Question from a reader:”My cosmetic business isn’t profitable, Kim, can you help me? (The reader then proceeded to have information about the specifics of the business sent to me and granted me permission to talk about some of it in the column.)”
My answer is that based on the information you provided me (and next time you get a bill for a consulting service since I went above and beyond the call of duty in order to get some great practical and profitable tips for readers). There isn’t a free lunch and you need to watch some of your goods to insure that you aren’t giving your customers a free dessert to boot as well. These suggestions are to be taken with the understanding that I am not responsible for any specific business decisions that you make, are planning to make or anything else directly or indirectly with your business.
The reasons you aren’t profitable are because of the following items:
1. The economy is on the skids and overall some of your sales are down just because people have been laid off or have moved out of town.
2. A lot of your items need to be discounted further down or dumped entirely. Tastes are pretty fickle these days and people want to latch onto the latest hot thing whether it is beauty cream, goat oil or whatever the heck people are marketing as “natural” to help their bodies.
3. A lot of your “natural” products aren’t holding up to the litmus test of being natural when you actually read the ingredients. There are a lot of chemicals in some of our products that I don’t want in the same state as me leave alone in my house or on my body.
4. You aren’t using the Internet to get advertising out to support your mail order business. I see that it is decent but you need to work a little harder at it to compete internationally with other suppliers of make up, etc.
5. If your target audience is getting to be more and more “the green consumer” you will need to dump anything and everything that isn’t part of your audience’s desires. It just makes good business sense and can help you start realizing a profit (and be profitable) within three to six months if you do everything correctly.
6. Cut down on your orders and if you buy pig-in-a-poke items, expect that you will need to first sell enough to make it worth your time to have one box per person sold in the United States.
7. Tap into the Spanish and Asian markets. Get your information translated into Spanish and get it out on the Internet. The Latino culture supports (as do other cultures) the use of make-up and cosmetics. It doesn’t see the use of tasteful cosmetics as something bad where some groups get really bent out of shape about things like make up being trashy (well some of the time).
8. Renegotiate the terms of your lease to ones that are favorable to you even if only for a little bit.
9. Dump the magazines you sell. People can get subscriptions cheaper and see the online articles from some of those magazines.
10. Focus also more on anti-aging items. Women (and men) love to look young. Heck, our internal organs can be infested with disease and replaced with computer chips and batteries but if we look good on the outside, that is what counts, right? Well, without sounding too shallow, remember that appearances sell (which is why you are in the cosmetics business, right?).
Before I forget, please be sure to write the Governor of your state and if you are in California, write to the State legislators to keep In Home Support Services from being cut. Our elderly (who cannot take care of themselves) and our disabled need us and it is cheaper and a more profitable solution for the State of California to have the family take care of the person (or persons) until they can take care of themselves or are in state institutions because their caregivers cannot take care of them anymore. Let us not rush that day any sooner than we have to, shall we? The State of California would spend billions more taking care of special needs and the elderly in state run or paid for homes.
Anyways, for any readers who are interested I do in-depth consulting as well and my prices are reasonable. If you have any quick and dirty questions that might be of interest to my readership, drop me a post, will you?
Is it the weekend yet? I am burnt out as a I write this and am getting ready to go to sleep for the night. Nighty night gang and thanks for sticking around!
Take care and make money – somebody has to!
June 05 2009
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Kim Isaac Greenblatt
My cosmetic business isn’t profitable Kim Help