10 Practical Tips
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We love working as Angie’s Gardens. The products we sell have, over the years, helped our family become healthier. That’s exactly why we founded this business.
Last week, we talked about establishing your business website on a robust, accommodating web hosting service. If you’ve just joined this discussion, you can catch up here – Starting a CBD Business, Tip 5.
Now let’s move on to Tip 6.
6. Prepare for Supply Source Emergencies
You may already have located vendors for everything from ingredients to promotional pieces to informative inserts to packaging and shipping supplies. Perhaps you’ve found some distinctive pieces that expand your product line or present it most memorably.
We realized early on that packaging plays a big part in brand recognition. To ship in that same green, red, or blue bottle becomes part of your signature, a facet that makes your product easy to recognize and appreciate. Invest time before you launch the business to develop that special packaging and labeling look you desire.
Then identify more than one packaging supplier and create a viable backup plan, because times change.
When we launched our CBD line at Angie’s Gardens, green glass bottles were part of our signature look. As the tariff conflict with China developed and an increased demand for green bottles arose, we realized that we had to reconsider basic packaging decisions.
What About Blue Bottles?
While CBD is an important part of our business at Angie’s Gardens, it is not our only offering. We promote holistic wellness through herbal products and also sell wonderful teas, salves, and lip balm. From a brand perspective, it would not be difficult to change to a new bottle color.
We watched the price of green bottles rise and realized that using blue bottles could both stabilize our supply sources for bottles – they were plentiful from several countries – and could add an important brand differentiation in the growing pack of competitors using green bottles. In other words, the very fact that our bottle color wasn’t green could as easily say “Angie’s Gardens supplies multiple kinds of herbal products, including CBD-containing mixtures and we use a blue bottle, while competitors focus only on CBD and use green bottles.”
We thought long and hard, though, and eventually decided that green bottles were too important to change at this stage in the business. Instead, we located several other suppliers but kept our original packaging look. We could have gone the other way.
Fortunately, we never stop looking for more and better and more local ingredient supplies, so we handle that supply facet all the time.
The moral is: embrace flexibility. So, once you choose packaging or ingredients, be sure to identify primary, secondary, and tertiary suppliers and avoid product delivery interruptions.
Question for Us All
Have you found something we all can use? A shipping vendor, some shipping supplies, or a cooperative that helps small compounders buy ingredients at more advantageous prices? Do tell, please!
We’ll be back next Saturday with another tip. Please, if you like this, share it!
