How Ellemental grew average order values 10% with a digital catalog
Oradea, Romania
50–100 employees
Founded: 2007
Website: https://www.ellemental.com/
We wanted the catalog to feel less like a product dump and more like a place where people can actually understand what they are working with.
About Ellemental
Founded in 2007, Ellemental grew from a handmade-cosmetics resource into a trusted European supplier for cosmetic producers, artisan brands, workshops, and independent personal-care businesses. Today, Ellemental supplies a full ecosystem built around real cosmetic production: active ingredients, emulsifiers, botanical extracts, oils, preservatives, cosmetic bases, packaging, accessories, formulation tools, technical documentation, and educational resources. Most products ship directly from stock, backed by technical information, traceability, and consistent sourcing.
The challenge: customers were only seeing a part of what Ellemental had to offer
As Ellemental's range grew, a recurring pattern became clear: most customers only ever explored the corner of the catalog tied to their own niche. Someone buying emulsifiers might never look at packaging. A soap maker focused on oils, fragrances, and molds, without realizing Ellemental also carried the formulation accessories, active ingredients, and production tools that fit the very same process.
That's the limit of traditional ecommerce. It's built for direct searches and products people already know to look for. It's far weaker at showing customers how categories connect, or just how broad the range has become over time.
For cosmetic producers, that gap matters. Cosmetic development rarely comes down to a single purchase; ingredients, packaging, preservatives, textures, formulation materials, and production tools all work together inside one connected process. When customers can only see one piece at a time, they miss the complementary products that would make their work easier and their results better.
The solution: a visual catalog that made the full range easy to explore
The digital catalog created a more structured and visual way for cosmetic producers to understand Ellemental's expanding ecosystem of products and categories. Instead of navigating isolated product pages and disconnected searches, customers can explore ingredient families, packaging ranges, formulation materials, and production-related categories in a format that makes relationships between products easier to understand.
It's especially useful when comparing ingredient categories, reviewing packaging collections, exploring complementary products, or researching the broader formulation systems behind a finished product. The visual format pulls customers gently out of their usual buying habits and into adjacent categories they'd otherwise skip — guided browsing instead of menus, filters, and search bars alone.
The results: more engagement, more cross-category discover
The catalog drove measurable engagement and broader discovery across Ellemental's range:
- 60% engagement rate on the catalog
- 28 minutes average time spent reading
- 10% increase in average order value in the first two weeks after launch, as customers added complementary products
- Greater visibility for adjacent and low-search categories that were previously overlooked
But the biggest shift was in behavior: customers began exploring complementary formulation systems together, browsing connected products as a whole rather than one item at a time.
Conclusion
For Ellemental, the catalog was not simply about presenting products in a cleaner format. It became a practical way to help cosmetic producers understand the broader ecosystem behind their daily production workflows and discover categories they may never reach through traditional ecommerce navigation alone.
Flipsnack helped transform a large and technically dense inventory into a browsing experience that feels more connected, more visual, and easier to explore naturally. Instead of functioning like a static product brochure, the catalog became an active product discovery tool that supports category exploration, cross-selling, consultations, workshops, and broader visibility across the Ellemental ecosystem.
For businesses with large interconnected inventories, Flipsnack works especially well because it helps customers move beyond direct searches and engage with the bigger structure behind the product range.