Supporting My Family with a Home-Based Beauty Business

Tara will tell you... she was cheap before cheap was in style. She enjoyed luxury salon treatments, but she didn't enjoy their inflated prices.

Why was it that having healthy, soft locks should cost a car payment?

Tara felt there had to be an easy way to deep condition her hair the way they did at the salon in her own home. Of course she couldn't bring in a salon size dryer, so she set out to find the right mix of materials that would create the same effect.

After finding the secret ingredient while watching a marathon race, she had 100 of her deep conditioning caps made and sold them to different salons and beauty shops in her city. An infomercial company saw the product and began to market it along with some shampoo.

That's when her need for deep conditioning started to fill her need for some serious dough. Tara realized that she had a business on her hands. Something that would be able to make money for her family and herself.

"Once the infomercial was on the air and did fairly well, I realized that this work could go from the realm of a fun hobby, something to do in my spare time, to a real business," she said.

Soon afterward Tara came up with her second invention.

"Ever since high school, I had always had the idea of putting nail polish in a pen, like a felt-tip marker," she says, "I was working on an art project with my daughter, with poster board and pens, and the idea came back to me. That was my genesis for a manicure pen."

Trusting in her ideas helped Tara become successful. Follow her pointers and you can be a successful inventor too--in due time. Inventions take patience.

1. Create a prototype. Nobody buys an idea.

It's important to get your idea to the prototype stage. Find something that's like the product, even though it might be in a completely different industry.

For example, Tara contacted the manufacturers of the pen that she used in her daughter's art project, and while they couldn't do cosmetics because they weren't cosmetic-qualified, they sold her the pen parts that she used to create the first prototype of Manicure Magic.

2. Have your prototype priced out.

Take a look at the marketplace to determine a reasonable cost to create your product.

3. Ask yourself, "How much do I want to invest?"

It's usually not expensive to get to the point of a prototype, so after that, you need to figure out where the manufacturing money is coming from, and how much of the product you want to produce initially.

4. Figure out where to sell it.

Could you sell it on the internet? Could you present it to one of the shopping channels and sell it that way? Could you take it just down the street to your local store and see if they would carry it? Since Tara's product was a manicure pen, she knew that if she could demonstrate it and explain it, it would sell. That's why QVC was the perfect way to launch her product.

If you're interested in taking your product to a large manufacturer or a large retailer that you think would have an interest in it, find an agent or a consultant to help you get in the door.

5. Define success on your own terms.

"You have to define success for yourself," said Tara. "You don't have to be the next Martha Stewart to be successful. If your vision of success is just to supplement your family's income, or just to make enough money to take a really nice vacation, or help pay for tuition for the kids, then you should be proud of that success."

 For those of you with a fascination for new inventions, there's always something new at the Inventor Spot, a blog that targets new creations from the worlds of food, technology and fashion.