Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

What’s in a Name?

I don’t remember exactly when the name Alice emerged as the winner. I know I put friends through tedious brainstorming. I know at one point I decided it should be a proper name rather than a “beauty” phrase, and I recall deciding to use “cosmetics” rather than “mineral makeup” because I didn’t want to limit myself, even though using the phrase “mineral makeup” would have worked better vis à vis the search engines. Thousands of women search for mineral makeup each day on the internet, and the numbers are growing . . . pray the numbers keep growing!

My funny and indomitable mother was named Gertrude Alice Keebler. Of course she hated that. So she set about changing her identity and became Kay (for Keebler, her last name). I’ve always admired her for that – to be a young woman in the 1930’s and make such an assertion stick was no minor accomplishment.

Though happily known as Kay by friends and family all her life, she did concede a bit to officialdom by signing checks and other legal documents as G. Alice Keebler, then after marriage, G. Alice Gray. When choosing her headstone, her heirs felt a moment’s indecision, but in the end, we opted for what we knew she would want, G. Alice Gray.

So what about Alice? A perfectly nice though under-used name. An accessible, welcoming name. A name that took second place to an initial! Alice it was.

Of course there is that other Alice—the one created by Lewis Carroll in 1865 and the one I studied as a graduate student in Oxford once upon a time. Clearly books for adults as well as children, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are classics along with their beloved namesake. Carroll’s Alice is always curious, always adventurous, always undaunted.

Not a bad thing to hitch our wagon to her star, linking our search for beauty as we age gracefully with her enchanted travels through the looking glass.

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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.

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Studying Feasibility

While it was easy enough to sample the products of mineral makeup companies simply by placing orders, it was a bit trickier to get information about how well these small businesses were doing. With notable exceptions, business owners aren’t typically anxious to share their secrets with potential competitors.

By calling or writing to a dozen or so for advice, though, I did manage to conclude that mineral makeup in general was indeed a hot commodity. One company owner claimed the product was “flying off the shelves” of those who were marketing it. And everywhere, it seemed, I kept hearing the phrase “women who try it never go back to regular makeup.”

Another indication of the appeal of selling mineral makeup as a small business, as opposed to a big-name player, was the sheer number of companies doing so. On eBay alone, nearly 200 store fronts at any given time offer mineral makeup, either by selling the dominant companies’ products at reduced prices or by marketing their own brands, and many of these storefronts have off-eBay companion websites. There are thousands of searches for mineral makeup on eBay every day.

While I was still gathering information and samples for my mineral makeup enterprise, I sold on eBay to get some experience selling on-line. There is a wealth of information and knowledge to be gained from selling on eBay, from how to purchase various products at wholesale to shipping charges and methods, and I would strongly recommend eBay selling to anyone considering online retail sales as a business.

The owner of one of the small companies I approached was particularly forthcoming about the field of mineral makeup. In a brief conversation, she filled me in on some of the challenges and controversies I would be facing, from how to handle the minerals to which ingredients to avoid and why. Her advice was priceless, and shortly thereafter I began to test colors and formulas.

Meanwhile, more than a thousand folks have visited my website! I am all aflutter.

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Meet Alice Cosmetics

Alice Cosmetics was born when it came time to pick a product. I was halfway through an intensive internet marketing program. The program strongly recommended finding reliable dropshippers and raking in profits by developing multiple streams of income. Also, find something you are passionate about, they advised—don’t select some electronic gadget that doesn’t interest you. (Turns out the lion’s share of those reliable dropshippers offered electronic gadgets.)

While I found a number of cosmetics companies that would dropship, I knew that to succeed I’d need to have something that reflected my personality, that looked like it was very much not dropshipped, and that appealed to some specific niche market. An admitted makeup junkie, I had become fascinated by “mineral makeup” (pure, ground minerals applied to the face with a brush). The large and still dominant player in the field had been doing many late-night QVC advertising spots. I loved the way it looked and felt on my skin and the fact that it was water-repellant, all natural, and long-lasting.

I soon found dozens of small companies selling mineral makeup on the internet, offering alternatives by changing ingredients or underpricing. One thing connecting them all in my humble opinion: amateurish websites. Given my background in writing and editing, the misspelled words alone would be enough to send me packing. Surely I was not alone.

Fast-forward to today, and my better-than-amateurish website (you can be the judge of that) has just gone up. But it was in those early days that I stumbled upon the bare bones of what would become a product, a market, and a brand. Stay tuned for what came next, and wish me luck.

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