Hi, Ellie is the cozy little studio companion that keeps your pigments, waxes, oils and recipes in one place — and whips up something new from what’s actually on your shelf. Then Signature — on the Maker and Studio plans, both open during the beta — puts your label on it.
Built around the three things makers do every day: keep track of what’s on the shelf, write down what works, and try the next idea. Ellie holds the rest — and when it’s ready to sell, Signature puts your label on it.
Add every pigment, wax, resin, wick, mold and mica you own — and, if you make Bath & Body, your oils and butters, lye, melt-and-pour bases, preservatives and bath add-ins too. Add them by hand or from a spreadsheet — and on the shelves a retail barcode actually resolves (colorant, resin, mold, supply, wax, fragrance, vessel, wick), by snapping the label. Mark anything In stock, Low, Out, or Needs-order, and Ellie keeps the whole shelf in view at a glance.
Select your colorants, your ratios, your steps. Make notes as you go, take photos during and after the batch. Each recipe gets a stitched, print-ready version you can take to the workbench — or have Ellie read it to you with step-by-step, hands-free voice.
Tell her a feeling — “ocean sunset, soft pearl shimmer”, “something gentle for winter hands” — and she’ll work the shelf to find something you can actually make today. No invented pigments, no imaginary oils, no Pinterest dreams. Or, let Ellie dream, and search hundreds of known vendor pigments to help you find just the right color to match your idea.
Every pour, burn test and batch you finish gets logged — what went in, how it cured, what set clean and what didn’t, and what came off your shelf to make it. Look back six months later and Ellie still remembers which Tuesday went wrong, and why. For resin and candle she also has a troubleshooter — a pour that wouldn’t set, a candle that tunneled: pick the symptom and she has tips for it.
Flag anything low, out, or needs-order and it lands on your shopping list — each with a link to buy it again. Materials a new idea called for but you don’t have yet show up too, so one trip covers everything. Take it as a PDF, copy it, or hand the whole thing to Ellie.
Point your phone at a new bottle’s barcode and Ellie identifies it and guesses what kind of item it is — colorant, resin, wax, or supply — so adding it is a tap, not a form. The scan happens right on your phone and the photo’s never stored. No barcode, or no match? Just type in the code.
The hard part of making isn’t the making — it’s deciding what to make. Ellie reads what’s on your shelf and builds recipes around it. When one leans on something you’re low on or don’t own yet, she flags it and can drop it straight onto your shopping list with a buy link.
Saw something you love? A sunset, a tidepool, a friend’s scarf — hand Ellie the photo and she pulls the palette out of it, then tells you how to get there: the colors, a few techniques, and notes for the bench. She checks it against your shelf, too — what you’ve already got, what’s a close stand-in, and what you’d need to grab. The gaps go to your shopping list in a tap.
Tell Ellie the mood — cozy, fresh, gourmand, woody, or something all your own — and she reads your fragrance shelf to build a blend around it. Every oil gets a share of the blend and a quick read on how well it fits the mood, and if it calls for a note you don’t stock, she flags the gap before you commit. Like what she found? Save it to your Inspiration Diary, or hand it straight to the wizard to build the candle around it.
Resin and candles each make one kind of thing. Bath & Body makes five — melt & pour, from-scratch soap, bath bombs, scrubs, and lotions — so the wizard opens by asking which one you’re making, then builds it from your own oils, bases, botanicals and scent. Your shelf grows to match: oils and butters, lye with its purity, M&P bases, preservatives, bath ingredients.
Every Inspire palette and every Scent Studio blend saves itself — no button to forget. Ellie names each one and lines them up as a swatch-dotted grid you can flip back through, rename, or clear out. Found one worth making? Hand it to Ellie and she’ll turn it into a real recipe.
The last mile of making something is putting your name on it. Lock a palette — from your own photo or a ready-made set — add a logo, pick a font pairing and how your art is composed, and Signature carries all of it onto every label you print. Pick a finished batch and the label picks up that batch’s lot code; print one, or tile a whole sheet. On a Bath & Body or resin label the compliance panel reads slot by slot rather than making one blanket promise — your business info and the lot number read live, and the slots that aren’t built yet say so: net weight on both, plus the warning and ingredient lines on Bath & Body. A candle label carries no compliance slots at all, and says as much: net weight, ingredients and warnings live on the separate Regulatory Label, printed from a completed batch.
Hi, Ellie isn’t a venture pitch or a side project on a roadmap. It’s a tool a maker needed, built by a partner who could build it — for makers who needed the same thing.
— it started, as most useful things do, with a problem nobody had solved yet.
Hi, Ellie grew out of Frost Pen Co., a small resin pen business in Birmingham, Alabama. The shelves there fill up fast — dozens of pigments, micas, resins, embeds — and the question that keeps coming back at the bench is the same one every maker asks: “with what I already have, what could I make?”
We went looking for a tool that could answer it. Something that knew the actual shelf — not a generic recipe site, not a Pinterest board, not an AI that invented pigments it had never seen. Nothing existed. So Mike built it.
Mike has spent thirty years in IT, but he isn’t a developer by trade. Hi, Ellie is the first product he’s shipped this way — written hand-in-hand with Claude as a development partner, across dozens of sprints and counting, every decision logged. The AI inside Ellie isn’t the headline; the headline is that the tool finally exists.
Andrea joined to do the other half — the half Mike isn’t built for. She’s been discovering the resin world right alongside the product, learning the craft as Ellie learns it. If you’ve talked to Hi, Ellie, you’ve probably talked to Andrea.
That’s the whole company. Two people. One shared studio. No investors, no growth chart on the wall. The income goal is modest and the mission is genuine: a calm, dependable tool that makers actually use.
Thirty years in IT, none of them as a developer. Hi, Ellie is what happens when someone who’s spent a career around software finally gets the tools to build the thing they wanted. Builds in public, sprints in the open, ships every couple of weeks.
Lives at the workbench when he’s not at the keyboard — which is how Frost Pen Co. ended up being the test studio for everything Ellie does.
New to resin, in love with the community already. Spends her days talking to makers, watching pours, learning what works and what jams up at the bench — then bringing the rough edges back to Mike.
If you write to Hi, Ellie, she’s the one writing back. If you see us at a maker meetup, she’s the one with the sticker sheet. Treats every conversation like the most interesting one of the day, because usually it is.
We’re letting makers in a few at a time and writing the next sprint around what we hear. If that sounds like the kind of thing you’d want to be part of — your shelf, and Ellie, are ready when you are.
Ellie knows what’s on your shelf — she’s not a generic chatbot, she’s your studio’s memory. Every plan, every tier, every recipe stays grounded in your real inventory.
A real working space — not a teaser. Enough room to organize a starter shelf and try Ellie a few times each month.
Once Ellie has seen your whole shelf, she gets a lot more useful. Unlimited recipes mean she’s there for every “what could I make with this?” moment.
When the studio outgrows one bench. Multiple workspaces, an operator on the floor, and a human in your corner when things get busy.
Teaching a workshop? Running a maker co-op? — write us, we’ll work something out.
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Pop into the help center or send Ellie a note — a real human reads them.
Three: resin, candle, and Bath & Body — the same pantry, the same recipes, the same wizard, each tuned to how that craft actually works. Bath & Body is the broad one, covering melt & pour, from-scratch soap, bath bombs, scrubs and lotions. You pick a craft when you set up a studio and can add the others from Settings, so a studio that pours resin and makes soap keeps both, side by side.
Yes. Grab the free sample template, fill it in, and upload it as an XLSX workbook (export one from Google Sheets, Numbers or Excel) — Ellie maps the columns for you. The template and export are free on every plan; the bulk import itself is a Maker feature.
Ellie only generates recipes from your real shelf. If she suggests a pigment or an oil you don’t own, it’s flagged clearly with a “you’d need one new thing” note and a link to where it’s commonly sold. No hallucinated colorants. And the numbers that matter aren’t hers to write: a soap batch’s lye and water, and a lotion’s minimum preservative weight, are computed in code from your own pantry rows — never generated as text.
Always. Your recipes are yours. We never train models on your data, we don’t sell your shelf to suppliers, and you can export everything as a PDF or XLSX workbook on any plan — including the free one — at any time.
It’s on the way — not live yet. The plan: your full shelf and recent recipes cached right on your phone, so you can read a recipe, log a batch, and scan a label without a signal, then sync when you’re back. It’s on the roadmap, and we’ll shout when it lands.
Careful by design, not by disclaimer. A from-scratch recipe’s lye and water weights are worked out in code from each oil’s SAP value and your superfat, and nowhere the app builds one for you — the wizard, the manual form — does it save without an explicit lye acknowledgment, at every experience level, with no expert bypass. In the wizard and the manual form the computed lye and water weights are shown to you before you acknowledge them. Lotions get their own gate: a minimum preservative weight from the preservative on your shelf, and a target pH to confirm. An emulsified scrub meets water the same way, so it takes the same preservative floor. Melt & pour, bath bombs and anhydrous scrubs pass neither gate: there is no lye to compute, and the preservative floor is scoped to the water-contact products — a lotion, or a scrub you mark as emulsified. None of that replaces knowing what you’re handling — the help center has the safety guides, and they’re worth reading before your first batch.
It prints two: a product label with your palette, type and name, and — for a finished batch — an informational one carrying that batch’s lot code and measured weight. For a cosmetic-classed product it assembles an ingredient statement from your own pantry rows: your base’s supplier list word for word, your essential-oil and add-in names. Be clear on what that is, though: Hi, Ellie assembles the statement and tells you which parts it checked. It does not review or certify a label, and some slots are still being built. Read it against your supplier’s paperwork before you print — the compliance call stays yours.
Right now there’s nothing to cancel — Hi, Ellie is in open beta, so the paid plans aren’t billing yet. You get the lifted caps without entering a card. When billing does go live, stopping will be a couple of clicks from Settings, and your data simply drops back to the free tier; nothing is deleted unless you ask us to.
Start free. Get your first ten materials on the shelf in five minutes. Let the wizard sketch you a recipe before your coffee’s cold.
