◆ E-COMMERCE · 2026-06-19

How We Private-Labeled Butane Torches (and Why Accessories Win in E-Commerce)

Here's a piece of resin trivia that turned into a business lesson: when you mix two-part epoxy resin, you fold air into it. Those bubbles need to come out before the resin cures, and the best tool for the job is a quick pass with a flame — the heat thins the surface just enough for bubbles to rise and pop. Which means every single resin artist needs a torch.

For years, ArtResin customers bought their torches at the hardware store. Then it occurred to us: why are we sending our own customers somewhere else for the second-most-used tool in their process?

The private-label playbook

We customized and private-labeled a line of handheld butane torches as companion products to our resin. On paper, that's a small project. In practice it touched every discipline in the company: sourcing and vetting suppliers, negotiating terms, designing packaging that matched the brand, writing the messaging, shooting the product photos and videos, and then selling the finished thing through every channel we had — wholesale, retail, online marketplaces, and our own store.

The torch became a quiet workhorse of the catalog. And it taught me a rule I now apply to every commerce business I look at.

Why accessories punch above their weight

The hero product gets the glory, but accessories do four jobs the hero can't. They raise average order value — a customer already buying resin adds a torch without a second thought. They deepen trust — when the brand's torch works perfectly with the brand's resin, the whole system feels engineered, because it is. They create repeat contact — accessories wear out, run out, and get re-bought on their own schedule. And they defend the customer relationship — every accessory a customer buys elsewhere is a doorway for a competitor to walk through.

There's also a subtler benefit: accessories are cheap experiments. Formulating a new chemical product took us years of R&D. Launching a well-chosen, well-branded accessory took months, and each one taught us something about our customers we could use everywhere else.

How to pick the right accessory

The filter we used: it has to be something the customer already buys (no new behavior required), used in the same session as the hero product, and improvable through branding or curation — either genuinely better, or genuinely better-explained. The torch checked all three. So did other companion products we developed over the years, like our resin line's supporting tools and eventually an entire two-part silicone product for mold making.

If you run a product business and your customers routinely buy an adjacent item somewhere else, that's not a side note — that's a product roadmap someone else is executing for you. Go get it.

These days I help other founders think through exactly this kind of brand and product strategy — you can find my current work at davidzak.com.

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