Beauty Bay’s makeover for digital-first strategy
With a rebellious proposition to ‘Break the Rules’ and an arresting visual identity that incorporates bright colours and bold imagery, Beauty Bay has cleverly decided to turn its focus on its biggest target audience of 16-25 year-olds, where the rebrand has already been met with immediate success.
Being one of the most successful online beauty shops in Europe, Beauty Bay has decided to highlight its success and ensure its longevity, with a brand makeover led by design agency MERó in partnership with the Beauty Bay in-house team and its head of creative George Burton. The rebrand includes a new logo, brand identity, proposition and digital strategy.
Andy Culbert, MERo’s founder, says, “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).”
To come up with an efficient and powerful identity for the brand, MERo held ‘Live the Brand’ workshops and market research that was not limited to the beauty industry but expanded to the whole of the fashion world.
The findings of the research, that showed the core audience of the brand is way younger than what the company thought, together with Beauty Bay’s core values and internal positioning as ‘ambitious and creative boundary pushers,’ resulted in a dynamic brand that has turned its focus into the digital world.
“We have created a brand with the flexibility to adapt to the fluidity of the beauty sector and the digital landscape”, says Culbert. “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.”
Taking into account the results of the market research, Beauty Bay and MERó had to rewrite the original brief collectively. The new brief disregarded any predetermined ideas the companies had, coming up with something fresh, new and entirely different. With the aim to push the limits of both themselves and the industry, the two companies agreed on a plan that was consumer-focused and had a clear vision of the brand’s future.
From the brief, four key words came up, which were put at the centre of the new brand identity: fast, pioneering, different and disruptive. The new brand was introduced in spring and has already been rolled out across all brand’s touchpoints.
“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.”
Andy says, “As a business heavily influenced by trends, where success is often determined by a fast response to what customers want to buy, a constant influx of ‘hot’ new products and fresh influencers, the brand is now flexible enough to respond to this.”
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