Charles Nwaoguji
Soap making is one business that is hardly advertised, but yet it holds a lot of promises for those who care to invest in it.
With the Yuletide season just few weeks away, soap manufacturing offers great prospects for those desiring to earn some income from new business ventures.
Indeed, the yuletide season comes with lots of social and religious activities requiring the wearing of clothes that have to be washed. It is a season where laundry owners make more money; and clothes cannot be washed without soaps.
But it is not just the soaps used for laundry of clothes that offers an investment opportunity for Nigerians this yuletide.
There are in fact other brands of soaps that Nigerians would gladly jump at if given the right information and opportunity to make money from it.
These include: beauty soap, toilet soap, medicated soap, herbal soap, hand washing soap , plate washing, car washing soap.
Getting started in soap making
The first thing you need to do is figure out what type of soap(s) you want to make. There is an unlimited number of styles, scents and looks when it comes to soaps, so don’t get bogged down in all the possibilities.
You can find plenty of “soap recipes” online, just like you can with regular recipes. Start with one that’s simple and go from there.
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Equipment needed
Soap, like anything else you make, requires different equipment for different recipes.
There are different processes for making soap — some you can make cold (cold process soap) and others you make with heat (hot process soap).
As you can imagine, hot process soaps require different equipment than cold process soaps. In either case, you can go as big or small as you want.
There are large, industrial sized tools you can find to take your soap making venture into the stratosphere.
But let’s start small for now.
Making soap on a smaller scale requires many of the same things you need when cooking a meal in your home, so you probably already have many of the basic kitchen utensils that you will need for making soap. Things like crockpots, glass bowls, baking sheets and spoons are all used in soap making.
Additionally, for this bar soap recipe you will need more of these equipment and tools: mixer, heater, fermenting tanks or plastic containers with covers, hydrometer, rhode moulds, cutting machine, stamping machine, and packaging.
In making laundry soap you’ll need the following ingredients: palm kernel oil, caustic soda, soda ash, silicate, sodium sulphate, kaolin, water, perfume, colourant.
How much you can make
Now that we’ve looked in to what it might take to get started making homemade soaps, let’s look at what you can expect to make selling them.
Making homemade soaps allows you the freedom to price things however you see fit. You can charge a lot of money for your soaps or you can opt to charge lower fee. It’s completely up to you.
You can look around and see that the price of homemade soaps varies just as much as the different styles of soap.
Marketing
After production, the next thing to do is how to market the products. Marketing is the key. You must get your marketing right. If you’re considering building a business you must make sure your marketing plan is right .
One other thing that you need to think about is how big you want your business to be, and how much time you want to dedicate to growing it. The easy way, that most people envision, is physically selling the soaps at a local market.
This is a strategy that doesn’t involve too much work, though you do need some preparation!
You’ll need a table, maybe a banner, and packaging materials. You may be required to get a business license to comply with regulations.
But if you want to make money selling homemade soaps, there’s a lot more to consider than just the creative side of things!
When you factor in the costs for the equipment needed to produce, package, store and ship large amounts of soap I think most soapers are probably spending more than they make. Those that make good money, usually have a wider variety of products available.