Perfume Costs
As you were interested in the cost of the perfume, I also got curious about it.
Knowing that the Jasmine Sambac Absolute and Neroli Essential Oil are a bit pricey, my guess for the total material value was around 2€, and it was actually pretty close. Together with 0.06€ for the Jojoba oil, the total material value is 2.12€, and with the 0.34€ bottle it is 2.46€.
Of course you could pay me this, but it is pretty insignificant, and I liked to give this as a gift – not for the sake of those 2.46€, but for the work that went into.
And this is also where it becomes interesting. If sold as a product, perfumers typically set the retail price at 2x – 10x the material value – so anything between 5€ and 25€ for this 1.5 ml bottle.
The challenge that I have is that given the time I spend creating the perfume (minimum 15 minutes, but rather towards 30, for a custom creation), at what I would consider a fair price of around 12.50€, I am left with a 10€ margin for 15-30 minutes of work.
Working backwards from my requirement to earn at least 5.000€ per month with maximum 100 hours of work per month, there would still be a 5x gap between my aspirational hourly rate and my realistic hourly rate.
And if want to earn 5.000€ per month with 12.50€ custom perfumes, I'll need to make around 500 of them, and spend maximum 10 minutes on each of them, everything included: marketing, blending, packaging, customer service...
What would seem more realistic would be to increase the quality of the experience, spend 1-2 hours in person with clients, and charge somewhere between 250-600€ per custom perfume creation.
This would allow me to get to my target income with 10-20 clients per month, and approximately 40-60 hours of work.