Can Design Be the Flex It Once Was in Beauty?

For makeup brand Merit, creative direction isn’t a luxury but a must-have.

Case in point: a recent campaign for the launch of its tinted sunscreen, Uniform, was inspired by dry cleaning, rather than the beach or vacation days: collateral included adverts featuring clothes hung up in dry cleaning bags and hand-written collection receipts.

“The design intention needs to come through in every touchpoint,” said Aila Morin, chief marketing officer at Merit, noting that the line uses references from the world of interiors, jewellery and art in its visual identity and packaging. “Something as small as an earring or a collar in a beauty advert becomes incredibly important, because it lets the viewer know who the customer is, and how she spends her day.”

Other design hallmarks for Merit include its $30 Bronze Balm, which is modelled after the men’s deodorant, Speed Stick, and a limited edition compact mirror in partnership with a jewellery maker, Completedworks. It often uses materials like wood and glass in packaging and in-store displays.

Stroll through any major beauty retailer, and a range of brightly coloured packaging, splashy visuals and a smattering of celebrity faces are sure to greet you. But those same hallmarks can offer a sense of sameness.

Merit is a part of a class of prestige beauty lines, however, that are bucking that trend and investing more into its packaging and design to differentiate themselves from the crowd. Isamaya Beauty, the line created by the makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench uses industrial and surgical-inspired elements; the niche perfume line D’Annam has made use of food imagery to enhance its egg-shaped bottles. Upstart New York-based cosmetics brand Sarah Creal Beauty has invested in custom–tooled packaging for all its products, including a sun-shaped orange ergonomic squeezable bottle for its Brilliant Repair Shield sunscreen.

A swing away from stock packaging and componentry that has allowed mass and masstige brands like E.l.f., Tower 28 and Odele to cut through on price, lines like Sarah Creal are willing to spend on custom-tooled packaging, bold-faced creative directors and specialist agencies, usually increasing a product’s retail price.

“I was looking at the competition, and I felt it was blanding, not branding,” said Creal, the line’s founder. “You can take a logo off of one thing, put it on another… there’s no differentiation.”

Still, such efforts are costly, complex and need to be carefully calibrated. What’s chic and innovative in one city or country could be confusing in another, and custom packaging can add intricacy to supply chains — Creal said she had been warned the expense attached would be nontrivial.

“I am paying more [than some of her competitors]... but you have one chance to launch a brand, and you better show people who you are,” she said.

A New Luxury

Part of the push to differentiate premium-priced products is changing perceptions of luxury. Like in fashion, many beauty brands undertook significant price increases in the years following the global recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. But those increased prices were met with increased consumer expectations.

Kapono Chung, a partner at branding and design agency Combo, said customers used to be interested in fashion house names like Chanel or Dior so they could own a piece of what they perceived as the most elevated brands. Designer beauty brands would often reinforce their high price point with add-ons like scents, layers of tissue paper in packaging, or make products a larger or heavier format to signal quality.

But beauty status symbols are changing — whereas before a compact or lipstick emblazoned with a fashion house logo served as a signifier of wealth and taste, viral products from indie or niche names like the lip-gloss-holding phone case from Rhode are increasingly signifiers of access and nous.

But even with shorter trend cycles, brands chasing longevity are refocusing on a more unique sense of luxury in the hopes of creating a more indelible impact on shoppers. “I wanted there to be a surprise every time we launched a product,” said Creal. “I think people are overwhelmed, and so having the packaging be unusual but also telegraph what the product does helps it stand out,” she said.

Unconventional Inspiration

With so many new brands coming to market, and so many trying to replicate their peers’ successes, some degree of saminess is to be expected. The success of a smash-hit product like Summer Fridays Lip Butter Balm or Dior Lip Glow Oil can be also indicative of a trend and create a halo effect for other contemporaries.

Some designers and marketers say it’s because as brands rush to get products to market so as not to miss ephemeral trend windows, many speedrun the creative execution process.

“If [a brand] is supposed to be highly accessible, that’s fine, but if it’s more premium and meant to be more distinctive, there has to be a certain amount of investment of foresight in the design. That’s the bit that some brands skip,” said Helen Steed, creative director of Los Angeles-based design studio Steed + Friends, whose clients include Rhode, Live Tinted and Supergoop. Previously she was creative director at Glossier.

At Merit, Morin said the brand tries to source as many of its references from offline sources as possible, to avoid unintended overlap with competitors.

“Algorithms serve artistic teams the exact same things, so we’re all consuming the same content,” said Morin, adding that she encourages her team to visit museums, galleries and look at archival books and magazines. “Otherwise, we all end up looking the same,” she said.

However, while discovering exactly what motifs and styles resonate with a customer group is difficult, Chung said he advised brands to decide early on what their visual identity would be, rather than trying to take a test-and-learn approach. “It’s better to build a base of fans first and get your positioning right,” he said.

Steed said there are scrappy ways to achieve a more differentiated look. She said suppliers can be open to mixing and matching to find more cost-efficient ways to personalise packaging. “You can be inventive…you can be scrappy and still do it very well and do it very thoughtfully,” she said.

Ultimately, brands must design what they want their packaging and visual identity to signal. For Merit, Morin said there’s a desire to create a feeling of longevity, hence its use of 1990s imagery and collaborations with jewellery brands.

“We want to make each product unique, but classic enough that someone will use it for the next ten years,” she said.

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