Is a cleaning products business for you

An easy product to make and a hard one to sell, for reasons that are structural rather than personal.

What the product is good at

Cheap raw materials. The formula is a small fraction of the cost.

Fast to make. A batch is an afternoon with no cure, no fermentation and no setting.

Consumable, so it repeats.

And a genuine gap in the market: consumers increasingly want to know what is in the bottle, and the large brands are poorly placed to tell them.

What it is bad at

A hard price ceiling set by products made by the tanker-load.

Heavy and liquid, so shipping is expensive and leaks are a real cost.

The regulatory layer is genuinely complicated: pesticide claims, hazardous substance labeling, child-resistant packaging, ingredient disclosure, and transport classification.

And the packaging costs more than the contents, which means the economics are a packaging business with chemistry attached.

The thing that decides it

Cleaner or pesticide. It decides the label, the registration, the cost and whether the business is viable at small scale at all.

For almost everybody the answer is cleaner, deliberately and in writing, because registration is tens of thousands and many months before a bottle is sold.

A maker who has not settled this is a maker whose label copy will eventually settle it for them.

Who does well

People selling on transparency: full ingredient disclosure, which is a compliance requirement in California anyway and a differentiator everywhere.

People selling concentrates or refills, which removes the freight problem that otherwise dominates.

People selling locally or into janitorial contracts, where delivery is not a parcel service.

And people comfortable with documentation, because this category has more of it than any other in the estate.

References