How many mistakes can I possibly make on the same products? Let me count the ways.

As this is the first product that I have ever made from scratch myself to resell (the others were designed by a contractor), I don’t think I could possibly stuffed up in more ways.

Some of the lessons this week:

1) If I’m going to use unrefined (raw) ingredients, I have to be able to expect variations.

If you can see the whiter bits in this block of unrefined shea butter below, you’ll know that I had to change my recipe to accommodate it. This also means I didn’t know that I had to adjust for this until AFTER I made a batch because it takes a while for the product to settle.

Long story short, more money, lost time, and lost ingredients, but this unrefined version is still better for you.

2) Not all boxes of the same size, are actually the same.

Below shows to bamboo boxes side by side. I bought them from two different retailers to act as display boxes for my new hand balm products. However, you can see the box on the left can easily hold six tins, while the other one can only hold five because of how they are made.

3) Yellow orange to you is not yellow orange to me

I have been struggling with getting the colour right for our peach flavoured lip gloss as it looks too much like the watermelon colour that I’m using. I hope that the third order is the charm as I reckon that their formulator must be coloured blind as they all look almost the same.

Can you see the difference below? I struggle to do so.

4) More mistakes with labels

The labels have finally come in, but the backs of the lip gloss are hard to read. This is my fault as I was in a hurry to redo them, and I squeezed the lines to make it fit with a 6 pt font when I had to reduce the label size to fit the smaller sized tins.

Unfortunately, it’s just going to have to be good enough. Luckily I only ordered 100 units, and I’m hoping that the new blank labels and laser printer will allow me to become less dependent on suppliers for these in the future.

Despite all of these issues, I managed to get my first order to a retail customer on Monday. It wasn’t without other mistakes, but it was pretty good for my first go as a product maker.