Cleaning products are made from chemically produced alkalis and acids. The chemical production is highly polluting and forms tons of industrial waste. The packaging for all commercial cleaning products is made from plastics. Plastics are inorganic and do not biodegrade in hundreds of years. Yet, we use and throw away these bottles regularly, at least once every couple of months.
It is high time eco-friendly products are presented in the market. A few brands have already started this, but the business is not as widespread as it should be. Luckily, that means there’s a lot of space for newcomers like you.
What products can you make?
From bars of soap to liquid washes and cleaning solutions, there is a long list of cleaning supplies you can make, pollution-free and for cheap.
Common ingredients in these products are charcoal, salts, vinegar, baking soda, and many plant extracts you can find if you go online. Many excellent anti-bacterial and stain removing extracts come from locals in certain farming regions. If you can contact some of them, that would be amazing. If you can’t, there’s always Etsy, Amazon, Alibaba, and the like.
A mixture of these with water and oils form cleaning products. You can find several recipes online. To make them, you will require molds, containers, and a stove. Many people nowadays sell soaps from their kitchen. They color their soaps in various rich shades and add scents and glitters to make them look even more desirable than the ones in shops. Making your cleaners is easier than you might think.
Packaging:
Your product should look perfect. If you’re making soaps, use colors and make them in exciting shapes and with lovely smells. If you’re making cleaning solutions, either use prettily designed, sophisticated plastic bottles – refillable, of course- or metal bottles. Glass is dangerous as cleaning supplies are usually not handled with too much care.
You can keep the design minimal and straightforward. You better do so as that would reflect the natural environmentally friendly feature a lot better than some more glamorous design. You can tie ribbons around your bottles and attach them to a wooden or metal spray to make them look even less disposable.
Pricing:
Depending on how many ingredients you’ve chosen to use in your products and how much time it took you to make them, your prices for your products will vary. If you’re a small business and you’re taking custom orders for designer shampoos and decorative soaps, you can charge a higher price and get away with it. After all, your attention to the customers will merit you for a higher fee.
However, as there are no such things as designer dish soap and grime removers, you won’t be able to charge a high price for those. Keep the costs for these relative to the more prominent brands who are selling in supermarkets. Customers would happily buy a well-designed product if it’s affordable and not too much over the alternatives. However, too low a price might make them undervalue your product’s worth and not buy it. So be careful about that.