3 Different Ways To Start A Skin Care Business [Beginner-Friendly Guide]
Have you always dreamed about starting your own skin care business?
If you need guidance on how to make this dream a reality, Genie Supply is here to help!
Our simple guide below outlines the pros and cons of the 3 different ways to source skin care for your business, including considerations about the estimated costs, timelines, customization capabilities, and ease of adherence to legal and safety requirements with each method.
Keep reading to find the best way to start a skin care business for your individual circumstances.
Option One: Formulate Your Own Skin Care At Home To Start Your Business
It’s not usual for a skin care business to start from the founder’s kitchen – and it’s easy to understand why! With so many online resources available to budding business owners, starting at home is a low-monetary investment opportunity and provides priceless hands-on experience.
You will rapidly acquire product formulation and business knowledge by making and selling your own unique skin care products all by yourself.
Some of the benefits of formulating at home include:
Choosing each and every ingredient
Fully customizing the formula
Revising your product formula infinitely without racking up extra manufacturing fees
Creates less waste
While this method appears cost-effective at first, going alone introduces massive risk to your business. Although you are not required to seek FDA approval for your cosmetics before they hit the market, you are legally responsible for the safety and correct labeling of your products.
Selling straight from home seems like the natural place to start your skin care brand, but most often, it causes headaches for newbies who have no professional help. You need to anticipate all of the potential pitfalls and safety issues that could arise well in advance.
If you don’t have prior experience, it’s highly unlikely that you will identify every problem before it materializes, and this will cause real reputational damage to your new business.
A professional lab’s advanced specialized knowledge and experience prevent formula issues, and they will conduct safety and efficacy tests to ensure your skin care is safe and effective on human skin.
Just some issues to keep in mind if you decide to formulate from home include:
Using water in your formulas poses a huge risk of mold contamination
You must anticipate in advance whether or not your skin care requires added preservatives (the consequences of not using preservatives potentially won’t appear until MONTHS after you’ve already sold your first moisturizer)
Formulating with trendy ingredients like CBD is heavily regulated, and it’s difficult for a small business owner starting from zero to follow the exact legal procedures to stay within legal limits for ingredients like this
Learn more about the dangers of formulating at home on our blog.
It’s a great learning experience to experiment with your own formulas at home before taking your ideas to a professional lab. However, we strongly caution against placing any homemade products on the market unless you are 100% sure that all of your skin care is safe for human use and complies with absolutely all legal regulations.
If you have already formulated great products at home, but understand that these potential health and safety issues could be catastrophic to your business, it’s time to level up and work with a professional lab.
Contract manufacturing, where the skin care manufacturer will safely recreate your at-home formula, is your next step.
Read more about the easy home-to-lab transition process with Genie Supply on our blog.
Option Two: Purchase Pre-Formulated Skin Care From A Beauty Lab
The natural step up from formulating at home is to invest in a beauty lab’s most budget-friendly and low-time investment product-sourcing methods: private label or bulk.
Private labeling involves using a lab’s pre-formulated products as your own. The process is quick and easy. Unlike formulating at home, you don’t need advanced knowledge about skin care formulation, you simply need vetting skills to choose a reliable and quality lab that invests in high-quality, safe ingredients and develops formulas that generate real skin care benefits for your customers.
In addition to purchasing the skin care formula, you can sometimes source customized packaging from the same manufacturer and fill the packaging all-in-one facility.
Otherwise, you can buy pre-formulated skin care in bulk, but you will need to source the filling and customized packaging from another manufacturing business if you plan to sell your skin care to consumers on the market.
At Genie Supply, we offer over 60 different clean and high-quality skin care products on a private label or bulk basis. Our turnkey private label process spans 6 - 8 weeks on average (including filling, customized packaging, and shipping). Learn more about our entire private label process here.
Option Three: Start With Customized Formulas To Set Your Skin Care Business Apart From The Rest
If you love the idea of creating highly customized skin care, but don’t have the technical knowledge to safely and effectively formulate great products to FDA standards on your own, consider partnering with a beauty lab to custom create your business’ skin care line.
There are 2 different customization methods that can help set your skin care brand apart from all the others on the market.
Custom Product Creation
Custom product creation involves using a lab’s preformulated base and adding your own customizations on top.
At Genie Supply, we have 100s of bases to choose from! The entire custom product creation process spans 4 - 6 weeks before the manufacturing stage, and we have 2 different packages to choose from to suit different budgets. Learn more about our custom product creation process here.
Custom Formulating
While custom formula creation is the most cost-effective customization method, it doesn’t allow for the same level of freedom or specialized customization as the next: custom formulating.
Custom formulating involves partnering with a beauty lab to create a brand new skin care formula from scratch. While this process is lengthier and more cost-intensive, you can combine your ideas with a lab’s expertise to create truly market-disrupting skin care that far exceeds any formula that you could create at home.
Plus, collaborating with a lab to custom formulate will help you comply with FDA requirements. Professional beauty manufacturers formulate and test with both human safety and legal regulations in mind.
At Genie Supply, we specialize in custom formulating clean skin care, novel chemical research, and new-to-market concepts and product formats. The entire process spans 3 months to a year, and costs depend on the formula complexity. Learn more about Genie Supply’s custom formulating process here.
In sum, there are 3 different ways to start a skin care business:
Purchase all of the raw materials yourself and formulate your own skin care from home, ensuring that you adhere to all of the FDA’s safety and legal requirements. You can also contract manufacture this unique formula with a beauty manufacturer.
Source preformulated skin care products from a beauty lab, either on a private label turnkey basis or in bulk.
Partner with a skin care manufacturer and add your own customizations to an existing base formula through custom product creation or create a brand new skin care formula from scratch via custom formulating.
Ready to start your skin care business? Genie Supply is here to help! We can contract manufacture your at-home formula, choose from our range of existing 60+ preformulated skin care products, or collaborate with us to customize your skin care through custom product creation or custom formulating. Contact us via email: customerservice@geniesupply.com or ring (812) 329-1105.