Designing a skincare brand’s personality
About the #Nature’s Lab
With increasing awareness about the benefits of sustainable and natural solutions to everyday concerns, the pendulum is rapidly shifting from synthetic to authentic. This holds true for skincare brands as well. Cruelty-free beauty is gaining popularity with the wave of veganism. This is also facilitated by the inception of skincare brands that add science-backed natural ingredients to skincare products.
Xyst has developed an all-natural skincare line in times when taking care of one’s skin takes a backseat in front of modern life’s demands. Xyst believes that people shouldn’t have to choose between leading a fulfilling life and nurturing their skin. Xyst was founded with a science-backed approach that utilizes natural ingredients like Hemp, Cica, and Alpha Glucan with the next generation actives to achieve industry-best results.
Xyst’s Motto:
- Natural products backed by Science
- Clean Beauty with Performance
- Relieve - Repair – Rejuvenate
Building a premium skincare line from the ground up
Creating a brand identity for a fresh name in the market is very different from rebranding. As Xyst was a fresh skincare brand, the onus was entirely on us to create their identity from scratch. For any consumer brand, aesthetics are the fastest way to appeal to the target audience. Xyst approached us with the aim to lay the foundation for its brand identity through designs that would marvel with a glance.
As a full-service digital agency, we understand what fresh consumer brands like Xyst need to start off with a bang. Therefore, we began by understanding the brand personality of Xyst. After multiple discussions with the team, we arrived at the big picture. Xyst wanted to establish an honest, reliable, and smart image in the minds of its consumers. In order to appeal to an audience of well-educated netizens who believe in looking after their skin and the environment, we offered a package of design solutions that would be the most effective for a brand launch.
Our solutions:
- Mood board
- Photoshoot
- Social media
- Amazon
- Website
Creating visual magic with nature & science
Designing is at the heart of an effective brand strategy. After understanding Xyst’s need for creating a strong brand recall, our team of designers huddled up to create the look and feel of the brand.
Mood board
Mood boards are the best way to begin imagining the look and feel of a brand. Mood boards are a compilation of images, fonts, colors and designs that define a brand’s identity. The board serves as a reference for all the creatives to follow across multiple distribution channels.
Our designers began by taking inspiration from Xyst’s blue and green packaging design. To further bring out the essence of the brand, we narrowed down on colours that were organic, earthy and natural. We played around with different hues of blue and green and also scanned through the key ingredients in each product to make the most of minimalistic colours and designs. To enhance the natural and scientific asethetics, we added some background elements like leaves, petri dishes, droppers, soil, water, test tubes and flowers.
The final moodboard had an ensemble of the sample creatives with a colour palette, font style, logo and images that would serve as a reference for the brand.
Photoshoot
We parallely prepared for the photoshoot of the brand by offering them shoot ideas. As the shoot was product centric, we imagined the flat lays of all the 14 products. We offered our insights to the brand’s photography team and got impressive flat lays where lights and shadows brought out the real beauty of the minimalistic packaging.
Our team got further involved when one of our account managers offered to hand-model for the shoot. This broadened the scope of the photoshoot and helped the photographers capture user-centric and application-based images of the products. Images with applications work very well for skincare and beauty brands. The end result gave us more options to work with as the color, texture and size of the product became more distinct with those pictures.
Social media
There’s a lot that goes into social media marketing, but primarily, it’s the design that matters the most. On social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, viewers prefer visuals over text. Thus, creating designs that communicate the brand’s message takes precedence.
Since Xyst was a new brand, profile visits and follower counts were the primary focus for the team. We, therefore, focused on maintaining their feed on Instagram. Our end goal was to create a uniformed 3-post grid that would make navigating content easy for any new visitor.
All Xyst social media copies contained the product in the middle of the post, fonts that matched the logo font, a background that suited the product, and the brand logo at the bottom right side. Apart from photoshoot pictures, we also used stock images and footage to make our creatives more diverse. The music we added to the stories and the reels was in sync with the flow of the clips in the videos. We stuck to soothing sounds that would create a sense of tranquility one often feels when near nature.
Amazon
Before reading product descriptions, potential buyers usually browse through product images on Amazon. Products that look visually appealing have a higher click-through rate. We thus designed creatives that struck a balance between visuals and text. For every product, we created copies for product intro, hero ingredients, direction to use, benefits and features. We also created a product video by compiling creatives of the product description with catchy background music.
Website
A consumer website should have a neat and stylish UI to keep visitors interested. We maintained uniformity in the website’s theme and used the pictures from the photoshoot for product banners. Right from header banners to shop banners, we played within the range of the color palette and used icons to make the content more digestible. Our designs made the website more lively, authentic, and user-friendly across all devices ranging from laptops to mobiles.
The Bottomline
After weeks of collaboration and multiple revisions, the end result that we presented to the clients was successful in winning their approval. It was a win-win situation for the brand and our team. We got to build the foundation for the creative personality of a premium brand and the clients found a reliable team of designers who will stick around till their dreams for commercial success come true.