- Beauty Essentials
- United Kingdom
- Brand strategist · Creative director
- Brand Strategy
- Brand Identity
- Packaging
- Copywriting
The products that stand out on a crowded shelf aren't the most glamorous ones. They're the ones a shopper actually understands.
Beauty Essentials wouldn't compete on glamour. It would compete on clarity.
Beauty tool brands selling into prestige retail environments like Sephora had built the category around glamour: glossy packaging, evocative names, the same visual mystique used to sell the cosmetics shelved right next to them. The assumption seemed obvious. To earn a place on that shelf, a beauty brand needs to look just as aspirational as everything around it.
It sounds logical. It also explains why so many beauty tools are impossible to tell apart from the cosmetics beside them, and why a shopper often has to turn the box over twice just to figure out what the thing inside actually does.
When Beauty Essentials came to me, it was a British cosmetics line preparing to bring an affordable range of hair, makeup and skincare tools to market, aimed at shelves at Sephora and Galeries Lafayette, the storied French department store. The tools themselves solved a real, everyday problem: taking the fuss out of hair, makeup and skincare routines. The brand hadn't found a way to say that yet.
I didn't think the challenge was earning a place next to prestige beauty by looking as aspirational as it does. I thought it was winning the one thing beauty tools are actually bought for: being instantly understood, in a category that had made itself needlessly confusing.
Beauty Essentials wouldn't compete on glamour. It would compete on clarity.
Working closely with Beauty Essentials' product team, I led the team that built a color-coded, high-impact visual language, iconic enough to read at a glance and legible enough to survive a congested retail shelf. From there, I led the team responsible for writing the copy for every product description and designing the how-to infographics that shipped on pack, so a shopper could understand exactly what a product did and how to use it before they'd even opened the box. I also managed production of the full packaging range, from brand strategy through to the boxes that reached the shelf.
Beauty Essentials didn't need to out-glamour the brands next to it at Sephora. It needed to be the one shoppers actually understood before they picked it up.