It's Everywhere!!

When I first started making bath and body products out of my home, it was all neat and organized and contained in a small little shelf in a closet in the hallway. As it grew to more and more products it just started taking over. It was in the front hall, the den, the living room, the dining room, the girls bedrooms and even om the rare occasion my bedroom. There were boxes and boxes of bottles, lids, jars, sprayers, bags. All different sizes, shapes and colors. Soap dishes, bath poufs and other packaging materials and that was just what the end product went into.

When you make a product, rather than offer a service, you need raw materials. It is oh so much cheaper to buy the raw materials in bulk than it is to buy small quantities. You have to store this stuff some where, right? There are the drums of coconut oil, palm oil, shea butter and various liquid oils. Huge containers that a 3 year old just loves to climb on top of. Then I have the dried herbs in HUGE bags as well as the waxes and other wonderful ingredients that go into soaps and lotions. Let's not forget the dozens of bottles of essential oils, peppermint, rosemary, lavender, lemon, lime, grapefruit and so on. The fragrance oils of coconut, vanilla, mango, pomegranate, Margarita, Jasmine and more. The 2, 4, 8 and 16 ounce bottles all having to find a happy home somewhere in my home. The variety, the scents. There are oh so many of them and I just have to try them when i read their descriptions from my vendors.

Then there are the raw materials you just want to try. There was the coffee butter I just had to try. Then it arrived but who wanted to smell like coffee all the time? It went into a soap that I swapped with some other soap makers. There was the Godiva Fragrance Oils for that special Valentine's Day Gift Set. It all eventual sold by Christmas that year. I guess everyone would rather eat chocolate than smell like it. Oh, there was the bowel from Pampered Chef that goes in the freezer to make my Whipped Body Butters. It works wonders but who ever has a freezer empty enough to be able to get the bowel in the freezer to use it?

Then I go to the huge trade show in New York City and see all these wonderful items great ideas and I just want to try them and incorporate them into my product line somehow. Then of course I finally track down the distributor of the bottle I am looking for that I just have to use and they want me to buy how many of those bottles? 100,000 of them?!?!? What are you crazy!?!?! Think my wholesale bottle company would decide to carry them? Maybe, but it might be a few years down the road so, I need to think of some other bottle in the meantime. Oh, wait, I think I found something that looks almost the same but I have to buy 300 of them at once. I can swing that. It comes in the bottle, lid and cap. They are perfect!! It has the same exact functionality I was looking for and they are on sale!! I can't bet the price! Sure, they fit oh so nicely right in my dining room. So what if I haven't been able to have dinner on the very nice table my parents bought for us when we moved in here 7 years ago.

I am supposed to move everything to my parents nice empty basement. I actually have most of my finished products there now anyway although I would not recommend going there to browse. Perhaps I will have more time this summer to actually do it. Everything is store in nice boxes so, it is feasible. I will have a lot more work space and space for all my pots, mixing bowels and perhaps I might even invest in a better blender for soap making or even a fancier standing mixer for whipped butters. My good friend has one of those and I am so jealous. Perhaps then I can reclaim my dining room.