Alchemis began as a side project: one developer, one partner, one shelf of beautifully kept potion books. Cosmetics came first; the other crafts followed. Here's how it happened.
My partner makes things by hand: soaps, balms, oils, candles, the occasional batch of preserves. The kind of witchy DIY where recipes live in beautifully kept potion books with hand-written notes, marginalia, sketches of what worked and what didn't.
I love those books. You can leaf through one and see years of care on every page. Neither of us ever wanted to "replace" that with software.
When you start running real batches (selling at markets, juggling stock, calculating costs, redistributing percentages because you changed one ingredient), the spell-book stops being enough.
Math gets done on envelopes. Stock gets counted twice. The witchy aesthetic and the production reality stop being friends. That's the part Alchemis was built to take over. Not the books, the math.
I'm a developer. She makes the magic. So I built her a tool that respects the craft, but takes the friction out of the math.
Every feature in Alchemis exists because she needed it. Percentage redistribution was the first one: she'd change one ingredient and didn't want to recalculate the whole recipe by hand.
Density-aware unit conversion came next: oils in ml, batch size in g, kept tripping her up. Soft amber warnings on compliance came after she said the red ones made her feel like she was doing something wrong.
She isn't. She just needs the number and a way back under it, and that's what the warnings say now. Then we started noticing the same envelope math at other benches: the candlemaker, the soapmaker, the herbalist, the friend who does hot sauce for the Saturday market. So Alchemis opened to every craft that starts from a recipe.
Two desks, one workshop. Everything you use was sketched at one and shouted across to the other.
Self-taught formulator. Calls her workbench "the kitchen," keeps her recipes in three potion books, sells at markets and online. Started with balms and salves; the candles came next; the soap moulds arrived last month.
Software engineer with no cosmetics background. Started by building a percentage calculator on a Saturday. The rest got added one feature at a time, each one because she asked.
Anyone designing for Alchemis reads this first. It's the most useful thing we've written.
Never imply the maker is doing it wrong, behind, or unprofessional. They aren't. The notes were never the problem; the volume was.
Alchemis doesn't turn a witch into a CEO. It removes the parts of running a business that get in the way of the craft.
"Magical" is OK. "Optimize your workflow" is not. The product is calm and confident; the language stays human.
Sage and gold, not neon. Poppins, not Helvetica. Photography of real workbenches, never AI-stock cosmetics.
Dialled-in visually, mentioned once verbally, then let the product speak. Resist over-witching. The product is the show.
formula. The maker's word.Operations, operationalize, workflow optimizationEnterprise-grade, industrial-strengthDisrupt, revolutionize, AI-poweredSolution: use "tool" or "app"Synergy, leverage: 2010 SaaS-deck wordsWrong, violation, illegal on compliance. Soft over hard.First commit. A single screen that auto-redistributes ingredient percentages. Half a day's work; the start of everything.
Recipes meet reality. The first market run. 47 jars of calendula salve, all tracked back to one batch lot.
IFRA, EU Annex III, INCI for cosmetics and soaps; the red errors became soft amber warnings. (Candle and cleaner checks followed — IFRA and CLP; food rule sets are still on the way.)
The workshop learned Finnish and Estonian, this site went up, and a waitlist formed at the door. Now: you.
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