I’ve still got a few years before I graduate from college, but I’m already thinking about ways to make a living. Don’t get me wrong, I love college, but the idea of making my way in the world really excites me, especially when I think about starting a business and trying to make my mark as an entrepreneur. I’ve known that I wanted to start a business for a long time, but I haven’t always known what kind of business I want to found. I’ve been thinking hard about that lately, and I think I have an idea. One of my big passions in life is health. I’m always trying to eat right, exercise, and find the latest and greatest supplements and vitamins. So I thought maybe I’d start one of those businesses that sells vitamins and workout supplements and stuff like that. But I don’t want to jump into anything I don’t totally understand. Can you tell me a bit about how these sorts of businesses work, and how I could find out more about them?
Your focus on the business side and your wise decision to research before you start your company are going to give you some advantages as you tackle the major challenge of starting a business.
Starting a business isn’t easy, and many small businesses fail within a year of getting their start. There are tons of challenges that can lead to rough outcomes: some small business owners follow their passions and are disappointed to realize that they have to spend as much time on payroll, maintenance, and other “business” tasks as they do on the work they love. Others fail to do research before they dive in.
You asked about starting a retail business in the health and lifestyle space. Good news: the health and lifestyle business is booming right now. The global wellness economy has grown significantly in the 2010s, and customers are becoming more and more aware of their own health needs.
To start a health and lifestyle business, you don’t need to start making your own vitamins and supplements. In fact, you really shouldn’t, unless you partner with qualified and experienced co-founders and employees. You can just carry health and lifestyle products from other brands. And, as a matter of fact, you can even have your own brand of lifestyle products without having to start brewing up vitamins in the basement.
What you need are goods called “white label” products, explain the experts at Makers Nutrition. White label products are goods that you can re-label under your own brand. In many cases, you can have the company you’re working with put your labels on even before the goods are shipped to you. This is a best-of-both-worlds situation for businesses like yours, because you can build brand recognition without having to invest heavily in the production of many different types of health and lifestyle products.
Determining good business partners for white label products is one of the many things you should be doing before you start your business. You should also be thinking about online and brick-and-mortar retail locations or marketplaces, and what it would cost to get set up in them. Most importantly, you’ll need to figure out who your customers are, how many of them you can get, and how the math will all work out in such a way as to make your business work.
All of this needs to go into a business plan, which is vital for getting a loan for your business. Even if you’re raising capital in some other way, making a business plan is not a step that you want to skip. Making one will help you see if your idea will work at all, and if you write a successful one, your business plan will be your strategy guide in the early years of your business.
This can all be a lot to take in, but there’s still more to learn. If you want to find out more about life in the health and lifestyle business, look for people who work for and run the businesses that are most like the one you want to found, and ask them for advice. You may be a future competitor to them, but you might just find a mentor anyway.
Reach out to suppliers and others who are involved in the health and lifestyle space too, and pick the brains of ecommerce entrepreneurs in other business spaces. You’ll get answers to the questions you have, and maybe to a few questions you haven’t even thought of.
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