A market stall range built from a single master base and four modifications

A five product balm range from one master base, with a modification table, a 200 unit weekend plan, container mix and pour temperatures for every line.

A stall needs enough variety that people stop, and few enough products that you can make them all in one evening. This page gives one master base and four modifications that turn it into five sellable lines, with the grams to add per kilogram, the pour temperature for each, a 200 unit weekend plan, and an honest account of what the trick does not save you: the regulator counts formulas, not bases.

• Base: 1 kg
• Lines: 5
• Pour: 62 to 80 C
• 200 units in one melt session
• Five safety assessments

Why one base and not five recipes

Five unrelated formulas means five sets of raw materials in stock, five melts, five sets of pour behaviour to learn, and five things that can drift between batches. A single base means one melt at one temperature, one bulk purchase of each oil, and a texture you already know because you have made it fifty times.

The base is set at 10% beeswax deliberately. That is soft for a lip tube and firm for a face pot, which is exactly where you want a starting point, because adding wax is easy and removing it is not. Every modification below either adds a solid to a measured weight of base, or dilutes the base with a liquid and butter cut. Nothing is ever subtracted, because you cannot take beeswax back out of a melt.

What this buys you is inventory and time. What it does not buy you is paperwork, and that is dealt with near the end of the page rather than hidden.

The master base

Weight percent of the total batch, totalling exactly 100. Make it in whatever multiple of a kilogram your largest pot takes comfortably.

Nothing here is exotic and nothing is expensive, which matters when a slow line ages out and you have to write it off. The material choices, and what each of them costs per gram at hobby, trade and 25 kg quantities, are worked through in the low cost balm formula. Melt the base at 75 to 80 C and hold it 20 to 25 minutes so no shea crystal nuclei survive, then split it hot.

The four modifications

Each modification is a weight added to a measured weight of base. The addition figures come straight from the arithmetic of a percentage: to raise a component from 10% to 15%, add x grams to 1000 g of base such that (100 + x) divided by (1000 + x) equals 0.15, which gives x = 59.

Modification 1 at two strengths is one operation, not two: you are adding beeswax, and the only difference is how much. That is why five products come out of four modifications. A 30% wax bar dents at about 30 C, so if you sell outdoors in a British summer take it to 33% by adding 343 g per kilogram instead of 286 g, and keep the display bars in a cool box. Bar structure and mould handling are covered at lotion bar.

The five lines in full percentages

Modifications are how you make the products. Percentages are what goes on the ingredient list and into the safety assessment, so both have to exist. Every column below totals 100.0 after rounding to one decimal place.

Two of these need a word of explanation. The tinted line carries 10% castor rather than 7.5% because the pigment is pre-dispersed in castor before it goes in; grinding iron oxides into a little castor with a spatula or a small mill is the difference between an even colour and a speckled one. The face balm ends up richer in shea than the base because dilution to 6% wax would otherwise thin it out, so the cut adds butter as well as oil.

Containers, fill weights and yields

Fill weight is volume multiplied by the working density of a set balm, which Trebalm takes as 0.92 g/mL. Yields below already carry a 10% overage, so they are net product divided by 0.90, not batch weight multiplied by 0.90. Getting that the wrong way round is a common way to come up a row of tubes short, and it is set out properly in batch scaling.

Three of those pour windows sit inside the general figures at pour temperatures and two do not, for stated reasons. The rosin salve pours hot at 76 to 80 C because rosin raises the viscosity of the melt sharply and a cool pour goes stringy and lumpy in the tin. The body bar pours at 70 to 74 C rather than the usual open-mould window, because a 30% wax blend begins setting almost immediately and a cool pour leaves flow lines across the face of the bar. The tinted tube pours at the cool end and gets stirred between rows, because the longer it stays fluid the further the pigment sinks.

One melt session, five products

The order is not arbitrary. Work from the hottest line to the coolest, take the contaminating additions last, and give rosin a jug it never leaves. Times below are for the 200 unit plan in the next section and assume one person working alone.

1. 0:00 Weigh and melt the base. 3.6 kg into a stainless pot, up to 75 to 80 C, held 20 to 25 minutes until completely clear. Tocopherol goes in at the end, below 60 C, or into each sub-lot if you prefer.
2. 0:45 Salve first, in its own jug. Draw 843 g of base, add 73 g of gum rosin, hold at 85 to 90 C stirring for 10 to 15 minutes until the melt is clear, then pour 30 tins at 76 to 80 C.
3. 1:05 Bars. Draw 1188 g, add 340 g of beeswax, return to 78 C to clear, pour 25 moulds at 70 to 74 C.
4. 1:30 Lip tubes. Draw 559 g, add 32 g of beeswax, hold at 74 C. Pour 80 tubes at 66 to 72 C and keep the remaining 190 g of blend in the jug.
5. 1:55 Tinted tubes. Stir 2.9 g of iron oxides, pre-ground into 5.7 g of castor, through the retained 190 g. Pour 40 tubes at 66 to 70 C, stirring the jug between every row.
6. 2:10 Face pots last. The remaining 917 g of base plus 611 g of cut, warmed to 70 C to homogenise, cooled to 62 to 66 C, poured into 25 jars.
7. 2:35 Top up. Tubes, tins and jars all dish in the centre 10 to 15 minutes after pouring. Go back over each rack with a warm jug and give it a second thin layer.
8. 2:50 Cure overnight before capping tins, labelling anything, or judging hardness. Wax crystallisation continues for 24 to 48 hours.

The 200 unit weekend plan

Two hundred units is roughly what a busy single-table stall sells across a weekend at a decent market, and it fits in one evening of making plus one evening of finishing. The mix below leans on lip tubes because they are the cheapest impulse purchase and the fastest to make.

Total hands-on time runs to about three hours for the melt session and another two for capping, labelling, batch coding and packing, so five hours for 200 units. That is a real number to divide into your takings before you decide the day was profitable, and it is the input that costing and pricing needs. Do the same arithmetic on materials before the market rather than guessing at it on the drive home.

Packing list

• Containers at 110% of the unit count, because tubes crack and tin lids arrive dented.
• Labels printed 10% over, plus blank stock for batch codes and best-before dates.
• An ingredient list on every unit. Not on the display card, on the unit.
• Testers, one per line, with the same full labelling as a sale unit.
• A cool box, from about April to September. A tray of 15% wax tubes in direct sun goes soft at 30 C and a bar will bow.
• The batch record for the run, and your insurance certificate, which markets increasingly ask to see.

What sells where, pitch costs and the transition from a stall to an online listing are covered at selling at markets and online. Heat is the recurring problem with a balm stall, and the mechanisms and mitigations are at balm melting in the heat.

What a five line range costs you in paperwork

This is the part the one-base trick does not solve. In Great Britain and the EU, the obligations under the cosmetics regulation attach to each cosmetic product placed on the market, and a product is defined by its formulation, not by the base it came from. Five formulations means five product information files, five safety assessments and five notifications, whether you notify through the EU portal or the UK submission service. Which portal, and what each one wants, is at cosmetic notification portals.

There is one real saving. Because the five formulas share a base, most of the toxicological work behind the assessments is common, so assessors will usually quote less for a related set than for five unrelated products. Ask for a range price before you commission the first one. Separately, the notification portals allow a colour cosmetic sold in several shades to be notified once with the full colourant list, which is why adding four more tint shades to the tinted line is cheap while adding a sixth distinct formula is not. Confirm both points with your own assessor rather than assuming them, and see safety assessment and the CPSR.

In the United States the arrangement is different again: the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act requires facility registration and a listing for each cosmetic product, plus records adequate to substantiate safety, and the ingredient declaration follows the existing labelling rules. Requirements by market are set out at selling balms in the UK and EU and labelling cosmetics in the US. Trebalm cannot tell you whether your particular range meets any of these obligations; that is what an assessor is for.

How a range fails

The second row is the expensive one. A range makes you feel productive, and the natural instinct is to make an even number of everything. Sales are never even. Track which lines sold at each market for three markets before you settle the mix, and let the slow lines run at half batch or come out of the range entirely.

How many lines you should actually run

The decision rule is not how many products you can make, it is how many you can document and sell through before their date. Start at three: lip tube, hand salve, body bar. Those cover the three reasons people buy balm at a stall, they use the same base, and they need three assessments rather than five. Add the tinted tube when the plain tube sells out at two consecutive markets, because a tint is a shade variant of something already proven rather than a new idea. Add the face pot last, since it is the highest priced, slowest moving and shortest lived of the five.

The honest limit of this page is that the modification arithmetic is exact and the commercial advice is not. The gram figures will produce the percentages shown, on any scale, in any kitchen. The mix of 200 units, the five hours of labour and the claim that three lines is the right starting point are judgements drawn from how small balm producers typically trade, not measurements, and your market will differ. What does not vary is the regulatory count: if the ingredient list on two products is not identical, you have two products, and both of them need everything.

Reviewed and updated 6 September 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix and log it.