**Lessons Learned in Business**

Welcome to my lessons learned in product manufacturing. Today, you'll need passion and a motherload of resilience.

This week, we upgraded our beloved OG product, Face & Body SPF 30! It's been our best seller for four years, and with a few tweaks, it's now better than ever. 

We added a touch more anti-inflammatory Zinc Oxide to soothe the skin and bump up the sun protection to an SPF 50. Plus, a sprinkle of Tapioca Starch to help absorb any excess shine. 

While this upgrade may seem minor to you, it’s monumental for me. The challenges in manufacturing this product nearly drove MOTHER SPF to the brink of bankruptcy….  

Packaging: How being the first to market isn’t always the greatest advantage…

MOTHER SPF was one of the first brands to use tubes made from recycled plastic, and as a result, our manufacturer did not have any previous experience with sealing such materials. Being new to the realm of PCR tubes, our first batch was a quick awakening to how much can go wrong during production.

When we filled our tubes with our formulation and sealed them, the heat was too high to seal this type of recycled plastic. As a result, we started getting black marks on the tops of the tubes that looked like mould, and they also now wouldn’t seal correctly. We lost nearly half the batch eek!

Lesson #1: Before bulk manufacturing, ALWAYS test your packaging in every scenario possible.

*We had actually tested them prior, but testing 10 tubes is very different from testing 10,000 tubes, especially as the machines get a lot hotter over time.

Speaking of mould! Our original tubes came in these cute organic cotton bags! We had them produced overseas, and they were shipped by sea during COVID. With all the delays, they ended up sitting on a boat for a few weeks, and somehow all our boxes got wet… This led to mould growing on almost all of our cotton bags. So yeah, those cotton bags aren’t so cute anymore… Another packaging disposal issue we encountered $$$.

Lesson #2: Any packaging you receive via sea shipping should be wrapped up to the nines to ensure that not a smidge of water can get inside.

These are just two examples of what can go wrong, but there are many more—too many for a substack read. 

Manufacturing Issues: Oh boy, I can feel some PTSD coming on here.

In 2022, my manufacturer made a huge mistake, and I'm still actually trying to win back the stockist and customers I lost as a result of this hiccup. 

For context, at that time, I had already been sold out of stock for three months, so when my fresh stock finally arrived, I was extremely excited to fulfill my pre-orders. I requested 10 units for inspection before release, and those initial samples were perfect. Happy days.

However, the bulk shipment to my warehouse was far from perfect….. My manufacturer filled the tubes with my formulation, but it was so thick that it was nearly impossible to dispense, and also filled with bumps. The photos don’t do justice to how bad it really was and how pissed off I was that the 10 units they sent me just happened to be fine..

All my pre-orders had been sent out, and I thought nothing of it until a few days later when I received a video from a stockist asking if I had changed the formula because she had to use all her strength to get the formulation out of the tube.

Imagine emailing your warehouse to check all your tubes and receiving this response regarding ALL of your stock... I remember this moment so clearly AKA I am really f**ked here.

By now, most customers had received their orders, so my inbox started filling up with countless emails from online customers and major stockists expressing concerns about the units they received and urgently requesting refunds. It felt as though, just overnight, my brand's hard-earned reputation and everything I had worked tirelessly to build over the last two years was being burned alive.

I had to completely recall every-single-order. I was calling every stockist in tears, asking if they could send the stock back to me so that my manufacturer could investigate. It was a logistical nightmare, also trying to deal with tracking and refunding postage costs. At the time, my stockist had been paying invoices via direct debit, so I couldn’t simply click a button and refund them. I had to manually transfer everyone's funds back and watch my bank account completely empty.

My manufacturer initially refused to replace the tubes, and that meeting left me feeling smaller than I ever thought possible—imagine a young woman in her 20s, sitting alone in a room filled with older men who were gaslighting me, insisting that I was overreacting and that the product was perfectly fine.

Lesson #3: I truly hate to admit this, but sadly it still rings true in our society to some extent – always bring a male with you to meetings.

After a week of tears and my skin breaking out in hives from the stress, I managed to get it together and find a lawyer who could help me out.

Lesson #4: Become besties with a lawyer prior to starting a business because contracts truly hold the key to your success in the manufacturing world.

Eventually, we secured a replacement order from the manufacturer, but I still incurred significant losses from all the double packaging costs, shipping fees, legal expenses, and, most significantly, my brand reputation.  

ALSO it takes eight months to produce and fill our tubes and remember I had also been sold out three months earlier—which meant I made no sales for 11 months.

Lesson #5: NEVER enter production without a signed contract holding the manufacturer liable for mistakes and NEVER send out stock until you have randomly checked the whole batch. Treat every single batch like the first. 

I was lucky that this occurred early on—without employees, an office, or major expenses. I focused on building the brand organically through educational content, making my time the only business cost. Additionally, I picked up some casual work so that I could personally stay afloat.

Lesson #6: Keep your business lean in the early days. Work from home, become a jack of all trades, and continue working in your previous employment so the business can avoid paying you a salary for as long as possible. 

Looking back, I’m actually kind of grateful this happened, as it allowed me to discover very early on that, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who makes the mistake - it’s your company, so it’s your responsibility to fix it and learn from it.

Lesson #7: The most important lesson - Learn from your mistakes! 

You need to make a lot of mistakes (and you will make them) to become aware that mistakes are the very things that build success. Not that I'm claiming to be successful in any sense—definitely not in the financial sense, especially after all these bumps in the road!  But if you haven’t made any mistakes, it probably means you haven’t taken any business risks, pushed yourself out of your comfort zone, or aimed quite high enough.

As Albert Einstein once said, “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” So, what’s been your best business mistake?  

For me, it turned out to be the stepping stone to launching our new Face & Body SPF 50! Feel free to check it out!