MIND & BEAUTY SKINCARE

Role: Lead Designer (worked with software engineers and designers from the Arketa Team)

Time in role: ~ 3 months

Skills: 

• User research
• User persona
• Customer journey mapping
• Brand strategy
• Brand design
• Logo development
• UI/UX design
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• Website Development

STORY

Mind & Beauty is a skincare company built by Alla Kvaterman, who is a licensed aesthetician with 50+ years of experience, that offers a personalized approach to skincare, commitment to sustainability, and ethical production practices of luxurious and effective products.

At Mind & Beauty, all products are made with ingredients that you can pronounce and are intentionally combined to transform your skin. Using small batch production, they ensure each product is produced to the highest standard. Mind & Beauty believes understanding your skin and how their products work is an important part of achieving healthy and beautiful skin.

Currently, word of mouth via a strong, loyal customer base is the main method of brand awareness.

CHALLENGE

Alla Kvaterman emigrated from Russia in the 1980s, established herself as an expert esthetician, and built her own line of skincare products [Mind & Beauty] using simple, natural ingredients for beautiful and healthy skin. Despite her 50+ years of experience and dedicated client base across the country, Alla was packaging her highly-effective skincare products in clear jars with black & white stickers for product labeling. As Alla’s family became more involved in the business and looked to scale operations of the skincare products, there was a clear need to curate the brand identity and establish a digital presence for brand expansion.

So, we started from scratch by truly understanding Alla’s unique story and her approach to achieving healthy, glowing skin. This was a complicated process given the majority of information was stored in Alla’s brain and relied on her direct communications with customers for ordering new product. The beginning was mostly excavating, absorbing, and documenting. However, the key takeaway was Alla’s business was thriving without a logo, color palette, or even website – a testament to the immense value and trust that customers place in these products and more importantly Alla. I quickly realized this trust and loyalty needed to be reflected in the Mind & Beauty vision.

SOLUTION

It was evident that the brand identity needed to elevate the qualities that made “Mind & Beauty” differentiated and successful with a unified, modern and consistent visual design.

The first step was refining Mind & Beauty’s value prop and vision [Hand-crafted, natural, and luxurious skincare products that exfoliate, nourish, and brighten skin].

To reflect the quality of the ingredients and product, we then built a color palette associated with liveliness, freshness, and luxury. This palette influenced the logo, packaging, and website design. The result was a strong, cohesive identity across digital and various physical assets.

Another component of this project was replacing the time-intensive, manual process into a robust, digital order & fulfillment process that would support increased demand. We built the website on Shopify to leverage the E2E order management system! Mind & Beauty now has a complete brand identity that measures up to the quality of its products.