Skinbuddy™ films with the BBC

Early in December last year a lady from Betty TV contacted me. They were filming a TV series for the BBC and could I help them with one of the episodes? Of course I was intrigued and asked for more details. The programme was Spendaholics and Rebecca Tapley from Surrey was the subject of the programme. Having got into debt in a variety of ways, style guru Jay Hunt and psychologist Benjamin Fry come up with alternatives ways of saving money whilst still having the champagne lifestyle the person was used to.

Rebecca’s weakness was for skincare products. She was regularly spending over £100 a time for a facial at a trendy London spa and then buying the recommended creams from them. Her favourite shall remain nameless but cost £80 for 30ml and its ingredients include liquid paraffin and petrol. Not great for someone with problem skin and not a good idea to use on the skin anyway in my opinion.

Skinbuddy to the rescue! I met up with the film crew at a chic hotel just off the King’s Road and we started filming. In less then an hour, Jay and Rebecca had made a superb skin cream using Shea Butter and organic vegetable oils along with a very effective clay masque. Rebecca had previously paid over £200 for something far inferior. These two cost £2 to make. What an amazing difference and as Jay pointed out, she was in total control of all the ingredients that went into the face cream.

I found it fascinating to watch how a programme like that was actually put together. We started off with me talking Jay through the procedure for making the cream. She was very quick to learn and understood the principles of what to do. I left some notes for her out of camera view but close enough for her to read to prompt her when she needed it. The cameraman swung his camera between jay and Rebecca as they chatted and zoomed in for close ups of the cream they were preparing. So far so good, the cream came out perfectly and everyone was very impressed. The film crew soon had half the amount on their faces and hands – nothing goes to waste when there is a film crew around.

Then it was time for the cut in shots. You see these all the time on TV but I hadn’t realised how they were done before. The cameraman got down onto the floor and aimed the camera up at quite a high angle so he could see the bowl of cream on the table and the two ladies faces. The cream was already made but Jay had to go through the whole sequence again so that these shots could be cut in to the other footage to make the whole sequence more vibrant and lively. Then onto another angke and go through it all again. I was starting to get worried how the cream might perform uner these circumstances. Normally, after making it, it is put straight into the pot and labelled. Here it was being heated again and beaten again and the heat from the film lights was very strong. I was happy to see that the cream held together very well even under the extreme circumstances. Ater that, the ladies make the clay masque in a similar way.

Then it was time for the “noddies” These are the reactions of the presenter whilst Rebecca is answering her questions. The is actually the one who asks the questions as sound is not used but the facial reactions and the little signals we give when chatting to each other are filmed and again inserted into the final footage to keep it looking real.

This was the last day of a gruelling session of exterior filming for the crew and Jay was exhausted so she collapsed onto the hotel bed whilst the director did the noddies for Rebecca. Well what’s the point of having a Naturopath on hand if you don’t take advantage so off came her shoes and I started working on her feet with Reflexology. Well there has to be some perks of the job for every presenter!

The entire crew worked so professionally together and afterwards there was talk of putting together a small TV series on making skincare products. We’ll let you know when it happens.

The episode aired in early February but unfortunately the filmed section had to be cut to save 5 minutes on the total programme so we never got our 5 minutes of fame and you didn’t get to see the footage. You can still however experience it for yourself and have an amazing weekend of making skincare products as the next course in coming up in March. See you there!

Pricing Your Products
Copyright Skinbuddy™ Mike Harmon 2006

One of the things that many people new to making their own creams and lotions ask is how to go about pricing their products. Initially, many home crafters give away their products to family and friends as they are so please that other people like what they have made as much as they do themselves. This very soon means that you have the most expensive hobby you have ever had and conversely, the people who like your products often stop asking for them. They really like them but do not like continually taking “freebies” for fear that you think they are taking advantage of you. So at some stage, the pricing question rears its complicated head. I do not claim to have an answer by any means but offer some ideas for further discussion as in the end, it is up to you to make that decision for yourself.

There are courses to learn how to make a wide range of products including massage lotions, shampoos, lip balms, deodorants and all the products your clients would like to buy from you. But how do you price them?

First of all, it makes sense to know what your product costs and this can vary greatly even for the same product. Assume that we are working with a shampoo you have made. If you have been making large volumes of it, you can easily work out your unit price that may be 100ml or 1 litre for example. This should also include your container price. Two common mistakes people make in the early stages of production are to forget to add the price of labels to go on the containers as well as adding VAT. I don’t mean adding VAT to your final product but most price lists that you use to work out your raw materials prices are exclusive of VAT and you will have paid it on at the final total so don’t forget to factor that tax element into your calculations. However, if your buyer requests only a small amount of products and you are only going to make up that amount, you may have to buy in the raw materials in smaller amounts. That also means that the price of the raw materials is higher so that gives you a different unit price.

There are varying opinions at the next stage when you work out labour costs. Some people factor in £20 per hour along with the raw materials costs whilst others multiply their costs by 2.35 feeling this is 100% mark up plus double VAT. In reality, that is a fairly random amount but is often seen at the retail level of small shops.

Other people multiply their raw material costs by 4 to give a wholesale price. Of course, the other thing to do is look and see what everyone else is doing and be guided by that. That can be incredibly random as well as you may have a superb shampoo that is ecologically sound, kind to skin and good at the job whereas a consumer may not perceive any difference between that and their usual bottle of Tesco’s own brand shampoo at £1 per litre. It can be interesting though to try all these calculations and just see what comes out as your final figures. It may well be that some of your products will never make a great profit margin whereas others are huge. As an example, an eye gel I make can come out at cost at less than £3 per litre. Applying one mark up formula would see it on the shelves at £1.50 per 30ml pot. Customers I have spoken to say that they wouldn’t really trust an eye gel at less than £7 or £8 per pot.

Several years ago, I found a book that was blowing the lid of the beauty industry secrets. The author had obtained a pricing formula for a typical lipstick produced for the cosmetics counter. It gives an interesting insight into the driving forces of the beauty world.

So I thought I would try this formula with a lip balm I already make. I had to work backwards in a way because as a small producer, certain things were beyond my control. For example, it is almost impossible for me to hugely reduce the costs of my raw materials and containers and labels so I worked out their costs and then worked out what that cost represented as a percentage so that I could fill in the missing costs that I have never used like incentives and PR.

My raw materials cost is 15p per lip balm and my container costs are 31p per tube. These are my invariable costs really and as you see from the chart, raw materials and container should represent 18% of the total price. In that case then, the total selling price should be £2.50. Not bad so far as that seems to be quite a respectable selling price and look at the bonuses I get; 13p per tube to offer as free gifts (not quite the free make up bag you get with Clinique I know) and a whole 63p to do my advertising. Now multiply that by 200 which is a reasonable batch load and suddenly that gives me £126 budget which is about the cost of a small advert in a health magazine. This is looking very promising indeed.

Jumping around with joy and thinking I had found the secret of pricing I applied the magic formula to my shampoo. The raw materials cost for 1 litre of my shampoo are £6.30 and the 200ml bottles I prefer are 55p each which gives a combined total of £1.95 for the filled 200ml bottle. According to the chart this should represent 18% of the total price, which would then have to be £10.83. Don’t know what your customers are like but not many of mine would pay that for a shampoo but partly because of consumer perception where an eye gel or a face cream is given more value than a shampoo which is often seen as a non luxury like toilet paper is. The good news is that according to the magic formula, if I make 200 bottles of this shampoo, I have a budget of £650 to convince the world that my shampoo is a fabulous product and worth buying at that price.

As I said earlier on, there are many ways to price up your product and I usually use this template just to see what it produces but rarely have I used it to come up with my finished price. Try it for yourself and see what you come up with.

Copyright Mike Harmon from Skinbuddy™ 2007.

Mike Harmon is a Naturopath trained in Aromatherapy, Reflexology, Iridology, Massage and Colonic Hydrotherapy. He is also trained as a Master Cosmetologist.

A Consultancy Service is available to Spa and Salon owners wishing to have their own range formulated for them.

Regular courses are also available to learn how to make organic and eco friendly products that are of benefit to yourself and your clients.

For further details, please contact Mike Harmon on 020 7884 1175.