Selling wholesale
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Wholesale in skincare arrives with a documentation request rather than a purchase order, and brands that have not prepared lose the account while assembling paperwork.
What a buyer will ask for
A line sheet with wholesale and retail pricing and case quantities. Product specifications: ingredients, size, shelf life, period after opening. Safety documentation, increasingly including the safety assessment. Product liability insurance at a named minimum. Tamper evidence. A batch code on every unit.
Retail buyers in this category ask more than in most, because they carry risk from what they put on a shelf.
The documentation you need first
Challenge test results. Stability data in the actual packaging. A safety substantiation. Those three are the file, and assembling them takes months while a buyer waits weeks.
Which is the practical argument for doing the testing at launch rather than when somebody asks: not compliance for its own sake, but being able to say yes when an opportunity arrives.
Margin has to survive the halving
Wholesale is roughly half retail, and your packaging and testing costs do not fall because the buyer is a shop. A product that is comfortable at retail margin and marginal at wholesale is a product that cannot grow through stockists.
Test the arithmetic before pursuing accounts, not after winning one.
Which accounts are worth it
Independent shops, clinics, spas and salons, where your story travels and the buyer is the owner. A single account that reorders steadily is worth more than a chain trial that ends in a return of unsold stock.
Be careful with terms that leave you financing their inventory, with exclusivity that limits you for nothing in return, and with any account large enough that losing it would end the business.