Show HN: GhostLabel – Start your own coffee product line | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GhostLabel – Start your own coffee product line

ghostlabel.io

39 pointsmcasey_gl25 comments

Poorly-kept secret about consumer packaged goods: you can launch your own brand of just about anything tomorrow if you don’t care about sourcing. There’s a US domestic factory making just about anything you can dream of that isn’t electronic, and, if you want something more specific, cheaper, or electronic, there’s Alibaba.

You can white label your own shampoo, sunglasses, supplements, anything, and even if you do the sometimes quite hard work of making sure your product is world-class, it often still doesn’t change the fact that once you have the product in hand, you’re now in the marketing business. This holds true even if you’re tapping a captive customer base with demonstrated search intent as in the case of Amazon. High quality product helps, but in the end it’s a marketing business.

This site doesn’t appear to make things much easier than just googling ‘[x product] contract manufacturer’ and picking up the phone. The product is the easy part.

You just described 80% of Amazon.

I think it extends to all D2C CPG, even ones that appear to have sourcing front of mind, or at least claim to. Branding, design, and marketing can come together to make it very difficult for even a discerning consumer to tell the difference between what is effectively a generic white label and a thoughtfully-sourced product. There was a good discussion about this on HN in re: headphones recently but it applies to just about everything in the world of manufactured consumer goods.

Thanks for the feedback! You certainly can google co-packers and call them yourself - however, we make it a whole lot easier for everyone involved - we take care of food safety paperwork, verify manufacturers, allow you to compare copacker offers, provide a systematic way of communicating what you are making, and allow you to make payments online--among several other services.

I would say that no part of launching a new food or beverage product is easy, including contract manufacturing. We have heard too many horror stories of shady co-packers running away with peoples money, or faking their paperwork, or just being disorganized. We will be building more tools and partnering with other businesses to help brands with the other aspects of launching a new food brand - this is only the start.

Yeah sorry this was not intended as feedback about the product - although if I were to give you a bit of strategy advice it’s this - if you want your customers to succeed, focus on creating truly valuable training and lessons around marketing. You’ve made it easy to get the product, their job is to get customers. Help them do that with quality content marketing about marketing the products you help them produce.

The signup bit that appears right after clicking a product is a turn off. I have no idea what this product is supposed to look like. I'm not going to sign up to some random site just hoping to see more. Provide more details before asking for visitors to create accounts.

Thank you for the feedback! You have complete control over what your product looks and tastes like. Sign up is free! You only pay when your product is made and delivered.

Show HN is supposed to be demonstrable; having to click a layer to to find out everything is hidden is a little bait and switch. You've really only shown you have a signup form...

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

100%. Nothing to see here folks, let’s pack it up!

What is up with the 'custom coffee brands' that seem to be pushed nonstop the last 6 months?

It seems like every youtuber that I watch now has their own coffee brand that they ask you to buy. Heck - a vtuber rabbit was pushing their coffee brand too. Did I just miss the memo?

Super easy to white label on demand and hard for most people to measure actual quality, would be my guess.

I assume there's some company out there that is basically drop shipping coffee and it's all coming from the same place with different branding. It probably costs the youtubers almost nothing to set up and the drop shipping company does everything and then forwards some percentage of the sale to the youtuber so it just runs on auto pilot. It's easy money if you already have an established brand.

This is a bit of conjecture on my part, but I see many "entrepreneurs" who go on vacation or otherwise encounter the large margin from exploitable cheap labor on cloud forest crops like coffee and chocolate (palm oil and others as well), and cannot resist setting up a co-packing operation and using their network to shoehorn it into grocery stores or shill it to their followers. It is a relatively easy "wealth expansion" play if you are decent at marketing or already have an audience.

There is a large spectrum from slave-owning cacao operations to fair trade and regenerative operations, but for sure the margin is a part of the draw.

It's easy print-on-demand merchandise (you dont have to worry about warehousing or any other logistic factor) and is more interesting than the usual POD goods like tshirts and acrylic pins.

There's a business model where a company makes generic products, like coffee or water bottles, and then puts your brand on it for a small fee. They also handle storing and shipping the inventory. So a business or "entrepreneur" can sell what looks like an original product with little investment. They just need a good website and an audience in order to exploit the cheap labor of workers living in poor countries.

Does it make the world any better? Absolutely not. But it's a way to make a buck.

You linked to coffee. There are probably 2 types of coffee bean buyer: The one who cares if it is freshly roasted, and the one that doesn't. Probably it is a matter of taste preference, snobbishness, cost etc. But it would be good to specify if it is freshly roasted with a roast date, or more the "Italian imported" style, like Lavazza for example where it was roasted a while ago dark roast.

Assume I have an existing bean supplier for a built brand I want to pull into your network, and don’t mind if others leverage them for their own brands, in order to outsource more of what your org offers (to go hands off). Is that possible?

Yes - if I am understanding you correctly - your manufacturer can create an account on our platform and find jobs.

Sweet! This is like a distilled version of Alibaba with out the bullshit.

Thank you!

Is it good coffee? That seems important.

You can get whatever coffee quality you want.

To elaborate - it really depends on the type of coffee. Some people really like the cheaper robusta - some people like a 2nd wave arabica blend - some people want that very expensive 3rd wave coffee where you know the story of the farmer and his family. You choose what type and quality of coffee you want to have made and we will find someone in our manufacturer network to make it for you.

Sister comment I made about roast date. Super important for most snobs, along with dark/light roast etc. etc. there are lots of variations. But the roast date is interesting to me as it affects the "supply chain" aspect of this. You will have to fly/truck (but not sail) the coffee if you are not near where it was roasted.

This applies only to beans. For ground or instant ... doesn't matter. Damage has been done :-)....

any example products we can see ?

Seems like some service like this just helps flood the market with crap products set at high prices.

There are some photos of unlabeled products when you select a specific product to design, however you will need to provide your own label design to the manufacturer (although some can help with this as well).

Our service should actually lower the costs of food products you see in the market, as we have transparent pricing and the ability to quickly evaluate different manufacturers in terms of quality, price, location, and experience.

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