Starter Kit. Idea 206 of 500. Cluster 10
Tea cosmetics: creams and serums with a named estate's extract
The mechanism, from the book
The Colombo auction sells tea by the lot to a buyer who blends it under his own name. Every step after the auction is where the money is, and every step can be done here by somebody who is not a plantation company.
The first step
Get a few kilos of leaf from a named field through an estate manager, then approach a small cosmetics maker or a trained formulator and ask what it would cost to make 50 jars of a cream with the estate's extract. Show a labelled sample to 10 spa or boutique hotel managers and ask whether they would sell it. The proof is a formulation cost and one stockist.
- Who pays first
- A spa or boutique hotel that wants a product to sell guests which carries the name of the estate they drove through to get there.
- What leaves today
- Tea extract goes into foreign cosmetics as an anonymous ingredient, while the estate that grew it earns the price of the leaf and nothing for the name.
Ask first
- National Medicines Regulatory Authority. Ask whether a cream with a tea extract must be registered before sale.
- Sri Lanka Tea Board. Ask whether an estate's name may appear on a cosmetic made from its leaf.
Check before you spend
Whether the cosmetic needs registering before sale, which claims the label may make, and the estate's written agreement to use its name.
Find out these three numbers
- What does a formulator charge for a small first batch?
- What does a tea-based face cream sell for abroad?
- Which shops would stock the cream on a trial?
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.