Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Product Development

Sampling gorgeous eye shadow colors, what could be more fun for a makeup addict? Looking back, I have to laugh. I remember telling friends that my red eyes were caused by allergies.

But pulling together a coherent line of private label cosmetics and accessories proved to be a monumentally detailed and challenging task, one that took many hours of sampling, testing, budgeting, rebudgeting, and keeping an eye on the big picture. Foundation, eye colors, concealers. Brushes and bronzers and blush, oh my!

For months I sampled cleansers, toners and moisturizers and the jars and bottles to hold them. At one point, I settled on a lovely bottle with gold trim for my toner, only to realize that the minimum order was 5,000 units—a tad beyond even my Scenario C budget. There were many learning experiences in this process, and like, perhaps, many small business owners and their product offerings, I had not done anything quite like it before.

At some point I realized I needed to set some boundaries around exactly what it was I was going to sell. Taking the entire skin care component out of the picture and saving it for some future rollout was a decision that eased the budget and the psyche.

Another learning experience but much greater setback was yet to come. Once I had settled on all the colors of mineral makeup for my line, I ordered quarter pounds of a half dozen of them to start experimenting with filling sample jars and trying out sifters and types of labeling. When the wrong formula arrived, my wholesaler was surly and uncooperative, and I did not want to run into that situation again. I learned from that that I needed to put my faith in more than just one main supplier, and I had to start the process of testing and sampling all over again.

Today, my line of mineral makeup consists of 53 shades in all. I order the colors from three separate suppliers, the accessories from two, the jars and lids and sifters from several, and the labels and the custom brushes from two others. Ultimately it all fell into place, but not without blood, sweat, and allergy eyes.

Posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 am and is filed under Alice Cosmetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.