How to price soap for wholesale

Why soap is harder to wholesale than it looks

The maths of wholesale is the same everywhere: the shop pays about half of retail, doubles it, and both of you make a living. What makes soap awkward is not the multiplier. It is that a bar is cheap, slow and lighter than it started.

• A bar of soap costs a few dollars at most, so every flat cost — the wrap, the label, the band, the minute spent cutting — is a large share of it rather than a rounding error.
• Cold process soap cures for four to six weeks, which means the money for oils and fragrance leaves your account well over a month before the invoice is paid.
• It loses water while it cures, so a bar poured at five ounces is not a five ounce bar when it ships, and the label has to say the honest number.
• It is bought in multiples. Shops rarely want four bars of one scent, they want a shelf, which is a bigger first order than most makers expect.

Get any of those wrong and the order still looks fine on the line sheet. You find out six weeks later, which is precisely too late to do anything about it.

A bar costed line by line

Here is an ordinary cold process bar, made sixty at a time, with three hours of work in the batch at $22 an hour. Three hours covers mixing, pouring, cutting, wrapping and cleaning up, because all of those hours happened whether or not you counted them.

Three dollars and three cents. Wholesale at twice cost is $6.06, retail at four times is $12.12, and a shop buying at $6 will put it out at around $12. That is a normal shelf price for cold process soap, which is the reassuring part — the arithmetic and the market agree.

Watch out. If that total surprised you, it is almost always the labour line. Soap feels cheap because the oils are cheap, and then three hours of your life quietly costs more than every ingredient combined.

Batch size does the heavy lifting here. Pouring a hundred and twenty bars instead of sixty does not take twice as long — call it four and a half hours rather than six — and the labour per bar drops from $1.10 to about $0.83. That is twenty-seven cents a bar found by planning, which on a three hundred bar order is eighty-one dollars you did not have to earn twice.

The six weeks nobody prices

Cure time is the cost that never appears on a spreadsheet. You buy oils in week one, you pour in week one, and you are paid in week ten if the shop's terms are kind. Everything in between is your money sitting on a shelf being soap.

It does not change your price directly. It changes what you can safely promise, which is the same thing wearing different clothes. A shop asking for two hundred bars in three weeks is not asking for soap you can make — they are asking for soap you already have, and if you say yes you will either ship it undercured or fail.

• Put a real lead time on your line sheet. Six to eight weeks from order to delivery is normal for cold process and buyers accept it when told up front.
• Take a deposit on a first order from a new stockist, so the oils are not funded entirely out of your own pocket.
• Keep a cured buffer of your best sellers if you can afford to, because the order that arrives with a short deadline is always for the scent everybody wants.
• Ask for payment on delivery rather than thirty days, at least until a shop has ordered from you twice.

Tip. Melt and pour cures in hours rather than weeks, which is a genuine business advantage and not a lesser craft. If your wholesale is limited by cure time, it is worth pricing both and seeing what each one earns per week of your money being tied up.

Weight, shrinkage and the label

Soap loses water as it cures. Depending on your recipe and how long it sits, a bar can shed something in the region of five to ten percent of its poured weight before it ever reaches a shelf, and the number on the label has to be the weight in the box rather than the weight in the mould.

That matters for pricing because shops and customers compare soap by weight. If you cut bars to hit a round number after curing you will need slightly more batter per bar, and your cost per bar goes up accordingly. Working the other way — cutting to a round poured weight and labelling what is left — is the version that produces awkward numbers on a shelf card.

Labelling rules for soap are genuinely fiddly and differ by country, and they change depending on whether your bar is sold as plain soap or makes any kind of cosmetic claim. Shops will also sometimes want a barcode. None of that is pricing advice, but all of it is cost and time, so check what applies where you sell before you quote rather than after.

Watch out. Weigh a cured bar rather than a fresh one before you print several hundred labels. It is a cheap mistake to make once and an expensive one to make in bulk.

Unwrapped bars, private label and seconds

Soap gets asked for in forms candles never do, and each variation changes the sum. They are all worth saying yes to at the right price, and the right price is rarely the one that first comes to mind.

• Unwrapped or bulk bars, for a shop that displays soap in a basket. It saves you the wrap and the label, so a small discount is fair — but not much of one, since packaging was never the expensive part.
• Private label, where your soap carries the shop's branding. Charge more rather than less: you are printing their labels, running a separate batch and building someone else's brand instead of your own.
• Seconds and end cuts, the bars with a wobbly edge or a colour that misbehaved. Sold as a discounted bundle these turn waste into revenue, but price them off retail rather than off cost or you have simply given away good soap.
• Sample and travel sizes, which shops love at the till. Remember they cost nearly as much to wrap and label as a full bar does.

The one to watch is private label. It feels like a big order and it usually is, but you finish it with no new customers of your own, a shop that can replace you with any other soap maker, and a shelf that never says your name. Price it as the contract manufacturing it is.

Minimums, and the Christmas problem

Because a bar is cheap, a soap minimum has to be counted in bars rather than dollars or it turns into an order you lose money on. Twenty-four bars at six dollars is a hundred and forty-four dollars of invoice for an afternoon of admin, packing and a trip to the post office.

Most soap makers land on a minimum somewhere between thirty-six and seventy-two bars for a first order, usually in multiples of six or twelve per scent so a shop cannot ask for two of everything. Reorders can drop lower, because the hard work of setting a stockist up has already been done.

Then there is the season. Soap is a present, so a large share of the year's wholesale lands between October and December — which, given a six week cure, means the orders you need to have taken are the ones sitting unanswered in August. Chase them early, tell your stockists your cut-off date, and hold the line on it. A December order you accept in November is a December order you make badly.

Tip. Set your Christmas cut-off eight weeks before you need to ship and publish it in your line sheet. Shops respect a deadline they were given in advance far more than one you invent when panicking.