to nonprofits, in which customers who use the nonprofit’s predetermined code when they order help assure a percentage of that sale goes toward the intended organization. “Really, it’s an easy way for an organization to raise money,” she says. “They really just need to share the code and really we do all the work.

And Osowski hopes her candles themselves will spark positive attributes like joy, gratitude and kindness in the people who light them. She even has a “Do Good” line, featuring four different candles bearing four distinct scents and inspirational labels like, “Be kind,” “Choose joy,” “Give grace,” and “Show love.”

“People say, what do you envision your business to be, and I want it to be more than a candle company,” she says. “I want it to be something that has a message that makes people want to be good and kind. I think it has not been an easy world to live in lately, so I need to make a conscious effort on my part, too, to let it be about more than candles. And I do think that comes from my counseling background.”

It started with a wedding.

One way in which Osowski decided to contribute to the upcoming nuptials of her daughter Abby and future son-in-law, Levi Rickert, was to make candles for them as wedding favors. She ordered a kit and Googled extensively to figure out the basics, then devoted her spare time to pouring 30 three-ounce commemorative candles in a variety of scents.

Every guest who came to the Rickerts’ reception found a candle at their place setting. They were a hit — with people passing them around to smell them and trading them like olfactory trading cards.

“People were smelling and sharing and swapping,” Osowski says. “It was fun, because people kept coming up to me throughout the night, asking where I got them and asking who made them, and it was so fun to be able to say I did.”

Osowski spent the next few months melting wax on a double boiler on her stove, pouring candles and learning more about candlemaking and fragrances. When she was invited to enter the Unglued Holiday Showcase in December of 2018, she knew this might be more than a hobby.

“It was at that point that I thought, ‘I probably should come up with a real name and a logo and be an official, legitimate business,” she says, laughing.

It also was time to upgrade her equipment. She may be one of the few wives out there who received a 50-gallon wax melter from her husband for their 25th wedding anniversary — and was thrilled. “It’s been a lifesaver,” she says.

Although Osowski calls herself “a creative wannabe,” it’s worth noting that she created DoGood’s elegantly simple labeling and packaging, which has remained on-trend and instantly recognizable.

She switched from counselor with a side gig to a full-time business owner in January 2020 — before most people had ever heard of COVID.

Within a couple of months, everyone had heard of it. “The whole world was shutting down and I was like, ‘Ohmigosh, what have I done? I quit my job,’” Osowski recalls. “It ended up actually being a really great time to start a business, because people started going online and started supporting local so much … The Fargo community has just been so incredibly supportive.”

But there were so many other lessons to learn, especially for someone who had never run a business before.

There was a worldwide glass shortage, which was a real problem for someone who relied on glass candle holders. “A lot of the things I had to do were not by choice but because of a shortage of supplies,” she says.

These pivots could prove costly, although they sometimes created a better product. For instance, when Osowski couldn’t source black glass for her “Modern” collection, she opted for a black ceramic container that looked more substantial and contemporary. Today, that line continues to sell well — and its Black Sea fragrance is a top seller.

Other lessons were even harder. Like the fact that even if you do good, it doesn’t mean the other person will do the same. “You can’t trust everybody,” she says. “You have to ask for a deposit. These are things I don’t like to do. I don’t want to operate a business that way, but I’ve learned that I had to.”

While there is always something new to learn in the business world, Osowski believes the problems of a candlemaking business, well, don’t hold a candle to the sometimes heartbreaking world of counseling human beings.

“I mean, people don’t get mad about a candle,” she says. “I think that, generally, I work with consumers who are very happy and they tend to be happy with their products. I work with businesses that tend to be small business owners. That network, generally speaking, is very supportive and very understanding. If something goes wrong, they are like, ‘We get it. It’s a small business.’”

By the fall of 2021, the Osowskis felt like they lived in a candle factory.The 50-gallon wax-melter was stationed in the laundry room of their Fargo home and candle-making equipment and shipping materials were stored wherever she could find room for them.

It was husband Brian who made the decision: Do Good would do better if it had its own space.

Their new space has an office and mini-store up front, a garage door in back for loading boxes and so much room that Osowski plans to buy a second wax melter to keep up with demand.

Osowski uses phthalate-free soy wax, which burns cleaner, is biodegradable, washes away with soap and water and burns slower and longer than paraffin candles.

Soy also has a good “throw,” which is candlespeak for how well the wax gives off scent. “Cold throw” is how a candle smells before it is lit, while “hot throw” is the smell produced after the wick is lit and the wax starts to melt.

Against the east wall of the space sit bottles upon bottles of the fragrance-infused carrier oils that give the candles their comforting scents of “Sweater Weather” or “Black Currant Absinthe.”

It takes an astute nose and lots of practice to create DoGood’s roster of candles so they appeal to the subjective sniffers of customers. Osowski has gotten quite good at the art of scent. With one whiff of a candle, she crisply rattles off the fragrance profile: “Some ozone, some musk, some amber, some plum notes, maybe some berry notes in there.”

In addition to several candle collections, DoGood also makes and sells reed diffusers, scented room sprays and scented wax melts.

Another new offering is DoGood's seasonal subscription box, which arrives every quarter with three season-appropriate candles.

And now that she has room, Osowski intends to start giving candlemaking classes in April.

In between Osowski and her three part-timers — who include Amber, the daughter whose wedding helped her mom discover a whole new mint-and-lavender-scented business — fill custom orders, refill their inventory at local storefronts like Unglued and Burlap, attend vendor shows and fill online orders.

"From October through December, we're really busy," Osowski says.

But Osowski loves it. She also loves the chance to create something that can make someone's day even just a little brighter.

“It’s a relatively inexpensive way to share, ‘Hey I’m thinking about you.’ And it’s consumable over a period of time, so it’s not like eating a chocolate and then you’re done with it.

"And I think, women in particular, there’s something about getting a white box wrapped in a ribbon. It’s just so easy to help people feel a little bit better—and to know someone is thinking about them.” 

Learn more at https://dogood-adventures.com/