Why We Haven't Invested in Machines

I get a lot of suggestions from well-meaning folks who want to improve my production processes, and they frequently tell me that I should buy some machines. Now, there are some amazing machines out there that could automate pretty much every step of what we do, but it's not something I'm interested in at this stage in my business.

For starters, they're very expensive, and as they should be! They're really sophisticated pieces of machinery that do amazing things, but they're also very much out of our budget at the moment. Not only that, but they make a lot of lip balm, and I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but we just don't sell enough lip balm where it would make sense to invest in that type of machinery.

It's not that machines are bad, but sometimes there are advantages to making things by hand, especially if your business is smaller scale like ours is. It gives us the flexibility to make small batches of a wide variety of different flavor anytime we need them, instead of having to commit to large quantities we can't be sure we'll sell.