#6 Products
Time spent: AGES.
Time to launch: 2 months
$ Invested: 460K
Products are Fluff.
Products have been the hardest part of this business to date.
We started working on our product formulations and packaging in September of 2016. And we placed our first orders this week.
17 months in, here’s what took so fucking long:
Asking for a natural coloured, unscented lip balm and getting bright orange, sparkly, strawberry lip gloss.
Asking for sandalwood fragrance and getting ocean mist, violet, and playdough.
Asking for a matte finish bronzer with NO SPARKLES and never not getting anything but sparkles.
Asking for leather and getting plastic.
Asking for ingredient listings and being told they don’t exist.
Trying to understand why girls want vegan brushes and still wear leather jackets.
Trying to make things heavy. Suppliers not wanting to make things heavy.
Trying to find a way to brand our products when we don’t want any branding on them.
Going full circle on our postage and packaging options.
Sending Pantone colours and always getting not Pantone colours.
Working on an idea for nine months, only to have another brand launch with the same colour/packaging/product.
Finally getting an inci list and the first item is the first item you blacklisted 12 months ago.
Being ready to order. At Chinese New Year.
We have worked with four formulators and over five packaging companies (maybe more). 30 iterations of fragrance, 10 iterations of brushes, and however many awful PVC bags from the great land of China. Email replies take time, and deliveries longer.
I’ve tried to decipher and decode inci lists and read through countless academic and non-academic articles on how different ingredients will kill me or how I can save the orangutans.
Deciding what we didn’t want in our products has been grueling — I blacklisted so many ingredients (sometimes without reason) that I was asking our manufacturers to create a product out of the air — no Youtube application video required.
When we finally made a decision, we had our feedback round — testing both product and packaging on ourselves, and our market. Realising that certain formulas don’t work with certain tubes, wipers, etc, and that certain people don’t know how to open a compact when it is seemingly the most obvious thing to do.
After nearly a year’s development working with our product and packaging suppliers, we went to Cosmoprof in Hong Kong — one of the biggest beauty conventions in the world. Walking past hundreds of stalls for pumps, tubes, lids, formulas, labels, was equally inspiring and soul-destroying — but opened our minds completely. We realised our product was not right, and that all of our decisions had been made because our options were so limited. And so, on the eve of placing our order, we went back to the drawing board, on literally everything.
I thought my small experience at frank (I’ve never had so much appreciation for the boys and our extended team, who carried this side of the business for us) would save us time. But I found that in this case, skincare is entirely different from colour cosmetics. And because I’m starting over, it’s been so much harder to get the big manufacturers to take us seriously. We’re just so small.
The first thing we did wrong was looking at Australia for formula developers. It seems that while we’re great at natural skincare, we’re not so great with makeup. I didn’t ask around enough, and this is one thing I would strongly suggest that you do — ask around — sample with as many people as you can, and start as early as possible. Be super, super clear with what you want and more specifically what you don’t want/refuse to compromise on.
And after all this, there’ll be more questions:
-How do you price a product? Higher or lower than competitors, what kind of margin do you want to maintain?
-Do you have enough money to meet your minimum order quantities? And will you have enough money to last you from order to launch?
-What do you care about? Vs what do your customers care about?
We were hoping to launch Fluff in November of last year with four products. We’re now launching with two. Not just because the other 2 products are not ready, but because we made a decision that we needed to change our tack and sharpen our focus. And our customers’ focus too.
And for all the waiting, and frustration, and things taking forever, we’ve managed to design, tool, and build a packaging concept that is so much more than I could have imagined, and a formula that I can confidently stand behind and use every day. I’m happy. (Impatient, but happy). The lessons I have learned have been invaluable. (But sure, I’ll make more mistakes.)
After looking all over the world, both through trusted referrals and cold searches/calls, we have a partnership that I feel incredibly comfortable with, with a family who has been in the industry for over 35 years, who work with the world’s best suppliers, which means we have product and packaging coming from Italy, Taiwan, Korea, and China.
Now, everything’s about to happen; we waited so long to get to this point that I almost feel scared to leave this not-actually-ever-launching-anything state that I’ve become so used to. Lucky I have a team who’d kill me otherwise.
We’re on track to be selling our branded merchandise mid-march, with pre-sales for our first product in April. That’s two months away. Which is obviously both exciting and nerve-racking. However, with all the work to date, the current community of girls we are talking to, and with our online and offline strategy, we’ve never been more confident that we’re in a good place.
In the meantime, here’s something to look at:
Right now this business is:
Spending money
Launching website stages
4 full-time employees
Warehousing
Printing a magazine
Summer Fridays
New product briefs
Bigger Pocket Clouds
Fluff.
