“What’s your MOQ?” is the first question we get from every prospect. The answer is 5,000 units. The follow-up, “is that a lot?”, deserves an honest breakdown.
5,000 units in plain English
5,000 units of finished product. For capsules, that’s 5,000 bottles. For powders, that’s 5,000 jars or sachet packs. For creams, that’s 5,000 tubes, jars, or pumps.
It’s the smallest run that lets us amortise setup costs, packaging tooling, and regulatory work without those costs eating your unit margin to zero.
The cost stack at 5,000 units
A typical first-batch project at 5,000 units of, say, a vitamin complex in capsules looks roughly like:
| Cost line | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Formulation | Your recipe, lab development time, pilot batch |
| Raw materials | Actives, excipients, capsule shells |
| Production | Encapsulation, blending, in-process QC |
| QC release testing | The 12 tests + Certificate of Analysis |
| Packaging materials | Bottles, caps, labels, induction seals, outer cartons |
| Design | Label and outer-carton artwork |
| Regulatory | Notification(s) and dossier per target market |
| Logistics | Palletising, export documentation |
We quote each project individually because the inputs vary wildly. The honest range for a first batch is the kind of thing we discuss after seeing your brief, not on a pricing page.
What 5,000 units gives you on the revenue side
Take a vitamin complex retailing at €25/bottle. 5,000 bottles × €25 = €125,000 in retail revenue. At a typical 60% gross margin (your sale price minus your manufacturing cost), that’s €75,000 in gross profit on the first batch. That’s 10–20× your manufacturing cost for most categories.
You don’t need to sell all 5,000 fast. A modest brand selling 50 units/day clears the inventory in 100 days. A growing DTC brand selling 200/day clears it in 25 days, and is reordering before the first batch is gone.
Why we don’t go below 5,000 (usually)
We sometimes do for proven repeat customers running pilots, or for high-margin specialty creams where the per-unit economics still work. But for new brands the answer is usually no. Here’s why:
- Setup costs (formulation, regulatory, packaging design) are fixed regardless of run size. At 1,000 units, those fixed costs eat your margin.
- Most packaging suppliers have their own minimums (usually 5,000+ for custom labels and printed bottles). We can’t run smaller than the packaging supplier will print.
- Below 5,000, the per-unit cost balloons to where you can’t profitably retail. We’d rather not take a project that’s set up to fail commercially.
Reorders are where it gets fun
Your second batch is significantly cheaper than your first. The formulation work, regulatory dossier, label design, and supplier qualification all happened on round one. Round two is essentially raw materials + production + QC. Most brands’ second-batch unit cost drops 25–40%.
Should you go bigger than 5,000?
If you have demand to support it, yes. The economies of scale are real:
- 10,000 units: ~10–15% lower unit cost than 5,000
- 25,000 units: ~20–25% lower unit cost
- 50,000+ units: best margin, but you’re now carrying the inventory risk
For a first project we usually recommend running 5,000–10,000 to validate demand, then sizing your reorder based on actual sell-through.