THE COSMETIC COMPANION TEAM

Tania just loves to help people. As she would say, "With a love of communicating and offering support, life has lead to me to where I am today, with of course my beautiful dog Ruby and husband Julian…… this is me, this is Tania."

Whilst living in the EU, she was contracted to make soap on a mass scale, but keeping everything handmade. Production was scaled of up to 3000 soaps a day, and what started off as a small crafter business grew very fast. Upsizing and downsizing formulations depending on the amounts required became a daily task, taking time and effort to recalculate repeatedly.

Upon returning to the UK she has worked alongside Cosmetic Safety Solutions, for over 5 years, as their formulator and hand holder to many of their clients. This has given her then insight into how differently we all work and create. Taking compliance into account to keep within the cosmetic regulations is always an ongoing learning curve. Testing ingredients for several other companies, showing her what is out in the marketplace for cosmetic makers to use keeps her life interesting.

She has been an integral part of developing Cosmetic Companion. Companion came to fruition, by working together with her husband, to give herself and the cosmetic community a program developed from a maker’s perspective. Helping build something more than just a soap calculator. Having been in the cosmetic industry for many years now, her input to what was needed and why it was needed, helped grow this program into something more than what is already available on the market.

She has now undertaken the role of Registrar of The Guild of Craft Soap and Toiletry Makers (GCSTM) offering access to a supportive peer network. Providing valuable information and guidelines for those actively involved in the Artisan Cosmetics industry.

At GCSTM, volunteers generously donate their time and expertise to benefit both members and the profession. The team are dedicated to fostering a sense of community and collaboration among like-minded individuals and providing resources and support to help members succeed in their craft.

Julian, husband of Tania, has spent more than 30 years helping companies across Europe, such as Audi, LaRoche, Bosch and many others, in solving their complex business problems.

Problem solving has always been his passion. In fact, when told something "cannot be done" or "our experts have told us" this has always been a trigger to find a solution. But it has never been solely about just finding a solution to the problem, but rather finding the solution that goes a bit further.

Having spent many hours helping Tania with the problems she faces, in supporting CSS customers, he decided it was time to step in and find the solution. So, Cosmetic Companion was born. Starting with lye calculations, it quickly grew to handle the more complex issue of dealing with the UK and European safety regulations for essential oils. Then came data sheets for oils and butters.

Customer response convinced him that they needed Cosmetic Companion to help them with producing their products. Once again this grew to include costing and pricing, raw materials and packaging stock control, batch logs and allergen declarations.

Then along came selling the products that Cosmetic Companion had helped them to produce. So the final piece of Companion was created - the Point of Sale (POS) system.

Finally, the result of all this, is the development of a suite of programs with more than 23,000 lines of code. Who would have thought that helping with a bit of maths we would have ended up here, but here we are some 15 months later!