Back To Work (The Brain Damage)

So, The Man decided to check out my blog the other night. (He does this from time to time – primarily to point out my typos. Thanks, honey.) “THIS is what you write about?!?”, he exclaimed. Seriously. What did he expect? The Man’s been married to me for…uh…well geeze, so long I’ve run out of fingers and I’m almost out of toes upon which to count. He knows I’m not an all work and no play kinda gal. He shouldn’t act so shocked.

The fact of the matter is that I’ve been working very hard lately – which is probably why the blog entries have been a little, well, shall we say, frivolous? Developing new products for my shop is hard work. We’re talking serious brain damage. There’s actual math involved! Formulas and conversions…stuff that makes my head HURT. Just buying my supplies takes an enormous amount of effort – finding the best price for the purest, most therapeutic ingredients…ugh! Just the thought of it!

Therapeutic essential oils can be crazy expensive. Committing to a new ingredient can be a significant investment. Example: German Chamomile. It’s one of my favorites. It’s cobalt blue in color and it smells a little funny in my opinion. The color can be a problem – like when it’s combined with oils that are amber or brown and turns the whole mix the color of old guacamole. (Nice visual, eh?) The smell can be a problem too because we’re conditioned to believe that everything needs to smell like flowers or freshly cut grass. But the stuff works miracles. It’s the serious magic in my Once Bitten bite soothing cream -- and if you’ve used this stuff, you know what I mean by serious magic. (And if you haven’t tried it yet and don’t enjoy those itchy red spots the mosquitoes leave behind, well go get you some…right here.) One drop…one SINGLE DROP of German Chamomile costs $.53. Drops probably don’t mean much to y’all so let’s do some conversions. After all, who doesn’t just love conversions? 1 drop = .05ml. In other words, there are 20 drops in a milliliter. And there are 5 milliliters in a teaspoon. That means there are 100 drops in a teaspoon. Now do the math that counts. That’s right…a teaspoon of therapeutic grade German Chamomile costs $53!!! And that’s wholesale.

So on top of the general chemistry involved, I have to ask myself the questions: Is the formula going to be prohibitively expense? Will customers be able to appreciate the therapeutic effects if the smell or the color is a little unexpected? Can I afford to invest in quality ingredients if a product bombs?  I haven’t found a chart or a calculator to help me out with these answers. Is it any wonder the blog gets a little silly when I'm in product development? So The Man should just back off a little, don’t ya think? And really, he’s a fine one for pointing fingers. Just look what he did to my Chickenpants while I was at work the other day!

Tell me, what do you do when the thinking part of the job makes your head hurt?  

Oh yeah, and look for a couple new products coming SOON!