Fairypants The feeling I got
from being in a market is that people have to see you there a few times before
they’ll buy from you, because to their mind you could be there one week and
gone the next. And they’ve bought something and they want a refund, so they don’t trust you until you’ve been there for a few months. So,
like I say, after the pity sales of the first few months, then it started to kind
of pick up a little bit and it was really good. And then I think maybe it was a
year or two years later I just found this recipe in a magazine to make vegan
lip balm and I’m obsessed with cosmetics, like really obsessed with them, to
the point where people who go abroad will bring them back for me
if they’re a strange brand that you can’t get over here.
And I had a friend in Uni
who was from Texas; she used to bring all this crazy stuff back over from
America for me. So finding this recipe for lip balm, it was amazing, it
blew my mind. I decided to make some just for me, but this recipe, it made
about ten lip balms. I had
all these lip balms in the same flavour and, although it was really nice, I didn't want ten of these lip balms, so I just gave them to my friends and
family.
And it was the same thing
as with the dresses, it was totally accidental. I just gave them away and
people were saying 'it’s the best lip balm I’ve
ever tried'. And probably part of it was them just being nice, but I thought maybe I was on to something. I started doing a load of research
into what it takes to make cosmetics and sell it. It’s different. If I make a
dress and sell it, that’s fine, I don’t have to adhere to any rules and
regulations, really. I mean, as long as I tell you about the washing
instructions and care and stuff, that’s kind of about it. But with the cosmetics,
you have to get it tested. You have to get it sent off to a lab. You have to go
through all this red tape. You have to tell the government that that’s what
you’re doing. You have to register.So I did. It took months of
this research to find out what I had to do to be legal and then I sorted all
that out, bought a license – well, it’s not really called a license, but it
basically means that I am allowed to make and sell lip balms in the whole of
the EU.
So I bought this license
thing, started selling them, and it just, it went from there. It got… it went a
bit crazy. I started having people wanting to buy wholesale from
me, so that was a bit crazy. I didn’t really know how I was going to do
that, but I said yes anyway. Say yes and think about it afterwards. Then it
kind of grew from there. I did just the lip balms for about a
year and a half, before I kind of felt like it wasn’t really going
anywhere. Like, it was slow and steady sales, but I felt like to really do
these wholesalers any justice, I had to expand the range and let them
buy more things from me.
So slowly over the course
of a year I introduced eyeshadows, skin balm. So the skin balm was quite a good
story, I’ll come back to that in a minute. Nail varnish, that’s my biggest
seller. It’s the worst as well because most of it I still make myself and
they just take forever and I have to rope my boyfriend in, and we just sit
there making nail varnish for a whole day. But, yes, so each time I was adding this product
to my collection, I was paying another fee for a different license for that
product, and the scarier the product is, the more stuff that’s in it, the more
expensive it is. So like for the lip balms I might have only paid £130 or something. But for the nail varnish it’s more like £400 because
there’s so many more chemicals and stuff in it that has to be tested. The lip
balms have only got three ingredients in so, you know, there’s not a lot
of testing that has to go into that, but the nail varnish is more complex.
After that, I started
doing perfumes as well. So they were another expensive one
because there’s so many things in them and also it’s directly onto your skin, so
there’s a lot of extra testing in there. There’s no real plan to when I’m going to think of
something new. I tend to just get bored and want to do something new. None of
what’s happened has been extensively planned. It’s all seemed a bit accidental,
which is probably not the best way to run a business, but it seems to work all
right for me so I might stick to it for a little while longer.
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