What is the best way to distribute a new cosmetic product to distributors and hair salons?

I've been in ecommerce for over a decade and have co-founded and helped start companies collectively driving over $10MM in ecommerce sales. I've consulted for Fortune 500 ecommerce stores. Here's my advice if you're just getting started without a big budget. Note: Some of this is copied from my answer to a similar question. #1) PROVE THE ASSUMPTION: Start with a dropshipper's existing products to figure out what sells best before you spend money on manufacturing and warehousing. Amazon is perfect for this - they will pay you 4%-10% to promote 253,000,000 products (http://bit.ly/1q2M85R) - you can sign up at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ Alternately, get very small amounts of the product (maybe even just buy some from a competitor) and try selling them on ebay and amazon. Nothing hurts more than having $50,000 of imported product gathering dust in your fulfillment warehouse while listening to a voicemail from a debt collector. #2) SOURCING There are several options here. Many people prefer Alibaba.com. Warning - if you use Alibaba, you are stepping into a tank of pirahnas. There are more scam "manufacturers" on Alibaba than real ones. Use Escrow or AliSecure Pay if you buy. If the supplier says they only take T/T, Western Union, Moneygram - just say no! I prefer American Made when possible. If you're like me, try Ariba's Discovery Service - http://bit.ly/1q2NFZu - which will allow you to find suppliers with a physical presence in the USA. Note: Many things can be made on demand (someone purchases, one gets made and shipped) instead of in 500+ manufacturing runs. Start there if you can - Books on CreateSpace.com, Clothes on CafePress.com, Playing Cards on MakePlayingCards.com, etc - to test out your exact product. If you decide to source by purchasing product in bulk, find a fulfillment company to store and fulfill (ship) your orders. Amazon does this - http://services.amazon.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon.htm - but they might decide to crush you like a bug if you're successful (http://bit.ly/1q2V7DX). Other fulfillment companies for e-commerce include http://www.shipwire.com/ and http://www.webgistix.com/ #3) LAUNCH YOUR SITE This is an entire topic in itself. One of the fastest ways I know for newbies to start in e-commerce is with a SquareSpace.com store. Other options include GoDaddy.com and BigCommerce.com. If you can stand to use the templates they provide instead of trying to customize them, you'll save yourself a lot of hassle and expense - customization usually looks terrible unless a designer/coder was hired to do the work. If you do customize, find someone on odesk.com or elance.com. If you're not hard up for money, just build a custom store from the start. If you can't do that, save up some money and then go for it. Focus on increasing conversion rate - for every 100 visitors, get 1 to buy. Then 2. Then 4. Then 8 (8%). #4) MARKET Figure out where your competition is advertising. Are they getting free, "organic" SEO results on Google? Using social media to drive billions of dollars of sales? (NOTE: That was a joke - don't count on social media as the nucleus of your marketing campaign. Please!) Are they paying for Google ads ("PPC"), buying email lists, using strategic partnerships for promotion, relying on shopping portals, using banner advertising, or something else entirely? There's probably a good reason - figure out what it will take to play in those waters. At the same time, try to find a small enough niche that you can win in it. #5) BEWARE Be careful about artsy things. If someone is attracted to something artistic, it's usually because there is a story behind the art for them, or because it's cheap. If you're going to try to sell artistic things, you may want to consider doing some serious research first about who has been successful in that area. Look at etsy.com to see handmade artsy items (very cool). #6) WORTH A LOOK Worth checking out as you start your journey: Art.com, yessy.com, Artfire.com, ArtPal.com #7) DEEP FOUNDATION If you need help, reach out for a 15 minute call and we'll discuss a go-to-market strategy specific to your goals.

If you have your CAD design done, you can get it printed in plastic first using inexpensive printers at 3DHubs for example. Do tweaks to the design and reprint. This can't cost more than $5 or so per print. Once you're happy you can then send your design to shapeways or i.materialise to be printed in metal. These services will likely charge a fee $100 for a metal print.

There are several options available which would work for SaaS. The best one I can suggest is Referral Program. The referral program would need to have Training Documentation well defined as well as marketing material. This would allow you to pay other consultants or individuals to pipe leads or signups to your site to get exposure. This is especially effective in SMB market and tends to be targeted to the customer who would purchase. The second is to be more specific in contacting specific demographic targeted customers (be aware in the US you must be subscribed to Do Not Call Registery to Scrub call list for telemarketing or be potentially be fined by US Government). You can engage Lead generators to accomplish this for you but be careful that they are registered and scrub their list against the US Do Not Call Registery. Email Campaigns are good if you have users who have requested to opt into receiving an email and also have opt out options to remove themselves from the list to comply with US and other countries SPAM Laws. Then there are advertising though multiple media types beyond email and banner advertisements such as radio, TV, Billboards, Magazines and other print media.

This depends on where you are located but in many major cities (U.S., Europe and Asia) there are showrooms buyers shop. This means, for a fee, your products are guaranteed to be viewed by buyers (though there is no way to guarantee they will select to buy them). These buyers range from local shops to regional chains to department store and boutique buyers. If you are picked up by one or more and show data to these online specialty stores, that is more appealing than a cold turkey approach. Simultaneously building an online following is key as well since both retailers have e-commerce-savvy demos.

Have you considered providing the book in electronic format. If somebody wants the book and are willing to pay the shipping fee, they get the paper copy, otherwise, it's a download.