Selling Private Label Products In 5 Steps

If you are simply intrigued by the idea of private labeling, or if you are ready to dive into the world of private labeling, we are here to share 5 tips to help your success in the private labeling world.

First, we’ll get to know what private labels are, and then we’re going to go through all the steps that you need to go through to build your own private labels.

We will also share a brief insight so you have a little more knowledge than most beginners out there.

Well it’s exciting, isn’t it? Embarking on a new adventure. Let’s get started.

What are Private Label Products?

Private label is all about its name: Private Labels. The sole purpose that you have, as a private labeler is to give a product its label, or its brand.

You get to put together a product, all the materials, packaging, design, and logo are your creation.

It differs from simply reselling another product, or rebranding an existing product and simply sticking your brand on it.

And yet still, you will not be the one creating the product. There will be a third-party manufacturer who will be responsible for that. Your role is simply to choose..

People often choose private labeling because they can get a higher profit margin compared to other kinds of businesses. In short, there is a lot of appeal from selling private label products. But only when you succeed.

But even if you don’t succeed, you can always learn from your mistake and create a stronger plan next time.

Step 1: Research

The first step to private labeling is research. You might think this is not related to private labeling. But research is everything. Especially in today’s age.

When you don’t know something or you want to try something new you need to learn about it. Long ago, you might need a mentor, or somebody experienced to tell you how to do something.

But now, all the information is at the touch of your fingertip. But you must put in the work and do the research. Nowadays, research isn’t about finding information. Information is everywhere, it is shared freely. The challenge is to comb through all the information and find a trusted source with useful information that can properly teach you what you need to learn.

There are a couple of things that you need to know before you start your private label journey. Below are a few things you need to research before you get started.

Product Research

Before you begin any kind of research, you must first start with yourself. What do you want to know, what are you trying to find out.

Spend time with your own mind and think about the kind of products you want. Or, if you’re truly lost on this matter, think about the feature you want in your product and go from there.

For insight, here are a couple of product features that are beneficial for private labels.

• Small
• Lightweight
• Easy to ship
• Unregulated
• Belongs to a larger niche
• Has varieties
• Non-seasonal

Now that you know what features you want in your product, it’s time to research your product.

List potential products that are appealing to you. Things that you use daily. Things that you understand and are intrigued to deal with. It has to be something you’re excited about. Because this is the first step to a long journey.

If you don’t even like what you’re selling, how will you make other people want to buy your products from you? You have to want it first.

This is a very exciting step, it can take a short amount of time, or it can take months. It all depends on how happy you are with the products you find during your research.

Begin with an initial list. Explore the benefits and risks of each product. Explore the list, research some more. Look at your competitors. Just be thorough in your research. Cover all your bases and be prepared. Look at manufacturers, is it possible to get your products easily?

How will you store it? How will you package it? Think about everything, and I mean everything. Create pins, portfolios, binder. Sleep on it. Think about it.

Now that’s thorough research.

Market Research

You know how when you want to do something, sometimes you accidentally do other things too?

When you’re doing product research, you will learn about the market too. So when you’re doing market research you wouldn’t need to start from scratch. You don’t need to spend time with yourself and think about the market.

You will already have a starting point.

The first thing you want to do is look at the competitors. How is the market responding to your peer private labelers? Look at the brands that succeed and the brands that fail. Failing is a harsh word. Let’s say, the brands that are still trying.

Why are they not as big as other brands? What is it about them that doesn’t inspire more people to buy from them? Is it because of their products? Is it their promotion techniques? Or maybe something as simple as poor customer service?

Now that you know who your competitors are, look at your pool of customers. What do they like, what do they say in their reviews? What do they value?

Put all the knowledge that you’ve gained into your branding strategy. Your marketing strategy. List the different potential and risks you’ve found and test them out with your own business. Experiment and find what works for you.

Yes, you can do a bit of science even in businesses.

Even though it will all be real when you’ve started. Being prepared is never bad.

Step 2: Use Your Imagination

This is where the fun begins. Now that you have your initial notes, research notes, and a couple of lists and plans. You then have to explore.

Think about your product. How do you want to present it to the world? What materials do you want to use to make it? Finding it hard? Let’s use a make-believe item.

Let’s do a very simple household item. A broom. Yeah, it’s boring. But not if you truly think about it.

What materials do you want to use for your broom? Recyclable? Wood? Plastic? Will the manufacturer have it? Maybe? Do you want to give it a unique design? Sell it in a set with a mop? Or maybe the mop set will come after your first product booms.

Let’s go with a recyclable broom, something made of wood, and will last a good amount of time. Next, think about the design. Do you want to focus on aesthetics? Or maybe you want to focus on usability and maximize comfort. Maybe have the handle adjustable to different heights of users.

Yeah, that sounds good, let’s move on. What kind of packaging do you want to give it? Remember, we need something light, small, and easy to ship. That’s right, an easy assemble-it-yourself kind of broom sounds great. A broom that comes in a box, well no one has thought of that before.

Remember, confirm everything with research. This looks good. Let’s move on.

Think about your KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. How will you say you succeed? Well, you need more research. Who can make this broom for you? Who can do the packaging? Do you need a product designer first? Is there a manufacturer for this?

It may be hard to find someone who can bring this idea to life, but let’s just stick with it for now. For learning purposes.

You have your product, your design, your manufacturing challenges, what’s next?

Think about your brand. You have previously chosen sustainability and comfort. Not so much on the design. What do you want your branding to be about? Sustainability or comfort? Or both? Or neither. Let’s say that we want our brand to be about hygiene. We want to promote cleanliness and cleaning as an activity.

On our promotions, we can talk about the benefits of having a clean floor, and the satisfaction it gives us to do it by ourselves. You don’t even need to mention your brand features in your branding, you can mention them in your description box.

Okay, we’ve gone off track. Back to the KPIs. Let’s say that you succeed if you get 100 positive reviews on your sales. That’s right, KPIs aren’t always about selling the products. You don’t have to measure your success only by profits or revenue, you can measure it with other things.

Let’s go through a dark thought for now. What will you do if you can’t reach your goal is, let’s say 6 months? Will you work on it some more? Will you quit? Will you explore other products, like a mop or a bucket? Have a safety net, a failure plan.

Now that you know what happens if you fail, think about what you can do if you succeed. Will you continue to promote it and sell it and aim for 1000 reviews? Or do you simply want to delegate this product to someone else and work on another product within the same brand?

Maybe you’re satisfied with it and want to sell another product with another brand? Well, the only limit is you. Remember, your tool is your imagination.

Step 3: Find Your Suppliers

Next, you want to look for your manufacturer. Wait, it’s not next.

This is the first step you’re actually doing. Something that’s really starting your business. We’re not doing research anymore. Well, we are, but the research that will really make something happen.

So first, think about your suppliers as a business partner. Somebody you can negotiate with, talk to, argue with. You know, all the joys of working with other people. Don’t think of them as someone else, think of them as someone you’re in business with.

It’s better that you build a long-term relationship. You get more perks that way, they get to grow with you, and you are familiar with who you’re dealing with so you both know each other’s likes and dislikes. Find a way of personalizing your professional relationship.

Get to know them, like how you would get to know another person. Ask questions. Of course, you would want to ask questions on things that they have not listed on their sales page or posts. So you can get the conversation going. And then negotiate.

Negotiate your price, your working relationship. Think about what you want. Basically, a win-win solution for all. The best arrangement where you both make money and are just happy enough to go through all the struggles that your relationship entails.

Here are a few questions you can ask your manufacturer:

• Can I get a smaller number of minimum orders?
• What perks do I get if I order a larger number of items
• How many times can I give feedback on the sample
• How long does it take to make a sample
• How long will the product take to produce once a sample is approved
• How long is the shipping
• Can you store my products for me
• Can you send my products for me
• Can you do custom packaging
• If I send the packaging to your warehouse can you assemble it and send it to me?
• What do you think about my product?

You don’t have to ask them anything personal, especially on your first encounter. You need to keep it professional and polite. But it doesn’t hurt to put in a kind word at the beginning of the end of your message or emails. Be human.

Look at how they respond and check if what they do is what they say. You want somebody reliable and trustworthy to build a relationship with.

For your first time, it’s best if you try and negotiate a smaller amount of minimum order. You’re still vouching for your supplier, and you don’t want to be stuck with a large number of orders you’re not confident in selling.

Then, you want to really be a control freak on that sample. I recommend that you criticize and make sure that all the details you initially order are up to standard. Do the best version of quality control you can. The only hitch here is if your products do not arrive the same as your sample.

Yes, you’re dealing with a loss here, but you can also look at it as a confirmation opportunity. Where you can never deal with this supplier anymore. And you can also look at signs if your future supplier is also unworthy.

Check if their production time aligns with your schedule. Are you happy with it? Where are you going to store your products? Do you need third-party fulfillment? Do you want to rent a warehouse, or will you keep everything in your garage?

The last thing you want to check for is the shipping arrangements. Do you pay to the platform, to the supplier? Or do you pay your country’s tax or their country’s tax? All the little details, pay attention to them. How will you pay for your products? Do you need to give a down payment? Can you use your credit card?

It is easier to try it. Now that you have an overview of what’s about to happen. Try it on your own and see how it turns out. Because we can talk about it all day, and you might face a different supplier altogether.

Step 4: Selling Your Products

Once you have your product ready and branded, it’s time to put it on the shelves. Wait, is that the best place to put it?

Well, you can sell your products anywhere, you can set up your own shop, or work with someone else. Find a big supermarket and try to get your products there. But with today’s technology, why do you even need to look so far. You can easily sell anything online.

All you need to do is get pictures and video for everything, a little copywriting and photoshop and you’re all set.

Well, it’s recommended that you sell online, but if you prefer to sell it offline, it is entirely up to you. If you’re feeling big, you can sell it online and offline.

Let’s go through what you need to sell your products.

How To Start Selling

Follow these steps to make sure that you’re not missing anything out. Add in notes and your own detailed reminder for each step because everyone’s needs are different.

Creating An Account – Well it can be an account, a website, or even a page. Anything really. But first thing’s first you need to sign up. You need to register your name, address, card number, payment method, and more. It’s a good idea to do a survey and find out what you need before actually signing up. A lot of times sign-ups are quite complicated, and they’re usually more complicated for people who sell than for people who buy.

Showing Off Your Listing – Now that you have your information ready, you can start promoting your product. Before doing advertising or any kinds of marketing campaigns, you need to get your product displayed attractively. Include:

• An image
• A video (optional)
• Your logo or watermark
• An attractive and eye-catching title
• A detailed product description

You want to be showering your potential customers with simple yet effective selling points of your product. The information you deliver should be displayed in the best way. Makes them want to buy from you immediately.

Ads & Promotion – Then the last thing you want to do is to promote your products. Using marketing campaigns or ads. This might be the last thing, but you’re going to have to do this a lot. It’s a good thing because it means that you have room to learn. So if you fail the first time, you’ll have the rest of the time to get better at it. Ads and promotions are very hard to explain with a limited amount of time and space. There’s a lot of different approaches which are suitable for different products and different platforms.

Setting A Price

Here, we are going to discuss the key idea. A suggestion for your thinking method and decisions. We can’t help you actually set a price because as we’ve repeatedly mentioned, it goes back to your product, your platform, and your market.

The first thing you want to do is research. Look at your competitor’s prices. Gather a couple, the more the better. That way you have data to play with. Check out the lowest prices, the highest prices, the most common price, and the average price.

Once you have your numbers, it’s time to decide. Our main suggestion to you is that you don’t choose the lowest price, or even sell cheaper than the lowest price. It’s good to sell at a 20% price range from the average price. The actual price is all up to you.

Another tip for setting the price goes back to the product you choose. You need to choose a product which can give you a good profit margin that will allow you to pay for advertisement costs and other marketing means. If the product is too cheap in general, it will be hard to do that, but a more expensive product will mean that you will be making fewer sales because fewer people will be willing to spend that much.

We’ve placed this topic pretty far down the discussion. But everything ties together.

Step 5: Selling On Amazon

You have everything ready to go and you just want to start making money. Well first, you need media to help you connect your products to its customers. Today we are going to talk about the online route. Because, really, that’s the option to go nowadays. Online shopping used to be frowned upon but not everyone is racing to be the first company to make “that” thing online.

For shopping, Amazon is a known giant. Let’s see the list of a couple of advantages for sellers.

Brand Restrictions: There will not be any brand restrictions when you sell on Amazon since you’re a private label. This might not be the case if you choose to be a reseller of an already existing brand.

Competition: Your competition will be similar products. That’s why your brand needs to be good enough to push your product through. You will have a great time on Amazon with your own brand.

Enhanced Brand Content: There’s a lot of features and settings to help customize your listings and get you the traffic and conversion you want.

Let us help you through getting a great listing.

• Prepare Your Stuff:

You’ve done this in the previous steps. You’re ready to go.

• Professional Images:

You don’t have to hire a professional but it does need to look professional. Anything is a learning opportunity but there are some requirements. You can start with getting a good camera. Something that gets a clean and crisp image. You also want to work with the correct lighting. And then there’s editing. Prepare yourself for all that, take a class or hire a professional. Invest in your business and invest in yourself.

• Title > Keywords:
  Are you selling shampoo? You can’t just title it “(Brand) Shampoo” and be done with it. Your title is a great place to put in a keyword. Instead of just shampoo, you could try words such as:

dandruff shampoo
best shampoo
dry shampoo
shampoo for oily hair

And so on. The point is, branding is important, but when you get to online marketing, keywords are important too.

• Features & Benefits:

This is also a great place to include your keywords. But other than that, you want to stay professional. Take a look around, do a little shopping for the product you’re about to sell. Look at what the competitors are doing. Aim to be better. Yes, it’s easier said than done. At least you don’t want to be worse than the worst.

• Optimization & PPC:

After you get your seller listing, you want to make sure it’s optimized, you can get a premium feature or run a PPC. Explore and do A/B testing to find what works for you.

Selling On Shopify

Amazon is not the only place you can sell. There are other platforms you can use. A platform just as popular as Amazon is Shopify. Check out a couple of pros and cons to introduce you to its usability.

Unlike Amazon, Shopify allows you to create your own website, you can set up a whole online shop. You have unlimited design options. If that sounds overwhelming to you, you just need to try it out. Because even though there’s a lot of things you can do with the design, there are countless themes to help you out.

Pros:

• An Ecommerce Platform
• Create website / online shop
• Design flexibility
• Ease of use

Yes, that’s all great. But there are a few challenges Shopify brings. There are fewer competitors compared to amazon. But to get any customer at all, you need to work on your own marketing and invest in SEO. Keeping this in mind, you still need to make payments to Shopify. Shopify does help, with its app and pushing people on itself, but your page doesn’t get a boost with on-platform ads.

• Extra cost
• No PPC feature
• Independent marketing

It’s true you need to do quite a bit more than setting up an Amazon account. But if you’re invested and intrigued by Shopify, a couple more steps will only add to the excitement. Prepare all that you have and a couple of rough design ideas to get you started.

Selling On Other Platforms

There will always be different pros and cons to selling on different platforms. But you want to look at the traffic and the customer behavior. Are they buying or just browsing? How many of them are buying? How many of them are repeat customers?

You can always try out and be a shopper yourself, that way you can go through the buying experience yourself.

If you found a platform you really like and it has a couple of cons, it’s best to just stick with it. You’re not going to get the same pros anywhere else, so you stick with it. You could have the best shop, but if no one is even browsing, then there really is no point.

You can also try and sell on more than one platform. But each platform will come with a different marketing method in order to succeed. You can also get into social media and that has its own challenge. It’s really about how much work and time you’re willing to spare to boost the growth of your product.

When Will It Be Profitable?

When? That’s the final question, isn’t it? When will it be real? When will you earn a substantial amount of money?

Well, it comes back to everything we’ve talked about. It depends on your research, your imagination & planning, your suppliers, and the way you sell your products. On top of all that it also needs to be backed up by hard work, consistency, and just a little bit of luck.

Enjoy what you learn today, and learn more before you start your own private labels.

Learn more about private labeling.   Start Here  

Bhushan Lele

Bhushan spent the last 15+ years building businesses and learning what really matters to customers. At Custom Logo Cases, we help brands turn everyday tech accessories into high-quality, on-brand marketing tools.