EDMONTON – Lori Erickson feels like a pioneer.
She was one of the first Alberta women with a home-based business and one of the first to sell her own creams and body lotions.
With a husband in university and two small children, the Bentley, Alta. woman decided to commercialize her husband’s family hand lotion recipe as a way to make a few extra dollars while staying at home.
The original recipe was made in a mixing bowl and given to friends in old margarine containers. With some refining and a new container, the lotion had good response at local craft shows and a wholesale show.
Read Also
Alberta looks for agricultural plastic management input
Alberta provincial government giving agriculture industry a say through survey in shaping future plastics management
“The business grew at a nice rate. I was careful not to let it grow beyond my control,” she told a recent Alberta Agriculture seminar on adding value to farm products through cosmetics.
Packaging is important
What Erickson couldn’t believe was the jump in sales when she changed the label. She recommends hiring a professional artist to design the label and packaging.
“It’s your salesperson. If your bottle looks good that’ll make the customer take a step closer. If it smells good they’ll want to try it.”
The business is not without its problems. Erickson wanted an easier supply of purified water than packing buckets and barrels of water from the local dairy. A company assured her they would deliver her a large barrel of water right to her home. Great. Just what she needed.
Things didn’t look so great when her lotion began to separate into clumps. After frantically tracing all her steps, she discovered her new water supply company used purifying chemicals and those chemicals reacted with the ingredients in her lotions.
“I not only lost a lot of money, but I lost customers too,” she said.
A third child forced Erickson to scale back her business to about a quarter of what she was selling. She now sells her lotions through a wholesale distributor, but when her youngest goes back to school, Erickson said it won’t be long before she gets going again.
Helen Onderka said she’s likely going about business backwards. As a director in E5 Enterprises, an emu oil, meat and leather business, she spent a year developing an emu lotion. Now it’s time to see if anyone wants it.
So far the market response has been positive, but she’s not adverse to changing the product in response to market demands. Because it takes a long time to develop a product and build sales, Onderka told the group budding entrepreneurs need to have an abundance of enthusiasm.
“If you are the least bit pessimistic about it – forget it. If your partners are the least bit pessimistic – get rid of them,” said Onderka, whose company started with seven partners and is now down to three.
A few things she’s learned in the past year of experimenting are:
- Time. “You better have lots of it or forget it. It’s overwhelming. It takes over your life.”
- Money. It takes capital to get started. So far they’ve spent about $12,000.
- Work room. You need a clean, sterile area. “You cannot do product development in your kitchen if you cook there.”
- Ingredients. Find a good supplier or have high quality standards if developing your own.
- Testing. Subject the lotions to freezing, thawing and shelf life tests because the customers will. “If someone develops a product in a month. I don’t have a lot of confidence in it.”
