Chapped lips are something that everyone has to deal with at one time or another. Maybe they live in particularly dry climates. Maybe they habitually lick their lips, causing them to crack. Whatever the reason, a lot of people rely on lip balm to keep their lips soft and smooth.
And that is exactly why lip care products may be the perfect way to broaden your product line and grow your business.
Is It Time to Expand Your Product Line?
Your Coogar mixers and melters deliver enough functionality for you to build your business on a couple highly specialized products, or to expand your line a little further to meet a growing demand in a related-but-different area. For example, if you’ve been making candles for some time, with a few changes you can start making lip balm.
If you handle the expansion well, you can continue to grow your business and increase your revenue.
Diversity in your product line can also act as a buffer between you and all the inevitable changes in the market. Adding a new product like lip balm won’t make you immune to all the normal business risks, but it can help you weather the storm.
Let’s take a look at four simple reasons why this might be the time to expand your product line.
- Build customer loyalty – Give your customers a reason to keep coming back to you by offering a series of new products.
- Take advantage of market opportunities – Trends in cosmetics and skin care are always in flux. You can benefit greatly when you have products that fit the new market demand.
- Develop your brand – You can brand your company as the business that does one thing extremely well, or the one that is the reliable choice for a wide range of skin care products.
- Minimize risk – As we mentioned above, when you spread out your product line, it can smooth out the road ahead of you.
Why Expand into the Lip Care Industry?
The lip care industry is growing – especially for products that include more natural or organic ingredients. In fact, according to one study, nearly 42% of women aged 18 and over, said that they preferred natural beauty products over a more synthetic version.
This same report predicts that the market will continue to grow at a steady rate over the next few years, and points out that it’s the “non-medicated lip care products” (i.e. the kind of products most small businesses are able to produce at a profitable level) that dominate the market at around 68%.
Some other studies suggested that various brands can reach sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The top brand sold more than $85 million in 2015 alone.
In other words, there’s a definite demand for high-quality lip balm products on the market and plenty of revenue to go around.
Lip balm is also a great choice for product expansion because it gives you a chance to exercise your creativity in a different way. These items are usually sold in small tubes or packages that can easily be carried around. You can customize the ingredients, the packaging, and many other elements to create a simple product that new customers will be happy to try out.
Considerations for the Cosmetic Industry
Lip balms and lip gloss fall into the cosmetics category, since it is something that your customers will use on their body. This means that it may fall under FDA regulations, especially if you make any claims about its organic nature.
This shouldn’t be cause for any stress. Just like lotion bars, you simply need to make sure your products are safe (which you can do by sticking with known, tested, and safe ingredients) and that you aren’t making any false claims about it.
For example, you can’t claim your product is “organic” unless your lip balm includes at least 95% organic ingredients.
Expand Carefully
When you see a market trend like this, it can be tempting to jump right on it and start producing as much lip balm as you can.
However, before you start any business expansion, it’s important to step back and really analyze your current situation and make sure this is the right time to take the plunge.
Any time you expand your product line, there is a chance for over extension. Also, if you start creating too many products that are too similar, you could end up competing with yourself.
So, if you are already producing lip gloss or other lip care products, another type of lip balm may not be that helpful. However, if you’ve built a soap making business, lip balm may be a great way to start diversifying your line of great products.
Make sure you do your market research and determine that you have the capabilities to produce a new product line, and then you’ll be able to reach more people who are looking for quality lip balms.
