Think sustainable skincare has to involve a sacrifice on style and function? Think again. Insiya Jafferjee is revolutionising the future of beauty packaging with her company, Shellworks, and transforming our beauty cabinets in the process. Here’s how.
The word ‘innovative’ probably gets overused in the beauty industry, and if you’ve investigated sustainable packaging in the past you might well remember messy refillables and flimsy containers that – however hard they try – simply lack the satisfying weight and closing ‘click’ of luxury products.
But as the winner of the Veuve Clicquot Bold Future Award 2025, Insiya Jafferjee and her sustainable materials company Shellworks, is finally breaking the mould. Jafferjee’s aim: to not only create an alternative to plastic, but to reimagine how the beauty industry thinks about sustainability and design.
This is her inspiring story.
Embracing big moves
“I grew up in Sri Lanka, but moved to the United States to attend Stanford University, where I did a mix of mechanical engineering and anthropology,” says Jafferjee. “From there, I spent my early career in very large scale consumer electronic manufacturing – my first job was actually as part of the operations team that did the Apple Watch launch! Then I moved to London for my Masters – and I not only met my Shellworks co-founder Amir, but it was also where the idea for the company was born.”
Shellwork’s unassuming beginnings
In fact, Shellworks’ origin story can be traced back not to a big business boardroom, but to a three-month experimental group project on said Masters course, exploring shellfish waste, which quickly evolved into something more.
“We never really intended to start a company,” Jafferjee recalls with a laugh. “The name Shellworks comes from the fact that we first started experimenting with shellfish waste and we just never really stopped trying to find sustainable packaging solutions. The further we got into it, the further we felt we could really solve this big and meaningful problem, and I couldn’t imagine a better thing for me to dedicate my skill set towards.”
On sustainability in the beauty industry
Jafferjee’s attention quickly turned to the beauty industry. The sector is particularly notorious for its plastic waste – and, it’s not just the obvious large plastic bottles or shiny plastic wraps around your skincare products that are causing the issues. Did you know, for example, that many cosmetic packaging items are actually just too small to be conventionally recycled (even if you wanted to) so they often end up in landfills or incinerated anyway.
“Most people don’t realise that anything smaller than five centimetres by five centimetres won’t be recycled because it falls through the recycling grates,” Jafferjee explains. “If you think about it, that means every lipstick, every small cosmetic container in your makeup bags, is essentially destined to not be recycled.”
The game-changing innovation
Shellworks is challenging this status quo by offering a genuinely sustainable alternative. At the heart of Shellworks is Vivomer, a revolutionary material that looks and feels like plastic but behaves entirely differently when it reaches the end of its lifecycle. Using naturally occurring microorganisms that transform plant matter into a flexible plastic-like substance, the company has created a material that completely biodegrades in natural environments.
“It’s a true collaboration with nature,” Jafferjee describes passionately. “These microorganisms essentially eat plant matter and create a material in their cells that behaves exactly like plastic. The magic happens when you dispose of it – it simply becomes part of the natural ecosystem.” In practical terms, this means a Vivomer bottle can completely decompose in a backyard compost within weeks – a stark contrast to traditional plastics that can persist for hundreds of years.
On facing challenges
If that sounds exciting for the future sustainability of our beauty bags you’d be right – but Jafferjee is choosing to go up against the industry’s big players, which is no easy task. As a female founder in a male-dominated industry, Jafferjee also acknowledges facing more significant initial skepticism.
“In the early days, it was constant rejection,” she admits. “But we took each potential reason for failure and worked proactively to overcome it. That’s why our product is so robust now.” Her recent Veuve Clicquot Bold Future Award win (she is pictured below with her fellow nominees) is the ultimate acknowledgement of that hard-earned success.
“Sometimes it is daunting, but call it naive optimism – you have to believe that you can change things otherwise the skepticism alone will stop you from trying,” she explains. “Secondly, you need an incredible amount of resilience to be able to face a challenge like this because you are often told, for many reasons, it’s not going to work. We have that resilience because we have a great team. And then lastly, I really do believe that consumers hate plastic and they want to build a more sustainable future. So, I think that’s the best motivator.”
As acknowledgement of her success as a female entrepreneur, Jafferjee (far right) won the Veuve Clicquot Bold Future Award 2025
Desirable sustainability
One of Shellworks’ most innovative strategies has been to make sustainability desirable – making it even easier for customers to want to invest in eco-friendly beauty solutions.
A standout example is the company’s pipette dropper, which isn’t just environmentally friendly – it’s a meticulously designed product with matte and glossy finishes, specific weight, and tactile qualities that make it feel premium. “We don’t want our material to feel like a compromise,” Jafferjee emphasises. “We want people to choose it because it’s beautiful, because it feels luxurious. Sustainability shouldn’t mean sacrificing design.”
Successful collaborations with forward-thinking brands like Wild deodorants and Haeckels bodycare prove that the approach is working. But, these partnerships go beyond supplying a material – “they’re also about educating the market and proving that sustainable packaging can be both functional and desirable,” too.
The wider vision
For Jafferjee, this is just the beginning: she wants Vivomer to become the “Gore-Tex of beauty packaging” – a global standard for sustainable, high-performance materials. “Our goal is to prove that it’s possible to disrupt an entire industry,” she says. And that hard work is already paying off. “We went to a fair the other day and overhead someone asking another manufacturer about Vivomer as a solution. That’s an exciting change we want to see continue to resonate with people.”
Ultimately, Jafferjee and her team are aiming to not just create a new product, but also reimagine an entire industry’s approach to materials. And their commitment to both scientific innovation and sustainability is offering a very exciting glimpse of a more sustainable (and beautiful) future in the process.
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