Custom cosmetic products offer consumers the ultimate dream: an item created for them, by them. Skincare brand Revieve and YSL’s personalized lip color creator are two such examples, but the cost and scaling possibilities of such enterprises have been challenging.Ellure is looking to change that, offering huge sustainability benefits in the process. The Swedish beauty tech start-up was co-founded by Selah Li and Marc van Almkerk in 2019. The duo met through KTH Innovation, the pre-incubator program at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The two founded Bosonic.design, a technology start-up specializing in lean user research and full-stack development, prior to setting up Ellure.Based on their research, they discovered that 7% of cosmetics and 14% of lipsticks specifically are unsold at a retail level. Research by Avery Dennison into supply chain waste shows that of the 10% of beauty products (totaling $4.8 billion worth of items) that go to waste, 4% is due to a damaged or unfit-for-sale product and 6.2% is due to overproduction. From product testers to SKUs that expire on warehouse shelves before they even reach the shop floor to items returned by customers that are no longer suitable for resale, there are multiple culprits. Custom, on-demand products could be a tool to eliminate this waste.Currently in its eighth edition, the printer enables the design, formulation, and manufacturing of any liquid FMCG, enabled through AI-driven software. The company’s manufacturing platform, Cloud Factory, allows for brands and retailers to apply this technology and scale it. AR and VR allow for advanced visualization of real-life colorways.