Congratulations. Now take a deep breath and take a step back...you're not ready to sell to the public. Why?
1) You just made your first batch of soap in late May of this year, and you're still "testing" your soaps. You really do need a good year to know what your recipe is going to do. Does the scent fade? Do the colorants fade? What about DOS? Do the bars hold up to changing environmental changes? How much does your soap shrink at three months, six months, nine months, a year? Does your recipe change with time?
2) As noted in your graphics thread...you've got issues with your labels. Just from a 'true soap' standpoint, you need to have ounces/grams on the label...no "approximately" or "minimum". And if you're going to list your ingredients, you need to include Water (or whatever liquid you use) and Sodium Hydroxide. Marie Gale is considered to be the leading expert in the US on soap and cosmetic
Labeling. And something I didn't mention in my response to that thread, you need to include your zip code. And you don't need to include your email or telephone number, that information will be on your website...where is where you want customers to go.
3) Retail vs Wholesale pricing and sales. The Retail price for a bar of my Regular Soap is $7.00/bar, the Wholesale price is $40.00/10-bar loaf; my Wholesale customer than turns around and sells my soap for $7.50/bar. Now it may seem that I am losing money with Wholesale, but I'm not because my actual costs per bar is around $2.00 for a 10-bar loaf versus $3.00 for Retail. When I Wholesale, all I do is cut the soap into bars, cure for two weeks, then wrap the loaf in bubble wrap, attached a hand-written label of the name of the soap and stuff in a box. The customer stamps the soap, finishes the cure, packages and labels. When I Retail...I plane, bevel and stamp a week after the cut, then it gets turned a couple of times until cured. Then it gets packaged, labels are printed and attached and it is put into inventory
You will also note that my Wholesale price is per 10-bar loaf. I do NOT wholesale individual bars of soap, I only sell loaves and I have a four loaf minimum requirement. And depending on the customer, they may have to pay in full at the time of order or make a minimum payment of 50%. I do NOT do consignment.
4) If you are selling soap, you NEED insurance.
5) More payments options aren't all they are cracked up to be. They MIGHT increase your sales, but now you have to track all those options. When I'm not working on my soaping business or knitting, I'm a Senior Staff Accountant for a CPA firm. We are getting ready to dump a client who has three merchant accounts (VISA/MC, Discover and American Express) which is 95% of his business (hotel). It's a freaking nightmare trying to balance out what the daily report says the deposits are, what the credit card says the deposits are and what the bank says the deposits because the merchants deducted their fees at the time of sale. What should take me an hour, takes me three hours and then I have to listen to the client whine about his bill.
I'm not trying to be a buzz kill, far from it. I went through something similar...six months after I started making soap I ended up with a table at a craft fair. I did fairly well considering I had no business selling yet. To start with, I had a huge variety of soap to sell, but no 'stock' soap on which to build a reputation. I had no real 'branding'...I had plain white labels with black and white stock printing (not professional at all). My business cards were pretty, but did not represent my company. My soap were different sizes and weights (I hadn't yet modified my cheese cutter). I did have cute shopping bags...it was the one thing I had carefully thought about ahead of time. And I didn't have a way to take debit/credit cards; not a huge deal for a local craft fair...a lot of customers expect to pay cash, but I might have been able to increase sales. And I didn't have a functioning website. Bottom line...my ducks were all over the place.
So I went back to my 5-year Business Plan and kind of started over by giving myself a year before I started selling soap. Of course, Covid-19 had other plans...we ended up closing our office, laid off everyone but the boss and I and started working 50-60 hour weeks. Great for my paycheck, not so great for starting a business. It's the 20th of September and I'm not even halfway to where I had planned to be (making Christmas soap). Too tired and too stressed to make soap, it took me until June to find "my soap". It was August before I found my "brand" and while I absolutely love my business cards, the company and I have a different idea of what a "sheet" of labels is. My garage did not get cleaned so no additional racks for curing and storing inventory. No website either. I do have a wholesale customer...a happy accident that had me scrambling because again...not ready.
Don't be forced into rushing. Crawling might be slower, but you'll get there faster than if you have to take two steps back for every step forward because you're not ready.
for my reality check lol.
