How To Find The Perfect Skin Care Factory For Your Brand
Struggling to find a suitable skin care factory for your business?
From poor-quality formulas to limited manufacturing options - we recognize that finding the right lab to bring your product vision to life is no easy task.
That’s why we’ve created this guide outlining the five key factors that will influence whether or not a beauty lab is right for you.
Remember - the best skin care factory for another beauty business is not necessarily the best for yours. Resist the urge to sign a contract ASAP. Take some time to weigh up your options by analyzing every lab on your shortlist based on the criteria below.
Does This Skin Care Factory Cater To Your Niche?
No beauty lab is one-size-fits-all. Each factory has its own unique selling points and specialties that can make it highly suitable for one business - and a terrible option for another.
To find the right match, first, you must decide on a general niche and create a brand identity for your skin care business.
Finding A Niche
Niche examples include:
Targeting a narrow and specific underserved demographic
Focusing on a particular ethical issue
Achieving a specific skin care result
Conduct in-depth market research into the skin care market to identify your narrow target market and niche. Market research platforms like Mintel, Marketresearch.com, and GrandViewResearch.com are particularly useful for analyzing the skin care market.
Identify the type of products that are selling well
What areas of the market are underperforming?
Read forecasts that predict the state of the skin care market in the next 5 - 10 years
Narrow your focus on the niches that are selling well now and are projected to sell well into the future.
Understanding Your Target Market
Next, you need to get inside the mind of the skin care consumer. Online forums and social media sites provide insight into your market’s current skin care routines, must-have favorite products, and major pain points.
Consider how your business could create new skin care that is compatible with your target market’s current morning and nighttime routines, rival their favorite products, and solve their largest skin concerns.
Finding A Compatible Skin Care Factory
Your niche and target market will influence the type of skin care factory that you choose.
Imagine that you are starting a new men’s skin care brand. Your products must do two things:
Appeal to men
Achieve noticeable results on men’s skin
Ideally, you would partner with a factory that specializes in men’s skin care. At the very least, you need a manufacturer that offers a broad enough range of preformulated skin care in your niche, or has the formulating capabilities to create an entire men’s skin care line.
Working with a skin care factory in the exact same niche is the ideal situation. For example, if your brand promises clean and sustainable skin care, your manufacturer should not only prioritize clean and sustainable ingredients throughout their entire formulas, but they should also focus on sustainability in other areas (like product packaging).
At Genie Supply, we offer a broad range of products and formulating options to suit a large number of niches. Formulating products with quality, high-performing, and clean, sustainable skin care ingredients is at the heart of our business. Learn more about our skin care factory here.
Are The Lab’s Manufacturing Methods Compatible With Your Goals?
Once you have found a skin care factory that fits your niche, it’s time to analyze its manufacturing processes.
If a beauty lab does not provide the manufacturing methods to fulfill your product plans and business goals, it’s simply not the best supplier for your brand.
The best manufacturing method for your brand will depend on your stage in the business journey and your budget:
If you are moving from home-to-lab and want to continue with your current product range, look for skin care factories that offer contract manufacturing. This process involves recreating your skin care formula as safely and as closely as possible to your recipe and instructions.
If you are beginning from scratch, you need to decide between custom-created or preformulated skin care (or a combination of both). Although custom skin care is more expensive and time-intensive, it results in unique products that your target market will not be able to purchase anywhere else.
Preformulated Skin Care
The preformulated route involves selecting ready-made products and adding your own unique branding on top. There are two main preformulated skin care methods:
Bulk - purchasing large quantities of product in unbranded drums
Private label - buying preformulated skin care on a turnkey production basis (with customized packaging and filling services).
Customized Skin Care
Customization involves either making changes to an existing formula or creating new skin care entirely.
There are two main custom creation methods:
Custom product creation – adding a limited number of customizations on top of a supplier’s preformulated base formula
Custom formulating - collaborating with chemists to create brand-new skin care from scratch
Always inquire about a skin care factory’s production methods. Some manufacturers offer both preformulated and customized skin care, while others specialize in just one method.
At Genie Supply, we offer a broad range of manufacturing methods for skin care businesses, including custom formulating, custom product creation, private label, bulk, and contract manufacturing. Take our quiz to find the right manufacturing process for you here.
Does This Lab Facilitate Room For Brand Growth?
The more manufacturing and product options - the better. More choice is not just important for your first skin care range, but it is also key if you plan to expand your product line at a later date.
That’s why it’s important to have a longer-term plan beyond your initial skin care range. If your current skin care factory ticks all the boxes for your first release but falls short on your long-term goals, you’ll need to search for an additional new supplier.
Not only does this involve search costs, but managing relationships with two separate skin care suppliers can complicate your business operations. Plus, you could miss out on potential large order discounts.
At Genie Supply, we offer plenty of choices to expand your business, with multiple customization processes and over 60 preformulated bulk or private label skin care products to choose from. View our full collection in our product catalog here.
Is This Lab Within Budget? Does It Provide Value For Money?
Imagine this scenario: you followed the steps above and finally found the (seemingly) perfect skin care factory. They specialize in your niche, the product quality is top-tier, and they offer multiple manufacturing methods to facilitate growth.
But there’s one catch - the lab is way out of your budget. There’s no getting around it - that “perfect” factory is no longer the perfect skin care factory for you.
Avoid this disappointment by crunching the numbers in advance and setting an absolute maximum budget before searching for your skin care factory.
Price isn’t the only concern - the best skin care factory for your brand will also match (or exceed) your product quality expectations. The goal is good value for money - impressive quality for a price that fits comfortably within your budget.
We tend to automatically associate quality with price - but that’s not always the case! Evaluate the true quality of a lab by testing plenty of samples, analyzing all of the product ingredients closely, and evaluating the real results the products provide to the skin.
At Genie Supply, we make finding quality skin care within your budget as straightforward as possible. We offer 4 separate tiers of preformulated products to suit a range of different budget constraints:
Diffusion (starting at $1 per ounce)
Mass Market
Luxury
Super Luxury (starting at $5 per ounce)
Learn more about our pricing in our product catalog.
Where Is This Skin Care Factory Based?
Another important issue to consider is the location of the skin care factory. Although it’s often less expensive to source your skin care from abroad, there are several advantages to sourcing closer to home.
Not only does a closer factory location reduce the shipping and restock lead times, but it also helps avoid many global supply chain issues. Domestic suppliers share your political landscape, currency, economic environment, and consumer base, and also abide by the same laws.
Although it’s sufficient to source your skin care domestically, there are some added benefits of sourcing in your local area. Choosing a local supplier presents the potential opportunity to meet face-to-face with your chemist team and build a closer working relationship.
At Genie Supply, we conduct all of our R&D and skin care production with our diverse team right here in the USA. Our headquarters are based in Bedford, Indiana. Learn more about the benefits and drawbacks of sourcing domestically here.
In sum, finding the best skin care factory for your brand involves evaluating manufacturers based on the following criteria:
Can this lab formulate (or do they offer preformulated products) that fit your niche well?
Would your target market enjoy the product formula? Do the ingredients and quality level match their expectations?
Does this skin care manufacturer’s services fit within your budget?
Are their manufacturing methods flexible and suitable to the type of skin care you want to create now and later down the line?
Is this supplier based in the USA or abroad?
Ready to start manufacturing your skin care today? Genie Supply would love to work with your brand! Contact us via email: customerservice@geniesupply.com or phone: (812) 329-1105.
