👋, I’m Kimberly. I’ve been creating obsession-worthy brands for the past fifteen years. And now, I’m giving away my secrets every week in this newsletter.
In this new ongoing “Build-A-Brand” series, I’ll be featuring behind-the-scene looks at how brands get built. To kick things off, here’s a very personal peek at the world’s most personalized skincare brand.
Get to Know Y’OUR Skincare
The founders of Y’OUR Skincare are two of the smartest, sweetest girls you’ll ever meet. Jenny is multi-company founder who had spent years in the beauty industry—talking directly to customers about their concerns and getting past bogus claims. And Hannah is an MIT data scientist, who has always been personally passionate about toxic ingredients.
When they discovered their shared frustration with finding the right skincare and mutual desire to help people feel their best, Y’OUR Skincare was born. Together, they created a unique algorithm that’s driven by powerful AI and human insights to fully assess your skin’s needs, then create a personalized regimen that changes with you.
Jenny and Hannah had built Y’OUR Skincare into a successful DTC business by investing their budget in product development, high quality ingredients, data-driven technology, and digital advertising.
But they knew that if they wanted to really skyrocket growth, they needed to invest in their brand and level up the creative to stand out in the highly competitive beauty market.
The Original Brand
When they launched the brand, Jenny and Hannah had kept the look and feel clean, minimal, and simple.
This was a smart choice for any brand just starting out with a concept like theirs—where they were bootstrapping and knew they needed to put the majority of their dollars into what was inside their jars.
The clean black-and-white packaging was easy to source and print. The photography focused on simple product soldiers and shadows. And the copy said very clearly what the product was and how it worked.
The Branding Sprint
Over the course of five weeks, Jenny and Hannah completed homework exercises
and met with me weekly to dive deep into their mission and values, get to know their customers better, explore visual and voice, and even try their hands at writing their own brand copy.
Each week’s learnings and alignments built on the next—and ah-ha’s emerged.
1. Competitive Ah-Ha’s
When Y’OUR Skincare first launched, the idea of personalized skincare tailored to your specific needs was a new one. But like all good ideas, it got replicated quickly.
The competition had grown fast and fierce. And some, like Proven, have gotten a lot of eyeballs—and airtime on Shark Tank.
We picked out Proven as the brand to put directly in our aim—and during our workshops, we broke down all the ways Y’OUR Skincare is better:
Our products are more effective.
We are more honest and transparent. Proven’s claims on data are pretty bogus, and the brand’s “unique” formulas claims don’t stand up to scrutiny.
We rely on both data and people to create our formulas. We realized data alone is not the best way to do things. We’re more than a machine.
We’re much more focused on natural ingredients.
Our price point is lower.
2. Customer Ah-Ha’s
Next, we mined the passionate Y’OUR Skincare customer base for information—sending out surveys and asking questions that would help inform how we approached building the new brand.
Here were some of our key learnings about the customer:
She’s a high and low shopper, just as likely to buy from H&M as Louis Vuitton. She spends more money where it matters most to her—if she sees that the quality is there, if she is convinced she will get the results she wants, or if the branding appeals to her aesthetic.
She follows people like Anna Kendrick, Jessica Alba, and Chrissy Tiegen (before her recent controversies).
She values positivity. She looks for the good and wants to see the bright side—especially in these turbulent times.
Honesty and transparency are important to her in her brands as well as relationships. She wants to understand her brands and know their founders.
She subscribes to a holistic view of beauty. Doing things that are healthy for her whole body matters to her.
3. Product Ah-Ha’s
Before our customers found Y’OUR Skincare, they had been testing out TONS of different products, especially when they were trying to solve for specific problems like acne. They would pile and layer the products on—often in disastrous ways.
But Y’OUR Skincare founders Jenny and Hannah understood that people’s skin isn’t meant to handle so much all at once.
And they knew that a lot of the ingredients in the products actually conflict with each other when they’re layered… doing more harm than good to people’s skin.
The prospective customers for Y’OUR Skincare were:
Feeling very overwhelmed by so many skincare options
Frustrated by having to “test and repeat” with multiple brands
Very likely have ‘battle scars” from using conflicting products
How the Ah-Ha’s Informed the Brand Strategy
1. We Could Be the MOST Personalized
Intelligence sometimes feels like a black box. But Y’OUR Skincare’s brand of intelligence is different than that of Proven and its competitors—because it is more human.
The process starts with a skincare quiz, similar to the competitive brands.
But then the Y’OUR Skincare team reaches out personally, continually customizing people’s routines:
Based on customers’ feedback on the products
Based on shifting environmental factors like the weather and the time of year
Based on accomplishing goals—they ask what you want to fix, target a problem, then move on to the next
2. We Could Be the MOST Personable
The celebrities our customer liked (Anna Kendrick, Jessica Alba, and Chrissy Tiegen) were all very human. They put their lives and personalities out there.
As a brand, we saw an opportunity to pick up on this. Whereas other “data driven” personalized brands are more cold and clinical, we could be human and warm—and provide calm in the chaos.
How the Ah-Ha’s Came to Life in the Brand Creative
What made Y’OUR Skincare so different was its unique blend of data-driven and human-centered insights.
In balancing these two often disparate concepts—the magic of the new brand was born.
Our Language
The first part of our new tagline came from the mouths of the real customers—many of whom expressed delight that they had finally found skincare that “just worked.”
Then, we put a stake in the ground as “The World’s Most Responsive Skincare System” — which spoke to how much more personalized we were in a unique way.
We showed off the magic of our data and human combination.
We put more emphasis on how very personal the brand is.
And we talked directly to taking out the guesswork.
Our Visuals
The Y’OUR Skincare team and I worked with the talented team Rare Eye, one of my absolute favorite Branding Sprint design partners, to create the most engaging look and feel for the rebrand.
Our key words for the visuals combined the scientific and human elements:
GROUNDED + HUMAN + RICH + VIBRANT
INFORMATIVE + SMART + INTENTIONAL
This resulted in a mood board with a warm, vibrant and inviting color palette inspired by the nature—paired with a more clinical choice of font.
Product photography precisely combined elements of nature and science in a bright and modern way, and model shots were relatable and friendly.
Our icons leaned more scientific—but were also relatable and an easy get.
Boxes also got refreshed with the new look and language.
Our Ads & Social
In ads and social posts, the brand shows a combination of products, people, and language that connects with their customers.
And the new hashtag #YourKindOfConfident inspired an ongoing series—where real customers share all the things that give them confidence.
Our Results
Rocking the boat is never easy. And making such massive updates to your brand all at once can feel frightening.
Every step of the way, Jenny and Hannah reached out to their most loyal customers through interviews, surveys, and A/B tests to gage their reactions to the big creative changes getting made.
The overwhelmingly positive feedback from their customers gave them complete peace of mind to move forward—and directly showed how our weekly process of building insights-on-insights during The Branding Sprint had resulted in a brand that 100% resonated with the audience it was built to attract.
That’s #OurKindofConfident branding!
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About Me
I help early stage founders create the kind of brands that get customers so obsessed, they’ll do your advertising for you.
Based on my experience founding my own consumer brand, I developed The Branding Sprint—a uniquely collaborative, streamlined, and agile approach to brand creation.
Click here to learn more about The Branding Sprint, or schedule a call with me.
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