Cheap or Inexpensive?
How can we offer our Products so Inexpensively?
There are a few simple answers to your question:
1. When we became VAT registered, we absorbed most of the VAT price increases ourselves so our products stayed at great low prices.
2. We buy our products in bulk directly from the importers, or import directly whenever possible.
3. We package a lot of our products and bottle all our aromatherapy oils ourselves, cutting out factory processing costs, and ensuring optimum freshness (where applicable!). Please see below for our No Frills Policy.
4. We do not set our prices in accordance with the current market, they are set depending on what we buy in for, and we do not buy products if we cannot sell them at a price we would like to pay for them ourselves! This means our prices may be subject to change as we pass our savings on to YOU!
5. We are not greedy, for example, we don't charge double for organic oils just because we COULD!
6. We are a small team and we work really hard, so our overheads are fairly minimal compared to larger companies with a lot of staff and fancy machinery to make their lives easy!
7. We design, programme and maintain our own website, no expensive contractors! This goes for all our equipment too!
8. We rely on word-of-mouth advertising of our customers and tend to steer away from expensive advertising campaigns.
10. When we do advertise, all our adverts are our own graphic design work, even our previous TV advert was designed, produced, filmed, edited, etc by ourselves!
NO FRILLS POLICY
When anyone buys a product or item, nearly all the time the packaging ends up in the bin. What a waste of money, and especially a waste for the environment! Not only is it a drain on the environment to make the packaging, but also the litter it produces.
Therefore, at Shop Holistic, wherever possible our products are supplied in adequate, but plain, packaging. In many cases re-usable grip seal bags are used making ideal storage bags for your purchase!
The labels are made and printed ourselves, further reducing overheads. Even though they are basic, we try to make them as informative as possible (where legislation allows).
Our leaflets and instruction booklets (apart from those supplied by manufacturers) are all written and produced by ourselves, with information provided from reliable sources and years of experience! This greatly reduces overheads that would be incurred through printing etc.
Doesn't Inexpensive Aromatherapy mean Cheap Aromatherapy?
Our prices are comparable to some manufactured cheap oils available on the market with high quality, pure products usually being a lot more expensive. This poses the question "Are your products inferior as they are so cheap?"
Our products are in no way inferior and are all of very high quality. Our suppliers are constantly striving to ensure that they acquire the best possible product available at the time. In fact, our main supplier also supplies many larger well-known brands! For you reassurance we are licensed with the Aromatherapy Trade Council and Soil Association.
Oils and products are usually discontinued (due to crop failure for example) rather than obtain a lesser quality product from another source, even if the product was very profitable for us, and even if we could exploit the market by offering something that is scarce.
Our suppliers ensure all products are GM free and are completely pure as nature intended.
We obtain 99% or our Aromatherapy from the same 2 suppliers as we have always done as we know how hard they work to provide the highest standard of service and products available.