Working out what to charge
Updated
A calculation makers often do once, too late, and find uncomfortable.
Cost per finished tube
Add, per unit: tube, cap, label, shrink band, share of the carton and the display, formula cost, and labor.
Formula cost per tube is grams per tube times cost per gram of the blended formula, which is cheaper than people expect.
Labor is the one usually omitted. Take your hourly rate, divide by finished tubes per hour, filled, capped, labeled, banded and boxed, not by tubes poured.
Worked example
Suppose packaging is 0.60 a tube all in, formula is 0.25, and you finish 60 tubes an hour at 25 an hour, so labor is about 0.42.
Unit cost is roughly 1.27. Add a share of overheads and a scrap allowance and call it 1.45.
Note the shape of that: packaging plus labor is most of it and the formula is under a fifth. Which is why sourcing a cheaper butter changes nothing and finishing 90 tubes an hour instead of 60 changes a great deal.
From cost to price
Wholesale must clear cost with a real margin. Retail is conventionally about double wholesale.
So set wholesale first, double it for direct, and then check the direct price against what the category actually sells at. If it is above the band, the cost has to come down; the customer will not move.
The sanity check
Take a real day: hours worked, tubes finished, gross margin per tube. Multiply.
If the day's margin is not a day's pay, the product is a companion item rather than a business, and knowing that early is worth more than any pricing formula.