Welcome to the new generation of the Mentoring Program.

When we started the Mentoring Program a few years ago, the idea was to transfer knowledge about cosmetic product development to people who want to make something of their own.

Today, after eight generations of participants, numerous products that have passed through our laboratory, and brands that I have had the opportunity to follow from the first idea to the market, I look at this program much more broadly.

Because in the meantime, I’ve learned something very important: making a good cosmetic product is actually only one small part of creating a successful beauty business.

You can make a fantastic cream, you can have great active ingredients, a beautiful texture and packaging that looks perfect, but if you don’t know who you’re selling the product to, why someone would buy it, how much it really costs you, how much money is left after you sell it, through which channel you will reach the customer and how many you will have to sell for the whole story to make economic sense, you simply don’t have a business. You have a product.

And it is precisely this difference that became the foundation of what I want the Mentoring Program to be today, which is why we created the Beauty Startup Bootcamp .

Before we talk about emulsifiers, active ingredients, preservatives and formulations, I want to talk about the market, I want to ask those questions that are not always pleasant, but are necessary.

Who is your customer? What problem do you solve for them? Are there enough people who have that problem? What are they already buying? Why should they buy from you instead? How much are they willing to pay? How much can your product cost? What should your margin be? What happens to that margin when a distributor, pharmacy, or retailer comes into the picture? What is your MOQ? How much capital do you have to commit to the first production run? How long can that money be tied up in inventory?

And perhaps the most important question of all: Are we building a product or are we building a business? Because they are not the same.

That is exactly why I want to say very clearly who the 9th generation of the Mentoring Program is intended for.

This is not a program for DIY cosmetics enthusiasts, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Loving to formulate, research ingredients, and make cosmetics for yourself is a wonderful hobby, and there are training courses designed specifically for that.

But the Mentoring Program is not that kind of education.

In the 9th generation, we create new value and build a business from it.

Maybe you have an idea for your first product, maybe you already have a small brand and you’ve realized that you can no longer make decisions intuitively. Maybe you want to manufacture your own products, maybe you want to enter pharmacies, retail or another market. Or maybe you don’t even have a brand name yet, but you know you want to build a serious beauty business.

Then we need to talk about much more than just the formulation.

We need to understand the market, the competition and the consumer, we need to know how to make a financial construction of the product, determine the price, understand rebates, margins and profitability. We need to talk about positioning, sales, webshop, retail, marketing and communication. And then we need to understand what we are selling equally seriously.

And that’s where we get into the nitty-gritty.

The skin. Raw materials. Formulations. Active ingredients. Product development. Stability. Microbiology. Challenge tests. Dermatological tests. Packaging. Regulation. Safety Assessment. PIF. CPNP. GMP.

Not because I think a beauty brand owner has to stand behind a homogenizer their entire life, but because I think they have to understand their own product well enough to be able to make good business decisions about it.

He must be able to talk to the formulator, the manufacturer, the Safety Assessor, the packaging supplier, the designer, the distributor and the customer. He must understand why something costs what it does, why something lasts for months, why we can’t write a certain claim on the packaging and why a product that looks perfect after two days may not look that way after six months.

And then we come to the laboratory.

Because no matter how much you talk about a product, some things you have to see, do, and make mistakes with your own hands to truly understand them. And that’s why the Mentoring Program today is no longer an education about cosmetics formulation for me.

It is an education on creating a beauty business. From the idea, through the market and business model, to product development, production and the moment when that product needs to find its customer.

After eight generations, maybe that’s the biggest change in the way I look at this program, because I don’t want you to come out of it with just wording.

I want you to come out able to look at an idea and assess whether it makes business sense. I want you to know how to spot a mistake before it costs you thousands of euros. I want you to understand numbers as seriously as you understand the INCI list. And I want you to know that one day, when your product is sitting on a pharmacy shelf, a grocery store shelf, or someone’s bathroom cabinet, you know why it’s there and how you got it there.

That is why we are opening enrollments in the 9th generation of the Mireille Lab Mentoring Program.

We don’t build people who just want to learn how to make cosmetics, we build people who want to make something out of cosmetics.

If your goal is to create a product, build a brand, and turn it into a sustainable business; then we have something to talk about.