Hey! You’ve Landed Here Because You’ve Chosen To Work With Sweet Little Crumb and We Need More Information. 

Firstly, congratulations, choosing to develop your own product is a huge deal, and you’ve just taken the first step to doing just that. I’m excited to be working on your product. Together we are going to work on creating your formula and product! 

To do that, from you, I need as much information as possible about your brand, ethos and the product. 

So, the form is quite detailed. Please fill in as much as you can. 

If you don’t want to fill in the form online you can request the pdf version, fill it out and email it back. 

If you really really hate forms, I get it, I do, but I still need the information. So, we’ll need to have a meeting where I ask you the questions and you answer them. I will need to record this session. 

If you want either of these options you will need to email me and let me know. 

There’s one more important thing we need to talk about (it’s on the form, but Often gets glossed over, and it is an important part of product development. 

Do you have a benchmark?

Hopefully you do. If you don’t, that’s fine too (we can work it out together, it just takes a bit longer).

A benchmark is a product that already exists on the market that we can point at and say “something like this”. It might be a competitor you’re trying to sit beside on the shelf, or a cult product your customers keep mentioning, or something you personally love and have never been able to find an equivalent of. It can even be a product you hate (those are surprisingly useful, because “not this, but the texture is right” tells me a lot).

The benchmark becomes our target for three things: quality, performance, and cost.

Quality and performance are the obvious ones. If you tell me you want a “luxurious” cream, I have genuinely no idea what that means (nobody does, it’s a word that has been stretched so far it’s see-through). If I have the benchmark in my hands, I can translate it into things I can actually formulate towards: cushion, slip and glide, how long the play time is, whether it breaks quickly on the skin (that watery splash feeling) or sits with some drag, what the residue is like ten minutes later, how it behaves in a Queensland summer versus an air-conditioned office.

Cost is the one people forget. A benchmark tells me what price bracket we’re playing in, and that quietly decides a lot of ingredient choices before we even start. A $12 AUD (~$8 USD) body lotion and an $80 AUD (~$53 USD) face serum are not the same brief, even if they’re both “a moisturiser”.

I need the actual product. Not a photo of it.

This is the bit I have to be firm about, so I’ll say it plainly.

A link and an ingredient list (LOI) are a starting point, but they cannot tell me what the product does. An LOI tells me roughly what’s in it and roughly in what order (roughly, because everything under 1% is in whatever order the brand felt like). It does not tell me the viscosity, the yield point, or whether it’s a lamellar system or a simple oil-in-water systern. It doesn’t tell me how it dispenses, what the pack does to the experience, how it behaves at 32°C (89.6°F) on actual skin, or what happens when I put it on a slide and look at it.

Honestly, I have to open it, weigh it, feel it, wear it, break it, and sit it next to your samples during testing. There is no version of this I can do from a website photo.

Option one: you send it to me. This is the easiest option. Full size where possible (samples and travel sizes are often a different fill or a different batch, and sometimes a different formula entirely). Unopened is ideal but not essential. Please send the outer packaging too if you still have it, because the claims, the batch code, and the PAO all live there and I’ll want to read them. My postal address is 8 Stella Place, Carseldine QLD, Australia. 4017. It is on all documentation as well but listed here just in case. 

Option two: I buy it and bill you for it. Some products are easier for me to source locally, or you’re overseas, or you simply don’t want to deal with it. Completely fine. I’ll purchase it, and the product cost plus shipping goes on the project as a pass-through expense, at cost (no markup, and I’ll send you the receipt). For most mass-market products this lands somewhere around $20 to $60 AUD (~$13 to $40 USD) including postage, but prestige benchmarks can obviously be a lot more, so I’ll always confirm with you before I click buy. 

A note on shipping: anything with a high alcohol content, aerosols, pressurised packs, and some nail and fragrance products are classified as dangerous goods and can’t go by air. If your benchmark is one of those, tell me early and we’ll sort out a road freight or domestic purchase route instead. (A very sad, very slow parcel taught me this one.). While talking about shipping please remember you are responsible for all shipping costs including shipping of samples. 

What a Benchmark Isn’t!

A benchmark isn’t a formula, and it isn’t something we’re copying. We’re aiming at a target, not tracing over it. Your product will have your ingredients, your claims, your positioning, and your budget, and it will be its own thing by the end.

It also gives us something to compare against later. When your samples go into stability, and when we’re doing sensory work, having the reference product sitting right there beside yours is far more useful than trying to remember what it felt like three weeks ago (memory is generous, forgiving, and deeply unscientific).

So, what I Need from you:

In the form, name the product (brand and full product name, please), tell me whether you’re sending it or you’d like me to buy it, and then answer two questions. What do you love about it? And what would you change if you could?