How to Start a Personal Care Products Business
The obvious biggest problem for starting any business is funding. This includes the personal care business. There is the cost of manufacturing and operations to consider. The big personal care products companies also spend a lot in marketing their products. Many pay models and other celebrities to endorse their products and as a beginner you cannot afford this.
You Can Start Small
You can however start small and young by offering your knowledge in personal care products and services in social media like Instagram and YouTube. By doing this you not only start creating a following but also potential customers. You also get better at not only endorsing products but you also learn to sell yourself.
You can start earning income from personal care products by endorsing them. You can earn Affiliate Income and if you become famous enough you may even become a celebrity social media endorser. This is a lucrative career that even top models, actors and other actual celebrities are doing it.
Once you have a bit of money you can decide to sell personal care products in your own e-commerce store or in the big e-commerce platforms like Amazon. You can also have a makeshift physical store like one from home where you invite your friends and customers to check and preferably to buy your products.
Start by selling the products of other companies. Go to the actual factories to get a cheaper price. When I worked for a personal care products company I would always see small retailers stopping by our warehouse to buy at much cheaper prices our inventory. They were able to cut our costs in delivering the products to wholesalers. We pass the discount to them. This could be you.
You can if you are persuasive enough offer to sell a manufacturers product and get a commission. Just get a few advertising materials from the company like sales brochures and sample products if you can get them. I was able to meet an individual earns money by selling products from multiple companies and earns a commission from each one.
You can also decide to become a full time employee of a personal care products company to know not only how such companies do business but to also know the industry and the customers as a whole. You just have to make sure that you do not get stuck In a dead end position in a company that your knowledge of the business and industry will be limited.
Should you decide to create your own brand you by this time have a better chance of success as you already have practical experience in the business and industry. It is ideal if you have your own business even while still working in a company. This does not mean that you have to work in a company. You can still get industry experience by running even a small e-commerce business selling other company’s products.
By this time it is assumed that you have enough capital to spend on creating your own brand. Setting up a manufacturing facility, an office and buying the supplies needed to create your own line of personal care products is expensive however and your capital may not be enough to cover this. What you can do is to try to outsource almost all your expenses.
Start a Company with Almost No Overhead
The company I worked for in Australia accepts bulk orders of their products. I saw one time Asian businessmen checking our manufacturing facilities and how we make our personal care products. They also sampled our products. Then they ordered several drums of our shampoos and conditioners to be shipped to overseas into their country.
I was told that they buy their own shampoo and conditioner bottles from a supplier in China and they also have another company making the labels and packaging for them. I do not know if they also outsource the task of putting the shampoos and conditioners in the bottles as well as putting labels and packing them. This manual labor however can easily be subcontracted.
You can also do the same. This also lets you scale the business. If you have many orders you can just outsource more and scale down when there is low demand for your line of personal care products. Your cost per product may be higher but your business setup is simpler to manage and administration costs are low.
If you want to test out if your product line will sell try starting out with product kits. There are companies that cater for example to budding perfume makers. They sell perfume ingredients in small affordable sizes as well as sell individual differently shaped perfume bottles in varied sizes. Google “perfume making kits” if you are interested.
Conclusion
As can be seen it is not impossible to create your own line of personal care products. It might take time to develop your experience, customer base and the capital to start it but there is a clear way to start. It is however important that you develop a social media presence even while still starting out for this will develop early on your customer base which is the most important part of any business.
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