Europe’s largest independent online beauty retailer Beauty Bay has had a makeover, centred around a new powerful proposition of ‘Break The Rules’. And through the process they have thrown out the cosmetic marketing rulebook to develop a creative attitude that matches their brave challenger brand position.
The brand’s striking new identity has now been rolled out across all of its consumer touchpoints – from website to social media channels – and is already proving a huge hit with its digitally empowered target audience of 16-25 year olds.
The new logo, brand identity, proposition and digital strategy has been created by digital-first design agency MERó in partnership with the Beauty Bay in-house team and its head of creative George Burton.
“Beauty Bay was born in 1999 – the same year as many of its current core customers. But things were very different then. The entire world wasn’t digital! Beauty Bay originated as an online business selling fragrances – and the brand reflected this. Over the years, the business and the brand evolved but to truly resonate with its core audience who live their lives digitally it needed an overhaul.”
– Andy Culbert, MERo’s founder who led the agency’s work
The starting point was to throw away any preconceived ideas of Beauty Bay’s audience and to create a definitive view of the actual target audience’s current online behaviours, influences and expectations – as they are today (with one eye also on what they might be in the coming years).
This involved ‘Live the Brand Workshops’, social listening and lots of market research – not just within the cosmetics sector but in the main fast-fashion world. The insight was mixed in with Beauty Bay’s own internal culture – already defined as ‘ambitious and creative boundary pushers’. The process also heavily involved buy in from all areas of the organisation to not only manage the development of a brave new look and feel, but to engender the necessary shift to a digital-first culture.
The research revealed that who the brand had historically identified as its core audience was actually younger than the business thought. The customer journey was also explored in much more detail, and core influences on their purchasing decisions.
The original brief became obsolete (which meant Beauty Bay and MERó working in partnership to rewrite the brief) and from this in-depth insight came the decision to throw out any preconceived ideas of what a beauty brand should be, pushing boundaries within the sector, yet with a firm focus on the consumer. A unifying yet flexible vision for the future became the new brief.
Underlying keywords running through the development process included: Beauty Bay is Fast. Pioneering. Different. Disruptive and a multitude of creative avenues were explored. Through a variety of testing processes the successful route – a brave, fearless brand identity that challenges conventions and aims to redefine the idea of what beauty is – was rolled out across Beauty Bay’s consumer touchpoints using Agile methodologies. The new brand was first unveiled in Spring and now appears across the majority of forms and spaces of the business.
“We have created a brand with the flexibility to adapt to the fluidity of the beauty sector and the digital landscape. We achieved this by taking a completely digital-first approach, designing for how Beauty Bay customers are engaging with them – from Instagram and YouTube to Pinterest and Twitter. It offers a mix of fixed and flexible brand design to mirror today’s constantly changing world and allow them to react to seasonal trends and palettes. It has delivered a re-brand has future-proofed the business.”
– Andy Culbert, MERo’s founder who led the agency’s work
Beauty Bay needed a strong identity to stand out against the many brands it stocks. It now has a consistent look and language in every channel, and from the smallest spaces to the largest. The website then continues the journey – to make purchasing as easy and enjoyable as possible. Even the choice of typeface was selected with a digital-first approach and continued testing throughout the development process showed how effective even the smallest of design elements were going to be as part of the user experience.
Image: Beauty Bay
One Response
“Beauty Bay is Fast. Pioneering. Different. Disruptive”
Yawn. so much for “break the rules”
more like “jump on the corporate jargon bandwagon”
sure this younger audience they’re targeting will love that.
“….and aims to redefine the idea of what beauty is”
No they don’t. That’s just nonsense. They sell make-up.
whole thing sounds like an ebay CS email, tons of fluff words, very little content, no meaning whatsoever.