We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Regina Di Silvestro a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Regina, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

One major facet of our company is formulating and manufacturing products for other companies and brands. We have worked with many amazing custom formulation, private label and contract manufacturing clients over the years and it’s always a fun challenge taking on their projects.

One of our first clients was a husband and wife company that used to work as a lighting technician and sound engineer respectively. They wanted to start a family and their hectic, travel laden careers wasn’t something conducive in doing so. The team had a desire to bring natural pet care products to the market while working out of their home and in a chance meeting we discussed the possibilities and logistics of creating and manufacturing a line that would work for them. Soon after Natural Paws was born. We started with 3 different sprays to moisturize and soothe tender, irritated dog paws and have since added other products over the 19 years from an ear wash spray to a dry shampoo.

Regina, 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 initially began making products 20 years ago in 2003 for a friend’s massage business. She would take custom orders on her client’s issues and report back with an order for custom herbal tinctures. I would make the herbal concoctions in my tiny apartment kitchen, making way more than needed for a single, 1oz herbal extract order. Not wanting to waste the rest of the product, I thought it would be better to pre-make a larger batch and bottle multiples of each instead of only one off customs, providing her with a full line of readily available products for all her customer’s needs. Soon after putting those together she requested massage oils, body scrubs, masques and aromatherapy products for her to use in her back bar and it grew from there.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Being Flexible. Even though we have over 300 products to chose from to privately label, most companies or clients have entirely different needs and desires. Expanding our services, offerings, minimums and pricing is difficult but is needed with each and every custom formulation, private label or contract manufacturing client, otherwise we would be turning business away.

We’ve had many opportunities over the years and the key to growing these opportunities comes from staying flexible. We had to develop Jojoba oil based skincare for a company that used to own one of the world’s largest Jojoba oil companies. Made a custom cologne, candle and bath oil for a Hollywood director. Developed a line of Vitamin E products for an Amazon marketing company that sold the company for millions. We created a way to disinfect, dry, process and use spent coffee grounds from Modern Times Coffee to be repurposed into coffee based body scrubs for a charitable company. We’re currently working with a Native American company creating custom formulas and modified private labels based on some of their traditional, herbal ingredients; most notably Acorns. We created a protocol to disinfect, dry, grind and use the fine Acorn powder into a new line of Acorn based body care. We supply retail stores, refill boutiques and spas providing retail size and bulk quantities for their refilling stations or products for their services and back bars. We’ve also made a few products over the years for Marijuana dispensaries ranging from CBD to THC tinctures and topicals.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

Keeping in touch and working with private label and custom formulation clients is so important and goes beyond the simple purchase order and shipping notice. You need to develop a relationship with each of them as you’ll be evolving on the product development journey together for months or years.

The multitude of possibilities, decisions to be made and changes along the way from formulation brainstorming to manufacturing and inventory management make it important to connect with our clients as closely as possibly and frequently.
Some know exactly what they want and how, some just want to make money and want you to figure it out for them. All rely on us to make sure the products will work best for them and their customers.

Frequent meetings over video or phone calls along with email updates and many spreadsheets on the backend that track their product development, orders and inventory control help us maintain our accounts with ease and keep them happy along with way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rdalchemy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rdalchemynaturalproducts
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rdalchemy
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/rdalchemy
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/rdalchemynp