BUSINESS BITS

Rafael Santos
Executing brilliant ideas

Prestige Labels Co. (PLC) started offering its customized product development and manufacturing solutions in 2003, targeting small business owners with great ideas but with scant resources for market and product research. For fees that go as low as P15,000, the company develops customized health and personal-care products. It also serves as a one-stop shop for creating and marketing health, beauty, and home cleaning products, with services ranging from product formulation and packaging design to integrated supply-chain management.

According to Patricia Besinga, PLC’s managing director, the company takes the guesswork out of product formulation particularly for startup companies. “Coming up with brilliant ideas is often the easy part,” she says. ”It’s the making of the actual product that proves difficult for some businesses, so this is where PLC comes in: we ask our clients what they want and we develop the product for them.”

Besinga views her company as an outsource provider for enterprises that want better products but have neither the expertise nor capacity to do the product development, marketing, and manufacturing themselves. What PLC does is to tailor-fit its services based on the client’s needs and specifications, using the wealth of its industry experience and strategic partnerships to deliver solutions.

She explains: “Our service is for people who have no idea where to begin after coming up with a product idea. Most startups have budgetary constraints, and because of this they can’t purchase the volume orders that most manufacturing facilities require. PLC comes in at this point, helping startups out so they can be relieved of the headaches during the startup phase.”
Based on her experience in working for big companies, Besinga has a clear idea of the usual shortcomings of small businesses when it comes to capitalization, manpower, and expertise. She had put up PLC to help fill this void, providing affordable solutions that can empower even small companies to take a crack at the bigger markets.

“The entire package PLC offers costs about P100,000, which consists of market research, product stability tests, packaging, as well as BFAD [Bureau of Food and Drugs] registration,” she says. “We can produce the products and even market the merchandise for the client. The product formulation is retained by PLC, but clients can ask for tweaks as they see fit.”

The PLC service package is inclusive of brand name studies with the appropriate logo design and the raw material sourcing arrangements for the product. Aside from its own Quezon City-based factory, PLC uses a line of accredited independent suppliers and manufacturing facilities.

Currently, Prestige produces for its various clients such products as teething gels, toothpastes, mouthwashes, colognes, lotions, sunscreen and hair products, laundry detergents, fabric softeners, household cleaning chemicals, and food supplements. “We have partnerships with four world-class manufacturing facilities to produce the products that we formulate for our clients,” Besinga says.