One of the easiest ways to promote your handcrafted soaps and cosmetics is through specialty gift baskets that you design and sell yourself. Many different types of businesses use gift baskets to thank customers and reward employees. By creating specialty gift baskets you can help your customers accomplish their goals and they can help you accomplish your business goals - more sales! Here are four gift basket ideas to get you started:

Basket name: “Welcome To Your New Home” gift basket.
Market: Real estate companies looking to give a gift to customers, or home decorators looking for new accessories to decorate a house with for a home show.
Basket description: This gift basket can contain soap and cosmetic items needed by the new homeowner. Such items can include bath soaps, guest soaps and kitchen soap. Throw in a couple of washcloths or dishcloths as an accessory.

Basket name: “Welcome Baby”
Market: Obstetricians who want to thank their customers, hospital gift shops, maternity stores.
Basket description: This gift basket should contains items to help welcome a new baby such as baby powder, baby oil and baby soap.

Basket name: “Kids Bath Basket”
Market: Stores that sell kids clothing
Basket description: This basket should contain fun shaped soaps. Add a funny shaped bath mitt or scrubbie as an accessory.

Basket name: “A Gift For The Bridesmaid”
Market: Individual brides and bridal stores
Basket description: This basket should contain a selection of pamper products like soaps, lotions and bath salts, scrubs or milks. It should be affordable so that a bride can afford to purchase several to give to her wedding party as a way of saying thank you.

In addition to making nice gift containers, baskets also make attractive storage containers when you are displaying your products at gift shows and bazaars.

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Turn a leftover box into a beautiful package for your bath salts and bath teas. This project is a nice way to turn an old box into something useful. It also makes a nice package for Mother’s Day gifts.

Supplies Needed:

A clean box or other cardboard container. I recommend that you use a round box for this project. This way you have no square edges to deal with. (For this project we recycled a round tea box, however, any type of clean cardboard container with a lid will do).

A paintbrush

Enough fabric or wide ribbon to cover the box.

One bottle of Modge-Podge® (Modge-Podge® is a sealant and glue sold at craft shops).

One roll of double sided tape.

One roll of very thin ribbon (1/4″ wide or less)

To make the box follow these steps:

Step 1: Cut the fabric (or ribbon) to fit around the box.

Step 2: Cover the sides of the container with the fabric (or ribbon). Use double-sided sticky tape to hold it in place.

Step 3: Using your paintbrush, paint over the fabric with one layer of Modge-Podge®.

Step 4: Apply the thin ribbon around the edges of the container. Use thin-strips of double sided sticky tape to hold in place.

Step 5: Using your paintbrush, paint over the whole container with several layers of Modge-Podge®. Allow each layer of Modge-Podge® to dry before applying another layer.

Here are some things that you can fill your box with:
-bath salts
-bath tea
-bath fizzies
-small bars of soap