🕯️ Cantique Candle AI Co-Pilot — Automating My Wife’s Candle Business with N8N + Slack + Airtable

Now that I’ve started on this journey, my mind can’t stop thinking about how I can automate everything 😂

This is a workflow I built for my wife’s candle company — her small side hustle and creative escape from her full-time job as a Communications Director for a global architecture and design firm.

We already had a really detailed Airtable setup to track every aspect of the business:

Candle recipes and fragrance ratios
Batch production and material costs
Consignment and wholesale tracking
Inventory levels for jars, wicks, and fragrance oils

So naturally, I thought: why not give her a Slack-based AI assistant to handle it all?

🧠 How It Works

The Cantique Candle AI Co-Pilot connects Slack, OpenAI, and Airtable so we can literally ask the business questions in plain English — things like:

“What was the last consignment order we dropped off?

“How much of each fragrance would we need to make a batch of 24 candles?

“What’s our material cost for a 12-candle batch of Hudson Woods?”

…and it responds instantly with real data from Airtable.

⚙️ Workflow Overview:

🗣️ Chat Interface

The Slack Trigger starts the conversation.Messages are passed to the AI Agent, which uses the OpenAI Chat Model and a Simple Memory node to keep context across messages. The agent interprets what’s being asked, runs the necessary Airtable searches, and sends a clean response right back into Slack.

This gives us a natural, chat-based interface for the entire business — no dashboards, no clicking through tables.

📊 Airtable Data Layer

Each of these nodes represents a connection to a specific Airtable table or function:

Upsert to Airtable: Automatically adds or updates records (like new batches or updated inventory).
Get Record: Fetches specific entries like batch data or consignment details.
Candle Cost Search: Calculates total material costs using live pricing and recipe data.
Search Consignment: Looks up consignment drop-offs, store partners, and payment status.
Search Wholesale: Retrieves wholesale account orders.
Search Fragrances: Finds fragrance inventory levels and cost per gram.
Search Recipes: Pulls candle formulas and scales ingredient needs for any batch size.
Search Inventory: Tracks all on-hand materials like wax, wicks, jars, and fragrance oils.

Together, they create a conversational co-pilot that makes running the business as easy as chatting with a friend.

💡 Why I Love This

It’s not just about saving time — it’s about lowering mental load. My wife can stay creative, focus on making beautiful products, and let the AI handle the boring stuff like cost breakdowns and inventory math.

This little project made me realize how powerful small-scale automation can be when it’s built around real daily tasks.

🧩 Stack Summary

Slack → Front-end chat interface
N8N - Workflow Framework
OpenAI GPT model → Interpretation + response generation
Airtable API → Data storage and querying
Memory node → Keeps conversational context

🗨️ What’s Next

I’m planning to expand it with:

Automatic low-stock alerts via Slack
Cost-of-goods reporting by month
Simple sales forecasting using historical data
Integration with Square to track sales, revenue, and trends

I’d love to hear what you think — or if anyone else has done something similar with AI agents for small creative businesses. Happy to share more of the Airtable schema or the AI prompt logic if anyone’s curious!

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