We were lucky to catch up with Bethany Meyer recently and have shared our conversation below.
Bethany, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?
There are so many small skincare companies out there. I spent a large chunk of time not building a business and selling my skincare products because I thought that there were too many and the competition would be way too difficult. If you look on Etsy and type in “natural skincare” you will be bombarded with 1,000+ results. Frankly it’s overwhelming for a person looking to purchase skincare or looking to try a new line of skincare. Basically the biggest challenge to profitability I think is the competition.
Bethany, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I make beautiful, natural skincare products with occasionally unique and luxurious ingredients that work really well.
I have always loved making things with my hands. From the time that I was little, I made all of my Christmas gifts and birthday gifts. Most crafts were self-taught. When I was in Chiropractic school I started teaching myself how to make skincare products like lip balms and body butters. My skills eventually evolved into more complicated things like emulsified lotions (containing both oil and water) and soap with lye. This even advanced to learning how to make mineral makeup from scratch.
As I was going through this process I had horrendous adult acne. I would find a moisturizer or a cleanser at the store that I liked that seemed to be helping with the problem only to find the product discontinued later. This happened so often and was so frustrating that I started gradually replacing all of my skincare products with ones that I made. There was quite a bit of trial and error involved, but my acne did clear up with my own products.
I started giving out some of those more sophisticated products for Christmas gifts and got such positive feedback that I thought I would start giving out samples to the most perfect sample base – my chiropractic patients! I bombarded them with tons of formula iterations until I got the feedback that I needed to just start producing the products for sale. I started with one product, a serum. I sold bottles of that serum to just my patients for nearly a year before I decided it was time to start including other products. My line has since evolved to 9 items plus seasonal lip balms.
I am fairly obsessive about researching ingredients used and doing multiple iterations of a product. For instance with my eye cream, I went through about 47 iterations before finally choosing the best one. Basically if I don’t love a product on myself, I’m not going to sell it.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
Yes, I do manufacture them myself. In my kitchen. I do this early in the mornings before going to work my day job or on weekends. I started by slowly learning and refining techniques. In the process I also started upgrading my equipment which has made manufacturing easier and more reliably consistent.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
Alex Hormozi’s book “$100M Leads – How to Get Strangers to Want to Buy Your Stuff” was pretty motivational for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bskincaretx.com
- Instagram: @b.skincaretx
- Facebook: @b.skincare
