Who's buying soap and handmade B&B products?

[dagmar88]

Hi,
As I'm doing (way too much) research on starting my own handmade soap and b&b shop; I'd like to know who tends to buy these products.
Just to get a better idea of who is interested and to be able to determine my main target group :roll: Hope some of you are willing to share this info! Cause I feel really stuck at this point :cry:
Dagmar

 

[Lindy]

The way I did it for my Business Plan was to look up the census for my area as well as the areas that I will be attending on a regular basis. Since I am going to be working at kiosks I determined that 5% of the populations already uses hand-made soaps and that 45% is convertable. Since I am in a small community I assumed that over 2 years I can convert 40% of those numbers to my product line. Now I live in a small community whose residents tend to be interested in natural products that are gentle on the environment. So that allowed me to use larger percentages. For the large centre I am going to be attending I reduced my convertable to me % down to 2% because I can't reach everyone in a large centre.

HTH

 

[carebear]

and Lindy just how did you determine that 5% and the 45%?

 

[dagmar88]

Carebear, you took the words out of my mouth (is that even an expression in English?!)
The problem is the handmade b&b product branch and especially soap just hasn't kicked in over here :wink: Soap tablet sales have been decreasing for years now... the products with 'natural' branding only take 2% of the cosmetics market here, where worldwide it's 6% and at the US it should be around 10%. Yes, us Dutchies are far behind you! Good thing of course is low competition.
Plus I'll be starting off with selling just via internet and keep it national for the first months, (in the mean time I'll have all the time to fiend a good location for my shop) so my broad target group will be roughly 60% of the Dutch population (the people with internet connection that buy online)
I'm just trying to guestimate who is willing to buy my goods; so I can narrow that 60% down to the people who are really interested and eco-minded.
Also the place where I'll be starting the physical store, there will be lot of tourism from mainly Germans, a group of tourists that have more than enough to spend and are willing; also the handmade segment has already been established over there.
I'd like to be able to determine who is the average customer: male/female, age, income, education, how is their media consumption, are they married, do they have childred and so on.
That way I could show the bank there is a market for my products, but also I'll be able to advertise efficiently. :?
Gosh a whole lot of work! Still have fun doing it though, and keeping myself busy for the past year haha :wink:

 

[Lindy]

I determined the 5% from doing a survey of 100 people within our community and then made the assumption of the same amount of people in the other locations. It actually came in higher (8%) but I decided to be more conservative thus reducing it to the 5%. The same occurred with the 45% convertable (the numbers of the survey were 56%) and again I chose to be conservative on my assumptions.

Does that make sense?

 

[carebear]

oh yea it makes sense more or less (I do this kind of research for a living LOL).

challenges include:
asking the right people (and then the risk of extrapolating to the general pop, especially to different regions, different socio-economic groups, people with different attitudes toward things)
asking the right way (direct questions are not always the correct way)
interpreting your results, generally a data-base of responses to questionnaires vs what happened in real life is maintained by market research companies as a very important check on reality vs research.

But given you don't have $135,000 (I assume) for a BASES test then you've done pretty well LOL

 

[Lindy]

Hmmm - nope I just checked my wallet and I'm just shy of that $135,000 today...

Carebear - thank you - I did the survey as a blind survey (they didn't know who I was or who I was representing) so hopefully I got it right and then like I said I took the numbers and then reduced the percentages to be more conservative. Fortunately these numbers are mostly for my information to check viability and whether this is worth the risk associated. Because the Self Employment Program pays me a living allowance which is about 1/2 what you would want to make for any length of time....and fortunately with this program it takes a whole lot of financial stress off the company allowing it to support itself for the first year.