Mark ups on any product are usually 50% if not more.

maybe for big companies that buy big orders but not for one man shows who take tiny orders (and her orders would have been minute)

Susan ma worked on stall and thought why am I not in business doing this for myself ?

She then went off decided to sell naturally based skin care ( as far as I am aware her own decision)

Certainly the name is her own, no one else sells the stuff in the same packages as she does and yet she stole the idea!

What the idea to sell skincare on a market stall ?

the stuff in the bottles which I believe is unique in the formulations to her?

the idea of naturally based skin care Ponds are now selling something similar have they stolen the idea from Susan?

I think people are desperate to take away any credit from Susana and cant think of anything better to come up with?

I have an idea for selling herbs in pots, but am I not to do it as every other garden centre also has the same idea ?

My herbs however would have my unique selling point and therefore like Susan I have stolen no noes idea

What nonsense about Susan 'stealing' the idea from a previous job!

Are you telling me that the folk who set up Lush, Body Shop etc. never worked in this industry before? Get real!

And has it occurred to you that LS was not pleased with Helen precisely because she hadn't put forward a business plan to do with a product/company she was experienced with? If she'd put forward her 2nd (supposed) business plan about setting up a speciality bread shop would you be lambasting her now about stealing ideas from Greggs?!

My stab in the dark guess at how much profit she makes on a jar of moisturiser which she is selling at £16 is £12 profit all tolled. It's only a little jar and it's just a bit of grease innit?

do you believe she made £1000 profit from a market stall?

its a numbers game and she is a tiny fish

The video of punters at the Ideal Home Show on Susan's website answers that question. Either Susan has Darren Brown or Jedi Jim qualities or these folk really did love her products!

http://www.tropicskincare.com/static/Video

Why do any of Susan's orders for her products have to be miniscule?

Must be in my imagination that Jim sold umbrellas available to buy at £1 and sold them on for £10 or that Susan bought numerous bracelets at £1.50 and sold them on for £6.

What do you know of her packaging costs, her label costs, her website costs, her postal costs?

I don't know why it's so difficult to understand that Susan's will have or should have applyed a 50% mark up or more to cover all those aspects. It will be the reason why her online business is profitable.

How do you know it is profitable?

i took a look at her website

her products are an almost exact copy of the Liz Earle range (which i use) even down to the packaging being the same colour & the same containers for the products.

Not exactly her 'original' idea...Liz earles products have been around for years

From your original guess of £3 profit per item, do you really believe that £13 on each of these little pots is spent on the product itself and all the overheads?

http://www.tropicskincare.com/Tropic-Face/Skin-Revive

It all depends on what she buys at. I do know that if you buy big cost is small but she must buy very small quantities.

Yes they are similar - but Susan's are about half the price!

I've already explained mark ups. On You're Hired LAS was happy to offer Susan some kind of deal so even less reason to think Susan's business isn't profitable. It's profitability is probably the reason Susan's rightly proud of it and why she kept so close to what she's knows when she produced her business plan.

Nothing came out at the interview stage that her business was a sham or that she'd lied about putting herself through uni or that paying off her mother's mortgage was phoney. Other than being repetitive why would anyone believe it shouldn't be profitable.

We saw tiny snippets of the interview process and her dismantelling would have compromised how they had portrayed her to date.

The fact that her business plan was so ridiculous in terms of profit and loss should tell you what you need to know about other claims she has made re her "Business"

Yes; or at least beauty products. Someone showed her how the business worked and how profitable beauty products were and how people would buy them based on image and pseudo-science. They taught her all of this as part of her employment with them. Then she took all that knowledge and scarpered with it. They found they'd been training their own competition.

Or so it sounds from what we've heard. If she actually set up in a different location I'd be a lot happier about it.

According to Susan she only spent one weekend with the original stallholder - we're not talking about some old master spending the twilight years of his life imparting his lifetimes knowledge to an underling who then destroys him leaving his family destitute..

one day she worked there and how do you know that she hasn't set up in a different market?
to say she stole anything is to deny any free market competitiveness.

There are tons of the same types of companies and individuals out there selling the same types of things, what's really new.

I think Tom's idea of finding a way to solve back pain has also been taken so, that's just the way these things are really. Sometimes people look at an exisiting products and think they can better it and maybe this is what Tom and Susan have done with their business plans (which are similar to what's on the market already). I have def seen something being advertised that is for use with chairs to help with posture/back pain so Tom's idea was by no means original either.

So many ideas are recyled when it comes to products. So many chefs doing the same dishes, so many fashion designers bringing back styles from former eras, so many artists singing similar songs with imilar beats, so many furniture stores bringing out the same chairs tables and lamps, and, so many chemists with shelves of beauty products by various companies that all do more or less the same thing. High street retalers bring out copies of clothes by the so called High fashion rollers and just copy the image and sell it at affordable prices for the rest of us. It's just a constant cycle of recycling what's already out there.

Sorry for lowering the tone, but that makes me laugh. As the others say, Susan has stated she spent only one weekend working on that stall. With this in mind, I found your dramatic scenario really funny. No offence meant.

On a serious note, I believe most employers are well aware that they are training potential competition. Some encourage them to spread their wings, i.e. Helen and her Greggs boss. Some drove them to do it. It can be justified. My great-granddad nursed a deep grudge against his former apprentice who, having been mentored for 14 years, ran off to set up an antique art shop of his own in a neighbouring ward. I don't blame the former apprentice for doing it, to be honest, because G-Granddad had no intention of letting him climb up the internal company ladder because he was an orphan (it was a common prejudice during their time, apparently). I feel that for something like this, it can be justified.

How do you know that? Do they all say

"The English people are very fond of their skincare products....."

"Stealing" didn't exactly hinder Apple or Microsoft.