6 Tips to Create the Formulation Desired by your Company or Customer

The beauty and personal care industry is getting bigger and stronger over the years, making it more attractive and increasing the number of brands joining in the competition. With the world’s increasing concern about beauty, influenced by the high beauty content on social media platforms and the well-known K-beauty trend, led the beauty and personal care industry in the Southeast Asia market to grow strongly in the previous years.

Due to this strong growth, the requests for new formulations are great challenges to the R&D staff. The challenges may involve:

1. Over-budget
   Good and effective ingredients are often expensive. If they come up with the formulation with very good efficacy, often the formulation budget does not meet the requirement of their internal and external clients.
   
   
2. Incompatibility with Corporate Marketing Plan
   Requirements from customer or company may change often over the development period. Along the way the marketing concept of product may change to the extent that the formulation is needed to be revised.
    
3. Bad Performance
   The formulation may turn out to be performing bad as the combination is not compatible. This often requires time for the formulators to understand the compatibility of ingredients with others. As a result, more time needed to be invested by the formulator.
    
4. Difficulty in Finding Right Ingredients

            To overcome these challenges, we are providing you some tips to create the formulation desired by your company or customer.

1. Check the INCI name of Benchmark
   Often marketing manager, product development manager, or even your customer will set up a benchmark to meet the standard. These benchmarks will often feature INCI names on the packaging of products. The one listed first has the highest content and so on. Based on this, you may have better idea about what you need to formulate.
   
   
2. Consider its compatibility to the solvent (water vs oil-based)
   One needs to make sure which solvent is to be used. Because depending on this, the feasible combination will be determined.
    
3. Consider the pH level
   Every ingredient has its optimal pH level. Make sure your ingredients are effective in the targeted pH level.
    
4. Consider the concept of product
   Carefully review the concept of product. Is the concept under natural, innovative or colourful? You may need to consider additional ingredients such as organic pigment or any decorative ingredients that blends well with the targeted concept.
    
5. Consider the cost per kg and its packaging size
   Most of the ingredients are costed per kilogram (kg). By considering package size of product, you can easily come up with the targeted budget. In addition, you need to consider if the ingredients’ packaging size is suitable to your demand. If you are planning to consume it little, you better avoid the big package size or the one with big minimum order quantity (MOQ).
    
6. Check out from Chem On
   Our E-Commerce platform, Chem On, enables you to find the ingredients that you need in short period of time. The platform can offer you product search by categories, applications, and chemical names. More over, you will be able to identify the price, product specifications, and documents of the products in an instant. We also offer you the series of formulation which can inspire you what kind of ingredients are needed for your project. Even if there is no product that you are looking for, you can always contact us for sourcing. In short, we can be your lab assistant to find the right formulation for you.

Chem On now and get your formulation right! You may visit our formulation page and check out. 

Posted by San Kang

San Kang is Regional Communication Specialist in MahaChem Group. He has spent most of his time working in the digital communication areas including digital marketing, market research, corporate internal communication and several corporate project management.