cosmetics manufacturing

AustraLab Cosmetics & Detergent Manufacturing Business Idea

AustraLab :  Cosmetics manufacturing and detergent manufacturing – which tops our list of profitable business ideas – is often considered the preserve of chemistry graduates and big corporations.

That’s what we thought, too – until we looked at AustraLab.

AustraLab is one of the most interesting and unique small business ideas we’ve seen in a while.

Click here to see for yourself what AustraLab is all about.

The concept: AustraLab is a “business-in-a-box” designed to provide all the information you need to start your own business making cosmetics, makeup, toiletries, cleaning products and detergents.

You can set up your own manufacturing workshop quite easily and inexpensively.

Again, contrary to our initial thoughts, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on machinery – you can use simple equipment for mixing your batches until you get yourself established – and you don’t need to know anything about chemistry.

The creator of the AustraLab program, Sam Stein, is an experienced chemical and cosmetic engineer and he provides in this program a comprehensive series of manuals which comprise:

• 100 professional quality formulations for makeup, cosmetics, skin care, hair care, toiletries and detergents
• Procedures manuals for the manufacturing process, including common sense safety procedures
• Marketing manuals with many good business ideas to help you sell your products
• Over 250 graphic designs for labeling your products (we fell in love with these designs – and we know they’re helping us to sell what we’ve made)
• A trademark license under the AustraLab brand name

The AustraLab trademark license is what really caught our attention – one of the most innovative, unique and profitable business ideas we have seen (and we look at a lot of business ideas!). Regardless of where in the world you reside, you can label your products “Made Under License From AustraLab Australia”. For someone just starting out in their own cosmetics company and/or detergent manufacturing business, we think this offers a great head start. It adds credibility to your operation and your products, and can give you an added edge of confidence. We think this brand has the potential for big sales on the international market – even Proctor&Gamble, one of the world’s biggest cosmetic and detergent manufacturers, produces a range of Australian label design hair care products, which makes them millions every year. (But we honestly think the AustraLab packaging is miles ahead.) P&G sure know profitable business ideas when they see them!

At SmallBusinessIdeas4u.com we’re in love with the AustraLab labels – we think this can save you a lot of time and expense and it will almost certainly make your products stand out on the shelf. Especially when you’re just starting out, graphic designers can cost an arm and a leg – so the savings here can be quite substantial (and save you a lot of time, too). As well as the trademark AustraLab label designs, there are also many generic designs. So, in addition to the AustraLab brand, you can create as many of your own brands as you like – just add your own brand name to the generic label design. This is how the big players in the industry make so much money – one factory, using the same equipment, staff, ingredients, etc can produce a multitude of different brands (and most consumers aren’t even aware they are buying from the same manufacturer).

Profitable Business Ideas – Our AustraLab Review Test-Drive:

After purchasing, within a matter of seconds we received a link to download the AustraLab manuals and designs.

We read through the AustraLab manufacturing procedures manuals – the information is comprehensive, but not overwhelming. We think it’s important to note here, that this program does not aim to teach you university level chemistry – and you don’t need to understand any complex scientific concepts in order to manufacture the AustraLab cosmetic and detergent products. In fact, we found the manufacturing process to be much easier than we expected. We like the fact that everything is written in plain language, no previous experience is assumed, and everything is easy to follow and understand, even if you were clueless in chemistry class.

After reading through the instructions, it was time to get ourselves set up for manufacturing. The AustraLab website advises that no fancy or expensive equipment is required – and we found what we needed at the local hardware store. When we get bigger orders, we will probably invest in some motorized equipment, but we’re doing just fine with this setup at the moment. (Update December 2012: Just clinched a BIG contract – some serious equipment on its way.)

It’s probably the right place to mention another reason why we like this program so much – you don’t need to spend money until you make money. In the manuals, Sam Stein recommends that when you begin your cosmetic manufacturing or detergent manufacturing business, that you only buy enough raw ingredients to make a sample range of products – there’s no need to buy barrel loads of ingredients until you actually have the orders for them. And you should always ask for a 50% deposit on every order, this way you can cover the costs of the order before you even start. We think this offers a major advantage over many other small business ideas, which require a large outlay of capital for stock and equipment.

So, we decided what products we wanted to start making first – we chose 2 makeup formulations, 2 skin care formulations and 2 hair care formulations, plus 6 of the household cleaning products.

Using the suppliers and resources directory in the AustraLab manuals, we purchased enough raw ingredients to make a few bottles of each of these products. Because most of the products comprise about 60-70% water, the actual amount of ingredients that we needed was very small. The total cost was less than $30. It probably should have been a few dollars more than this, but one of the supply companies we contacted was very obliging and gave us some sample ingredients free of charge.

We found the manufacturing process quick and easy – it’s important to make sure you measure everything correctly as you go. It’s also imperative that you add the ingredients exactly in the order they are listed – don’t go getting creative with the actual manufacturing procedures – you can save your artistic touch for adding the pigment dyes and fragrances. This is the part we really like about the AustraLab formulations – you can add just about any color pigments and scents that you like, so you can create an absolutely endless number of different combinations of products. This means you can sell your cosmetics and detergents to an endless number of different markets and customers.

We were very impressed with the quality of the samples we made – we really couldn’t notice any difference between what we manufactured compared to what we buy from department stores/drugstores/supermarkets, etc. Another aspect we really like – the AustraLab manuals tell you how you can use exactly the same scents that are used in some really well known high profile brands, and they’re not expensive (and it’s quite legal!).

The AustraLab program promises profits of around 500-1000% or even more (we don’t come across many profitable business ideas, so we were interested to see how this measured up after making our own samples. We had heard that this industry operates on very high profit margins, and our own research supported this – but we never realized quite how much until we tried it out for ourselves. We thought it might be difficult for beginners to make big profits – but we’re happy to admit we were wrong about that! We estimate that we could make a mark-up of at least five times greater than the manufacturing cost, and with some products it could be closer to thirty times. We knew that companies like P&G and L’Oreal make some really huge profits, and turn over tens of billions of dollars every year, now we know why.

We’re in the process of making a few more samples and securing our first orders now – the AustraLab marketing manuals gave us some great ideas to get started, and we have a couple of our own, too. We’ll keep you posted of our progress, but we’re sure we’re on a winner with this one.

The AustraLab program costs $1997 – it works out to $19.97 for each of the formulations, along with the trademark license, designs and manuals. We think it’s great value for a business which offers a very high return, has virtually no competition among small businesses, offers unique information, and doesn’t need a big investment for equipment and supplies. Before investing in AustraLab, we did a bit of research to see what it would cost to buy an established cosmetic manufacturing or detergent manufacturing business – we were staggered at what it costs to get into this industry even at basic entry level. We’re quite confident that with this program, we can build a very profitable business – at a tiny fraction of what it would cost to buy an established company. We read an article on the AustraLab blog (Link) about some young Kenyans who started their own cosmetics company manufacturing skin lotion – and they now have a business worth almost $1 million !!!  If they can do it, we sure as heck can, too !!!

This would also make a great side business, as you could easily run this in your spare time from home or a workshop/garage. If you have an existing business, there are many avenues for producing and selling your own line of cosmetics, toiletries or detergents and cleaning products.

At SmallBusinessIdeas4u.com, our problem is not that we can’t find enough avenues for selling products – we can think of so many, that we were not quite sure where to start! We should add here that we sought the advice of the program’s creator, Sam Stein, to ask him his suggestions of what direction we should take. His reply gave us some great advice and it’s obvious he really knows the ins and outs of this industry.

There’s a really interesting post on the AustraLab blog – it examines the essential ingredients of creating a successful long-term high profit business. We can’t say it better ourselves – and we think it pretty much sums up why we like this business idea as much as we do – you can read it here.

The AustraLab program gets the SmallBusinessIdeas4u.com Seal of Approval. It wins our vote as one of the most unique and most profitable business ideas!

You can check it out for yourself here www.australab.com