Equipment for a first run
Updated
A genuinely short list, and two items on it are worth more than the rest combined.
The short list
A double boiler or a dedicated melting pot.
A scale reading to 0.1 g, and a second reading to 0.01 g.
A thermometer that reads quickly, digital, probe or infrared.
A pouring vessel with a real spout.
A filling tray or at minimum a rack that holds tubes upright.
Stainless or silicone spatulas, paper towel, and somewhere cool to set a tray down.
What to spend on
The second scale. Weighing half a gram of flavor on a 0.1 g instrument is a 20 percent uncertainty in the thing customers choose on.
The filling tray. It halves the pour time and removes most of the mess, and mess is what makes labels lift.
Both are cheap. Everything else can be improvised for a while.
What to skip at first
A pouring machine or a semi-automatic filler. Right at a few thousand units, absurd at a few hundred.
A large melting tank, for the same reason: batch size here is limited by the pouring window, not by melt capacity.
A label applicator, until the label design has settled. Buy it with the first big label order, not before.
Dedicated, not shared
Keep this equipment for this. Wax is hard to remove completely and a trace of a strong flavor or a dark pigment carries into the next batch.
It is also the simplest way to keep a clean line between cosmetic work and anything else happening in the same space.