Building up a skin care brand can take a lot of effort and in this crowded market, standing out can be tough. However, this type of business is ideal for starting at home as a side business to support your studies and then scaling up later on. This is because you can easily make soaps and bath salts at home, and then find a manufacturer when your kitchen can no longer keep up with demand.
Initial Design and Prototyping
Start by experimenting with basic soap recipes. Understanding the fundamentals of how soap is prepared is vital for making more unique soaps later on as well as ensuring consistency in each batch. You can add different scents and colorings as you wish – just make sure they won’t stain your skin!
To create other products such as bath bombs or shampoo, you may need to experiment with other chemicals. You should consult a bulk chemical manufacturer to make sure that your recipes are completely safe and can be marketed. This is especially true if you plan to create a bleaching shampoo, for example, as too much of the bleaching agent could cause hair loss.
Funding and Marketing
Initially, your soap business will be fairly cheap to run and once you have all the right equipment, you overheads should be relatively small. However, if you plan to scale up your business, you may need to look into funding for small businesses to get your plans in motion.
In the meantime, you should be concentrating your efforts on marketing your product and selling as much as you can in order to reinvest the profits into your business. Use social media such as Twitter and Facebook to get your message out their and start gaining followers. You should also think about adding a blog to your website offering hints and tips for personal care and beauty regimes. Naturally, your products will take the center stage on all of these blogs!
Scaling Up and Outsourcing
When you are ready, make the move into scaling up your production by manufacturing more products and diversifying your product range. If you have started by just making soaps, now is a good time to look into that shampoo you were thinking about or considering your competition to see where else you might compete.
At this point it is likely that you will have to outsource production as your kitchen will simply be too small to cope with the demand. You could opt for a large manufacturer to take over for you, however, if you can afford it, a viable alternative is to get a location for your business and manufacture yourself in this new space.
Building up a skin care empire from your kitchen to your very first premises is an exciting opportunity and there is plenty of room for maneuver in this business. Make sure that you have a good marketing strategy and a really good idea of why your product is unique on the market to give yourself the best chance of success.
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