Ellure's customisation platform enables beauty brands' products personalisation

Ellure, a startup supported by the EIT Digital Innovation Factory, enables made-to-order production of FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) on a mass scale.

Ellure is luring interest in their solution with a Direct to Consumer (D2C) brand, Ellurelipsticks, that lets you virtually try out 10,000 shades of lipstick and then order the shade you want, but the innovation is much more than a D2C brand.

“The mission of Ellure is to enable brands and retailers to offer affordable customized products to everyone. The innovation we are building is a platform for mass customisation. We have both hardware and software, and the first application we are using it for, is cosmetics,” according to the startup’s co-founder and CEO Selah Li.

With Ellure’s solution, a range of liquid-based products, from detergents to shampoos, can be personalised by the customer.

“With this method you produce locally, no over production, no waste, and people are much happier with the product because they designed it themselves.”

The solution has attracted the attention of a major US retailer, who saw the tremendous potential of the offering.

Ellure’s platform consists of three services to enable this type of customised, flexible production: First, an AR tool to enable end-consumers to design and create products digitally. Then, the “digital recipe” of the product will be sent to a network of IoT-enabled machines (such as Ellure’s cosmetic printer) to manufacture the final product, ready to be used by the end consumer. The process happens in real-time and within minutes.

Besides, Ellure also offers a monitoring service for brands and retailers, who can analyse production flow in real-time.

“We have two co-founders now, Mark van Almkerk and I. We met in 2017 in the master's programme at the University of Twente” in the Netherlands, says Li.

They were enrolled in EIT Digital Master School Human Computer Interaction and Design (HCID) programme, studying technical aspects of improving the way computers and people can work together. “HCID is spot on for what we do,” Li explains.

Like all EIT Digital Master School programmes, the HCID master’s emphasises entrepreneurship, and Ellure’s founders put that knowledge to work in forming their startup.

In 2020, the Ellure team received €400,000 in support from EIT Digital through the Innovation Factory, which invests in pan-European entrepreneurial teams together with EIT Digital partners to build new ventures.

EIT Digital also nominated Li for the EIT 2020 Woman Leadership and Entrepreneurship Awards, and she was a winner of the EIT Digital Alumni Startup Contest 2020.

Ellure is currently piloting with a major beauty retailer who has more than 1000 stores to test the opportunities of offering affordable customized products to everyone. Meanwhile, Ellure is seeking further funding, and has several other pilots in the pipeline.

In 2021, 93 out of 146 investments in beauty have been dedicated to the personalized beauty market, but most of them are focusing one building a B2C brand, with outdated manufacturing methods.

Ellure is offering beauty brands a ground-breaking technology infrastructure, fit to the digital age, to streamline their personalisation efforts. It’s an almost €44B target segment, of which Ellure believes can capture 5%, or €2.3B.

An opportunity not to be missed!