Texas candle maker’s $15,000 Vidcon shipment arrives crushed, and FedEx allegedly blames her for the damage. She can’t ‘beleaf’ it

A Texas-based entrepreneur recently used FedEx to deliver a $15,000 shipment of handcrafted soy candles. However, when it was delivered, it was allegedly destroyed. According to the owner, within the comments, 264 of the 500 candles were lost in the shipment. TheBalesky, a psychic medium who hand-pours her own holistic products, took to TikTok and Instagram to share the wreckage. 

According to TheBalesky’s post, it took two and a half months of crafting and curing to make the candles for a Kelsi Davies event at Vidcon. She also claimed she and her husband spent two and a half hours meticulously packing the items with bubble wrap and tape. When the shipment arrived in Los Angeles two days later, it was a different story. As the owner shows her viewers, “There’s a leaf in it. I can’t beleaf it. There’s fingers. Fingers. Not to mention, where did all the dividers go?”

When they received the news, she noted that they called FedEx. They allegedly told her, “Well, it could have been that the person who received this damaged them.” TheBalesky claimed that she then escalated the issue and, after speaking with another representative, learned the truth. According to her, the representative tracked down images and videos of the shipment showing that the 2,000-pound pallet was pushed off the freight truck.

The lost packages

It seems like after the pallet fell from the upper shelf, someone allegedly wrapped it back up and delivered it. It should be noted that all we have is her perspective on the events. We do not have the details from FedEx. 

The poster’s video went on to reach over 1.3 million views across both platforms, and her audience was mostly outraged for her. One user commented, “Ok that’s so wrong! yall all need compensation…. thats crappy.” Another suggested, “I’m convinced @fedex needs cameras in their trucks or something cause how are their workers this comfortably reckless?” 

Others shared their own horror stories, with one user noting, “There’s a woman on here who sent her father a cloth painting and she had to pay almost $400 for shipping and they notified her that it was”was damaged and we had it destroyed” excuse me…DESTROYED?” Some on TikTok provided advice on how to protect future shipments, like strapping products down or adding more wrapping.

While FedEx handles approximately 3.4 billion packages annually and maintains an on-time performance rate around 96.1 percent, the sheer volume of shipments means that thousands of packages face issues every single day. According to data from Shipaid, while less than 1 percent of all shipments are officially reported as lost or damaged, that still translates to millions of packages annually.

For a growing brand, these numbers aren’t just statistics—they’re real costs. Shipaid points out that traditional carrier claims are often slow, leaving merchants stuck in a vacuum of uncertainty while customers wait for answers. The issue goes beyond just “lost” packages. In one instance, a customer received empty boxes even after they spent over $2000 on watches.

Many shipments, like TheBalesky’s, arrive in a state that makes them completely unsalable. So, many brands are moving toward a Shipping Guarantee rather than relying on traditional insurance. As Shipaid explains, traditional insurance is a third-party product that can take weeks to resolve, whereas a merchant-led Shipping Guarantee allows the business owner to stay in control of the resolution process and to react immediately when things go wrong.

TheBalesky isn’t just sitting back, though. She’s calling for accountability, tagging FedEx in her post, writing, “You need to do better… yall have been messing with people rates. Changing contracts and now throwing 1000’s of dollars worth of products around wrapping them back up and trying to blame it on elsewhere… as a small business owner I have been speaking to business in my area that have been having the same problem as well.”

Whether you’re shipping candles or high-end goods, it’s clear that relying solely on the carrier’s internal process can be risky. TheBalesky even joked about a different way of dealing with this problem in the future. She quipped that she would start her own delivery service, which she said she’d call the “not that f—ing bad delivery service.”