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Formulation Process: Highlight: Holifrog

When it comes time to formulate products, you can certainly hire someone to come up with your product concepts and a general ingredient brief to pass off to a chemist to formulate, but you don’t have to go that route.

To find a lab, you can Google contract manufacturers and cold call them to set up intro calls.

“We found the lab we launched our first four products with through an ingredient supplier who supplies some of the best natural and organic oils and extracts to labs around the world,” says one beauty product producer. “We said, ‘Listen, you work with all these labs. If you were creating your own product line, which lab would you partner with?’”

“I wasn’t looking to go to a big box lab that everybody uses, because then I was going to get formulas that everyone else has,” adds the producer.

Each lab has its own product brief form that includes the ingredients you want to use, the ingredients you don’t want to use, specifics about the percentages you want in your formula, marketing ingredient callouts, and the viscosity—whether you want it thin, like a serum, or whether you want it thick. The lab asks about the packaging components you’re going to be using for that formula because they can’t create a dense cream if it’s going to need to come out of a pump.

You’ll send the completed product brief to your chemist. Then, you’ll have a call with your chemist and you’ll pay a fee for the product development.

The fee is usually quite small. Labs aren’t charging $50,000 to formulate a product. They’re charging more like $1,500.

Where labs make their money is when you place your order for 10,000 units or 100,000 units or a million units, explains the producer.

“The one thing I found to be extremely helpful was having a contract right out of the gate with the lab that specifies formula ownership,” says the producer. “You want to own your formulas. Most brands don’t know this, so they launch their brand without owning their formulas. And if you don’t own your formula, the labs don’t ever give you the recipe.”

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