Formulate & Price™: Create Your Formula. We Calculate the Weights and Costs.

By Joan Morais

For 15 years, I’ve wanted to create a simple cosmetic formulation calculator to help my students, formulators, and makers build their formulas and understand what they cost.

Students have asked me for years: “Can you help me calculate my formula and what my formula costs?” They wanted a place to create formulas, keep their notes, and price products without feeling overwhelmed by the math.

I understood that need. Developing a cream, body oil, shampoo, or cleanser already involves many decisions. Converting purchase units and calculating costs can interrupt the creative process.

As a business owner, formulator, and creative person, I’ve found formula calculations and product costing to be among the most challenging parts of my work. Many students have told me they don’t use Excel or simply don’t like working with it. I created Formulate & Price™ to offer a simpler option: enter your purchase details, batch size, and ingredient percentages, and it calculates the weights and costs while keeping your formulas organized.

Having the right support gives you more room to develop your skills as a formulator and maker. Every task you can simplify frees up time and attention for experimenting, evaluating your batches, and refining your formulas. Formulate & Price™ helps take formula weight and cost calculations off your plate, giving you more time to devote to the creative work you enjoy and the skills you want to strengthen.

“The smartest thing I ever did in the early days was to hire my weaknesses.” Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx

I created Formulate & Price™ to make that work easier. You create your formula. We calculate the ingredient weights and costs, help you understand your product pricing, and keep your work organized in one place.

Know the cost while you create

I encourage students to consider ingredient costs from the beginning. An ingredient may sound wonderful for your product, but how much will it add to the formula’s cost?

Formulate & Price™ shows that cost as you build your formula, using the purchase details you enter. If an ingredient makes the formula more expensive than you intended, you can evaluate alternatives for their function, performance, and cost, then record what you want to test.

Seeing the numbers during development helps you make those decisions before committing to a larger batch.

Bought in ounces and formulating in grams

You purchase an ingredient in ounces, but your formula uses grams. What is its cost per gram? What does the amount in your formula cost?

Formulate & Price™ handles those calculations for you.

Enter the Quantity Purchased, Purchase Unit, and Price Paid. Then choose your formula’s batch size and enter the ingredient percentages. The tool calculates how much of each ingredient to weigh and what that amount costs.

Ounces by weight convert to grams automatically. For purchases by volume, such as fluid ounces or liters, add the supplier’s density or the measured weight of the full purchase. Your saved ingredient can then be reused across formulas with different batch sizes.

See it with Golden Glow Body Oil

I included Golden Glow Body Oil as a separate learning example so you can see the weights, ingredient costs, and pricing calculations before creating your own product.

For a 1,000-gram batch, here is what the calculator shows:

The MCT Oil purchase is 128 ounces by weight for $41. Formulate & Price™ calculates its cost per gram, works out that 40.50% of this batch is 405 grams, and shows an ingredient cost of approximately $4.58.

You enter the purchase information and percentage; the calculator connects the numbers.

These are sample costs in USD for a calculation learning example. Use your own purchase prices and expenses for your products. Formulation development and testing remain part of your work.

Understand what your finished product costs

Ingredient cost is the starting point for product pricing. Packaging, production supplies, labor, and overhead also contribute to the cost of making a finished product.

Enter those expenses and the number of finished units in Cost & Pricing. Formulate & Price™ calculates Batch COG, the cost to make the batch, and Unit COG, the cost to make one finished unit.

Using the Golden Glow example’s entered expenses, Batch COG is approximately $37.38. With 8 finished units, Unit COG is approximately $4.67. Development labor is excluded in this example; you can choose whether to include it in your own calculation.

Make sense of margin and markup

Gross margin expresses the amount left after COG as a percentage of the selling price. Markup on COG expresses that same amount as a percentage of the cost.

For a simple example, a product that costs $10 to make and sells for $20 has a 50% gross margin and a 100% markup, before selling expenses. The percentages differ because they use different starting numbers.

Formulate & Price™ calculates both for you. Profit at a Glance also helps you compare retail, wholesale, and distributor prices and see what remains after the selling expenses you enter.

At its sample $28 retail price, Golden Glow Body Oil shows an estimated $22.49 per unit after its production costs and a 3% merchant fee. Additional expenses need to be entered to be included in the estimate.

You can also explore discounts and free-shipping offers to see how they affect estimated profit before offering them to your customers.

Give your formulas a home in My LAB

In My LAB, each saved product holds its formula, procedure, notes, and Cost & Pricing. Keep observations in LAB Bench Notes, log and name versions before making changes, and print your formula when you’re ready to make a batch.

Reuse your saved ingredients, purchase records, and suppliers as you develop more products, with less repeated entry and a more organized record of your work.

Start your own My LAB

Your time as a formulator and business owner is valuable. I created Formulate & Price™ to take some of the pressure out of calculations and help you make more thoughtful ingredient and pricing decisions as you work toward a profitable business.