We invested in Bombiix because we recognised the strength of its PLM offer and the impending EU requirement for Digital Product Passports.
With decades of experience investing in SMEs – from starting at 3i, to opening the Bahrain Development Bank and now co-owning Anticus – I’ve seen the challenges businesses face and the opportunities that come with them. Our role is to be a supportive investor, guiding Lucy in growing Bombiix and in future fundraising.
With experience across manufacturing, financial services, SaaS, e-commerce, and retail, I help Bombiix navigate growth while keeping a close eye on cash flow, performance and strategic alignment.
From the first time I met Lucy, I knew I wanted to work with her – she’s a breath of fresh air and the passion that fills her is infectious. It’s a pleasure to complement her skills in delivering the vision of Bombiix.
I make sure our software meets your needs, spotting areas for improvement and helping your team streamline and grow.
Having worked in hospitality, manufacturing, supply chain and agriculture, I bring a wealth of experience when it comes in creating digital solutions that tackle real-world challenges.
I joined Bombiix after being a customer – it’s hugely refreshing to see a platform that focuses on the needs of product people. After managing many global teams across multiple industries, including pharmaceuticals, FMCG, toiletries and cosmetics, sporting goods and apparel and fashion, I can see real potential in Bombiix, and I’m excited to lead the business and achieve it.
My experience is in garment technology, pattern cutting, product development and technical design and I understand the everyday struggles our customers face – the chaotic workflows, confusing email threads and out of date spreadsheets. So I created Bombiix to change all of that.
The concept for Bombiix was born from one product developer’s frustrations with outdated legacy PLMs. So, when we say we get it, we really do. Whether you’re a growing start up or experienced enterprise, our team is with you every step of the way with personalised onboarding and ongoing support. My experience is in garment technology, pattern cutting, product development and technical design and I understand the everyday struggles our customers face – the chaotic workflows, confusing email threads and out of date spreadsheets. So I created Bombiix to change all of that.
Manage your entire product lifecycle, from initial concept and design through to development, manufacturing and bringing it to shelves.
Automate your Digital Product Passports in a way that’s affordable, scalable and removes the need for multiple complex systems.
Unify all your product information with an automated PIM that ensures consistency and accuracy while reducing workload and manual data entry.
Organise, store and access all your digital assets into a single, easy-to-use hub so you can effortlessly find, share and use content whenever you need to.
Take control of your cosmetic formulation management with our PLM for cosmetics. Designed for product people by product people.
With the rise of social media, the cosmetics industry is no longer defined by industry trends and innovations. Beauty products can go viral within a matter of hours on tiktok or instagram, and if your systems and workflow can’t keep up with an emerging trend, you can quickly get left behind.
Legacy PLM systems aren’t just slow either; they can also prove to be very costly. This is because there are often additional costs hidden behind tiers and features.
The cosmetics industry revolves around having numerous different versions of a single product, whether due to skin tone options, texture preferences or any number of factors that different customers prefer.
This means that the number of products cosmetics companies create can grow very quickly, with each new product needing a unique SKU. Legacy PLMs may struggle to house a growing number of SKUs which can result in a large payment to unlock more space for SKUs. Once you hit your initial limit, the cost of your PLM can start to skyrocket.
Generic PLM software that is not agile fails the unique needs of beauty R&D in a number of ways. Due to their rigid structure, legacy PLMs are not capable of handling the hybridisation of cosmetic products, where skincare products, SPF, and colour cosmetics are no longer considered as separate entities.
The use of siloed data in a legacy PLM can result in issues with product formulation for hybrid products. Because they were never designed to track complex data of hybrid formulations in a single view, it is very difficult to get an accurate formulation for a product that is tinted and provides SPF. A legacy system only sees these 2 things as separate entities.
There are now new regulations that the cosmetics industry needs to take into account. The EU Green Claims Directive and Digital Product Passports require businesses to prove their sustainability claims at the ingredient level of a product.
This is extremely difficult to track effectively through spreadsheets, especially when compliance is treated as a final check-off where you have to manually look for the information for the label. Not only is this task very time-consuming, it also opens you up to risk due to compliance gaps.
The answer to the problems caused by relying on a legacy cosmetic product development software is to opt for an agile PLM for cosmetics instead.
An agile system is the best PLM for cosmetics teams because it is able to handle complex data and formulations effectively, and provide a single source of truth that all team members can access and update in real-time.
Without the help of an agile PLM, managing INCI (International Nomenclature Cosmetic Ingredient) lists and allergens becomes a tedious and time-consuming task of copying and pasting information. This can lead to human error that puts your compliance at risk.
A PLM for cosmetics removes this headache by connecting with information systems such as PIM and DPP software to ensure that data flows from system to system without the need for manual transfer.
It also allows for the use of complex BOMs with added logic, often referred to as the Bill of Substances. Instead of considering each part of a product to be a ‘part’, agile PLMs understand that a raw material can contain multiple chemical elements which can be potential allergens.
Variations in ingredient costings can easily be accommodated and updated in agile PLMs. This allows for product pricing and profit margins to be updated throughout the product development process, ensuring that a product remains profitable and cost effective.
Rather than treating compliance as an afterthought, agile PLMs like Bombiix have compliance built-in to the product development process from sourcing to production and sale. Everything is kept up to date and treated with equal priority.
Due to the new ESPR legislation in Europe, digital product passports are becoming an extremely important part of a product’s information. While legacy PLMs are not built to include DPPs as part of product development which results in them becoming an afterthought, agile beauty industry compliance software builds the DPP for a product alongside its development process.
This ensures that all relevant and required information is in place on a DPP as soon as a new product is ready to launch. There is no delay due to needing to create a new digital product passport for cosmetics products, as each new product already has one in place.
The number 1 cause for regulatory delays and recalls in the cosmetics industry is the manual management of Product Information Files (PIF) and Safety Data Sheets (SDS). They are no longer simple documents, and have to be treated as living tech packs that need to be kept up to date at all times.
Agile PLMs are able to support these tech packs effectively, updating them when something changes, and ensuring that every product has a PIF and SDS in place. There is no need for time-consuming manual updates, and the number of product delays and recalls is reduced.
If you don’t stay ahead of regulatory tracking requirements in the UK and EU, you will end up getting left behind. That’s why our agile PLM is designed to ensure that all of your products will be DPP ready, from the moment that they are ready to launch.
Sustainability has become a big part of how consumers choose their products. That’s why our agile PLM tracks sustainability information throughout every stage of a product’s lifecycle.
Our PLM doesn’t just add sustainability information to a product once it has been fully developed. It connects with suppliers to receive sustainability information for every product ingredient at the sourcing stage, combines information to measure ESG metrics throughout the development process, and provides a final set of sustainability information for a product at the point of launch. Everything is tracked at all times.
Instead of simply storing a PDF certificate for Mica, agile PLMs create a digital thread that follows the mineral from the pit all the way through to the palette. This helps to ensure that your sourcing is as ethical as possible.
Product and ingredient information data is requested throughout multiple sourcing tiers within the supply chain. Instead of just receiving information from tier 1 suppliers, agile PLMs request data from suppliers throughout tiers 1 - 4. This enables you to show exactly where each ingredient within a product has come from.
Instead of treating packaging as the final step of product development, agile PLMs move into the product development process where it lives as a dynamic specification.
By allowing you to capture precise weights, volumes, and sizes of a product, an agile PLM enables you to fit packaging to the product every time that its dimensions change.
By reducing the fit-to-product ratio during product design, you can reduce unnecessary filler packaging and lower your carbon footprint during shipping. All packaging information is also pushed to the appropriate DPP throughout the product development process, to avoid information gaps.
Most legacy PLMs require dev work for implementation that can take upwards of 12 months, resulting in high setup costs and additional fees.
In contrast to this, Bombiix PLM has zero setup fees and has speedy onboarding that is handled by product people through live-chat and face to face calls rather than dev tickets and queues.
Rather than waiting for up to a year for full implementation, with Bombiix you can be up and running in a matter of weeks.
Our PLM solution is also easy to integrate with your existing systems. It can connect directly with an ERP via robust APIs to allow data to flow between systems freely, integrates directly with CAD systems and design software to negate the need for manual data transfer, and has built-in communication tools that enable everyone within a product development team to stay on track in a single centralised environment.
Rather than developing a roadmap based on an internal wishlist that could result in features that are nice, but not much use to the majority of product development teams, our roadmap is purely based on the needs of the product community.
We are constantly evolving our offering to better suit a wider range of product teams, with each addition to our PLM solution being included within the subscription cost.
Rather than providing a single piece of software that becomes a part of a fragmented solution, at Bombiix we provide a complete, unified product development ecosystem. This includes our PLM, PIM, DAM, and DPP software. All of which connect to each other seamlessly.
Our solution is developed to keep track of information across the complete critical path of a product’s development in a single connected ecosystem. This is important because it helps to avoid important information getting lost in external silos such as email chains and spreadsheets.
With Bombiix, all information about a product’s lifecycle is recorded in one easy to access place that can be updated directly. This removes issues around version control, and ensures that all team members are always working with the same key information.
Rather than just storing product information, our solution uses it proactively. Once a product has all required information attached and is ready for launch, our PIM can push the product to numerous sales channels with machine readable information that is formatted for each specific sales channel.
This removes the need for product profiles to be rewritten manually for different stores such as shopify, amazon, and physical stores.
While Centric and Aptean are capable of connecting your product data to DPPs, their approaches both have some niggles, outside of their enterprise level costs.
Centric uses a middleware approach to DPPs that is fine, but it can lead to the need for significant integration work to connect a PLM to the QR code on a DPP. This can be costly and time-consuming.
Aptean has a strong focus on the compliance side of DPPs with everything being ERP centric. This makes the interface very technical and difficult to understand for anyone other than a compliance officer. It’s just not that user-friendly.
The Bombiix approach allows small product teams to manage a legally compliant DPP without needing a substantial IT department. By connecting our PLM and DPP systems directly, there is no chance of data drift. A consumer will see the exact same version of the data that an engineer approves. We have placed a big focus on an easy to use UI too.
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Today, Bombiix empowers product teams with cutting-edge, affordable technology that simplifies processes, reduces admin, and enables smarter, more ethical decisions.
