Direction for a beauty brand that wanted out of beauty's visual rut

Gloss has been a DTC beauty brand for six years. They had a perfectly competent in-house team of three — a designer, a copywriter, and a producer — and their visual output looked exactly like every other DTC beauty brand of the past five years. They knew it. We knew it. The brief was: stop that, in six weeks, without firing anyone.

The brief

Six weeks of embedded creative direction. We audit current output (campaigns, social, packaging, marketing site, email), identify the systemic issues (which were not the team’s fault), write a direction principles document, and build templated systems the team can run with after we leave.

A quarterly review retainer is on the table for after.

Approach

Week 1 was an audit. Every piece of design from the past 12 months, sorted into “yes that’s the brand” and “no that’s the category.” About 80% landed in “the category.” Not the team’s fault — the brief on every project had been “look like a beauty brand,” and they’d nailed it.

Weeks 2-4 were the direction principles. Four of them, each with concrete examples of yes/no, each with a rubric the team could apply to their own work without us. The big one was: “the work should look like ours, not like an aspirational reference. If we can name the reference, we don’t ship it.”

Weeks 5-6 were templates. Twelve campaign templates, six social templates, a packaging system, and an email system. All in Figma, all with the new direction principles applied, all annotated with “what to vary, what to keep.”

The outcome

The head of brand has a one-line summary: “We ship in half the time and I don’t have to redirect anyone.” That’s the bar.

We’re now on a quarterly retainer — 8 hours per quarter, two of which are a critique session, six of which are async review of in-flight work. The team has shipped two campaigns in the new system, both of which would have been unrecognizable as Gloss work twelve months ago.