A cosmetic chemist who decided to manufacture, too.
Most contract manufacturers are built around operations. Formula 117 is built around chemistry — by a degreed cosmetic chemist with over a decade in the lab.
Most brands outgrow their first manufacturer.
Indie beauty brands almost always launch the same way. They hire a freelance chemist to develop a formula, then hand that formula to a generalist manufacturer to scale. The chemist disappears after delivery. The manufacturer's team — operators, not formulators — runs the batch. Two months later, the cream separates on the shelf, the serum browns, the emulsion fails the second stability cycle. Nobody on the team can diagnose why because the formula and the manufacturing happened in two different rooms with two different sets of expertise.
Formula 117 collapses that gap. The chemist who develops your formula is the chemist who manufactures it. The same person who picked the surfactant system runs the pilot. The same person who balanced the actives oversees the production batch. Chemistry and operations stop being separate disciplines that hand off through a brief — they're one continuous process from concept through shelf.
Ten years of chemistry, four of running a lab.
Formula 117 was founded by a degreed cosmetic chemist with over ten years of formulation and manufacturing experience across major retail and indie beauty brands. The work has spanned skincare, haircare, men's grooming, and clinical-tier specialty products — emulsions of every flavor, anhydrous systems, surfactant-based cleansers, and the difficult hybrids that fall between categories.
That decade includes formulation development, scale-up engineering, stability testing, regulatory navigation, and the kind of late-night manufacturing-floor problem-solving that only a real lab teaches. The Formula 117 lab in Chicago, Illinois exists to turn that experience into something brand founders can hire directly — without losing the chemist between concept and case-pack.
Four things that change when the founder is the formulator.
Your formula isn't handed off to operators after development. The chemist who built it runs the scale-up, the pilot, and the production batch. Stability issues get caught in the lab, not in your warehouse.
When something needs adjusting — a viscosity drift, a fragrance bloom, a preservative challenge — the person you're talking to is the person who can fix it. No "let me check with the chemist" delays. No formula re-development from scratch.
Some product concepts don't work — actives that destabilize emulsions, fragrance loads that crash preservation, packaging incompatible with the formula chemistry. We tell you that on day one, before you've spent five months and twenty thousand dollars learning it the slow way.
Custom formulas you commission are yours, fully and exclusively. We don't repackage your serum into a different brand's bottle six months later. The boundary between custom development and our private label library is bright and explicit.
Four paths in. One chemist throughout.
Whether you're starting from a concept, an existing product you want to improve, a formula you already own, or our private label library — every path runs through the same lab and the same lead chemist. Manufacturing minimums start at 500 units. Production scales to 10,000+. Every project ships with full documentation, batch records, and stability data.
- Custom Formula Development — original formulas built from concept
- Reverse Engineering — recreate and improve existing products
- Bring Your Own Formula — manufacturing for formulas you already own
- Private Label — launch fast from our proven formula library
Ready to start production?
Send your project details. You'll hear back within 48–72 hours with next steps.
Start a Project