Starter Kit. Idea 105 of 500. Cluster 5
Herbal bath and body product lines
The mechanism, from the book
Ayurveda is a system of medicine the world already recognises and seeks out. The demand is there; what Sri Lanka needs is more of its own names, known and asked for abroad.
The first step
Make a small batch of one product, a herbal bath soak or a body scrub, using plants you can name and trace, and pack 30 in labelled jars. Give them to a guesthouse owner to place in the rooms with a card saying where to buy more. Count how many guests ask or buy within a month. Repeat orders from the guesthouse matter more than praise.
- Who pays first
- A boutique guesthouse or hotel that wants something local in its bathrooms instead of anonymous imported miniatures.
- What leaves today
- The herbs grow here and are sold as dried raw material; the jar, the label and the retail price are added somewhere else.
Ask first
- National Medicines Regulatory Authority. Ask whether herbal bath products need registration before they are sold.
- Sri Lanka Standards Institution. Ask what standard and labelling body products should meet.
Check before you spend
Whether the products count as cosmetics or medicines, that ingredients are safe and legal, and that labels meet the rules where you sell.
Find out these three numbers
- What do shops pay for a herbal bath product?
- What does one product cost to make in small batches?
- Which hotels would put your range in their bathrooms?
A comparison from the book
Sri Lanka. Appendix
"product in poor packaging with no story attached."
Good packaging and a story are what most good products are missing.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.