Candy Cottage turned imported sweets into a growing business through livestreams
Chelsea Chan, 31, was working in marketing when she noticed something missing in Singapore: a pick-and-mix candy shop that could satisfy her cravings.
The last brand to do it well, Mini Toons, had closed in 2020. What remained were supermarket shelves stocked with the same handful of familiar names—mostly prepacked containers, with pick-and-mix sections, where they existed at all, offering only a limited selection.
Then, in 2022, while scrolling through TikTok, Chelsea noticed candy livestreams going viral everywhere except Singapore. She saw an opportunity to shake up the local candy retail scene—and took it.
Four years later, that side project became Candy Cottage: a family-run business with a TikTok following of nearly 35,000 and an online shop that’s shipped well over 100,000 bottles of gummies, with hundreds of orders coming in daily.
A modest start
Starting small in May 2022, Chelsea brought in 30 types of colourful candy sourced from the UK, the US, Germany and Turkey, and began selling them live on Shopee out of her family home.
The appeal of her business lies in letting customers build their own mix from different candy varieties. They choose their sweets, then pay by weight.
Chelsea’s first livestream brought in about 10 orders over two to three hours—a modest start, but an encouraging sign.
“We were already very happy, very satisfied back then,” Chelsea said. Within a week, that had grown to 30 to 40 orders.
At the time, Shopee’s livestream feature was still relatively new, which worked in Chelsea’s favour. The platform was generous with vouchers, helping new streamers attract shoppers.
Chelsea also found that Singaporean customers were surprisingly willing to try unfamiliar foods and flavours.
Take, for instance, the savoury cheese gummy she introduced at a colleague’s suggestion. Chelsea herself didn’t even like it, but customers couldn’t get enough of it. It has since sold out and been restocked twice.
Eventually, Candy Cottage grew to a point where Chelsea needed to rope more people in, and the lady boss eventually quit her marketing job in 2024 to run the business full-time.
Selling over 500 varieties of candy
Today, Candy Cottage’s livestream is run by a team of eight full-timers, mainly made up of Chelsea’s sisters, her parents and other family members.
Its catalogue has also grown to around 500 candy varieties, with imports from countries including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. The brand sources its offerings from suppliers and larger brands, which are then repackaged into bags and bottles under the Candy Cottage name.
Among its most requested flavours are mango cubes, sour lychee and sour guava—flavours that are harder to find on Singapore’s candy shelves, where more familiar options such as apple and strawberry tend to dominate.
One exception is its Stoppers line, which is manufactured to Chelsea’s own specifications. She developed the range by approaching suppliers directly to find out what flavours they could produce exclusively for her.
Beyond its online shop and livestreams, Candy Cottage has also expanded into corporate gifting, working with names such as Google and YouTube, as well as weddings and events for clients including content creators Shawn Thia and Xenia Tan.
Livestreaming six days a week
However, Chelsea acknowledged that running a business heavily reliant on livestreaming comes with a demanding schedule.
Livestreams run six days a week, every day except Friday, for around six to seven hours at a stretch. The sessions are split between Chelsea, the main face of the brand, and a full-time staff member.
They’re spread across TikTok, Shopee, Lazada and the brand’s own website, pulling an average of 50 to 80 concurrent viewers per platform.
On a typical day, the business processes 150 to 200 orders. On sale days, that can climb to 200 to 300 orders, with each order ranging from a single item to several and averaging S$15 to S$20.
If you look at it, it actually runs like a small production line: hosts pick candies and pack live on camera, tubs get passed down the row to be bagged, sealed and boxed.
SFA almost shut them down
But keeping the operation running at that pace has not always been smooth sailing.
Candy Cottage’s biggest crisis didn’t come from a competitor or a bad review, but from a single complaint to the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) in 2023, after the business had moved into a shared commercial space.
At the time, the business was operating without an SFA licence because Chelsea didn’t yet know she needed one. But “ignorance is not an excuse,” she says now. “You can’t tell the government, I didn’t know.”
SFA officers arrived the day after Christmas and told her to stop the livestream business immediately that night. With four or five staff depending on the business, Chelsea had days, not months, to find a new space.
She eventually found a 300 sq ft unit, just barely enough to physically fit all her candy stock.
A consultant then helped her understand what the rules actually required. Home-based candy sellers can operate with far fewer restrictions, but the moment a business takes on corporate supply, catering or events—as Candy Cottage now does—an SFA licence is mandatory, just as it would be for any caterer.
A year later, Chelsea made a huge decision. Rather than rent, Candy Cottage bought its current 1,800 sq ft unit for six figures, then spent another S$40,000 renovating it from a bare shell.
Buying secured the space for the remaining 19 years of lease and insulated the business from the headwinds of landlords raising rent, something Chelsea said was a common practice when they see tenants doing well.
The costs nobody sees
Running a livestreaming candy business comes with its own day-to-day costs.
Deliveries are handled by Candy Cottage’s courier partners rather than in-house, which makes melted candy and cracked bottles a recurring and largely uncontrollable problem, often caused by mishandling or heat exposure in transit.
To reduce both issues, Candy Cottage upgraded to heavier, heat-insulated bottles.
Shipping candy in from overseas isn’t cheap either.
Chelsea cites roughly S$8 to airfreight a single kilogram of candy in from the UK, and freight costs have climbed the way fuel prices generally have. When one is bringing in various candies from all over the world, that shipping cost compounds on top of the cost price.
Then there’s the public side of livestreaming: refund disputes, occasional competitors dropping into the stream to poach customers, and what Chelsea calls “keyboard warriors”—anonymous accounts posting bad-faith complaints.
Her approach is to stay visibly upbeat regardless. “We don’t throw vulgarities, we don’t spread negativity on our stream,” she said.
“Candies are something that people eat to be happy. I don’t want them to buy the candy, be happy, but think the sellers were unfriendly.”
Going global, without leaving the livestream room
Candy Cottage’s growth hasn’t stayed within Singapore’s borders.
Chelsea joined the pilot phase of Shopee’s International Platform (SIP) in Sep 2024, a scheme run with Enterprise Singapore that lets local sellers list on Shopee’s Malaysia and Thailand storefronts without setting up overseas operations or handling cross-border logistics themselves.
Initially, she was doubtful that shoppers in Malaysia and Thailand would go for Singapore-sold candy, but the SIP ended up lifting Candy Cottage’s overall monthly sales by around 5%, and cross-border orders and sales value have since grown roughly eightfold.
The demand, it turned out, proved that customers overseas were specifically after the harder-to-find imports—Swedish and UK candies especially—that are difficult to source locally in Malaysia and Thailand. Candy Cottage now offered these customers an avenue to get their novel candies from.
The business also ships worldwide via its website.
Looking ahead, Chelsea is focused on growing Candy Cottage’s wholesale arm and developing a separate, own-manufactured brand, something adjacent to the core candy business, although she isn’t ready to share much yet.
Meanwhile, she’s also watching for SIP’s next expansion into the Philippines.
In the longer term, she’s weighing a retail storefront, though cautiously, as the rents she’s scouted in malls like Jewel run high, and the lease commitments are long, so that she’s in no rush to sign anything before the business can absorb the risk.
In its four years of operation, Candy Cottage has been named one of TikTok’s top five food sellers in Singapore twice, and has come a long way from a family home in front of a laptop camera to seeing hundreds of orders packed every single day.
- Find out more about Candy Cottage here.
- Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.
Featured Image Credit: Shopee Singapore
