Free The Birds rebrands medical skincare brand for daily-use cosmetics market

London-based creative agency Free The Birds worked with medical skincare brand Bepanthen to launch a new range of products for the daily management of dry skin.

While Bepanthen had recognised there was a chance to compete in the daily management skincare category, the brand felt clinical-oriented. This limited consumers’ perceptions of it to a medical treatment rather than a product they’d choose for their skincare regime, explains Sara Jones, partner and client services director at Free The Birds.

“Our challenge was to build on Bepanthen’s established positioning and develop the design for a new, everyday skincare product by balancing its trusted science and medical expertise with the familiar visual cues seen across the cosmetics category,” she says.

To achieve this, Free The Birds translated the science of Bepanthen’s mode-of-action into a new graphic depicting the skin’s surface and cells layered over a gradient in the brand’s core colours of blue and white. This graphic expression is used consistently both on and off-pack to communicate the product’s effectiveness to consumers in a way that aims to stand out from other competitors in the daily-use cosmetics space. 

The graphic is paired on-pack with a ‘B5 icon’ to signpost Bepanthen’s signature ingredient. The typography has been designed to facilitate clear and direct messaging of the product’s benefits in the brand's new empathetic and assuring tone of voice, aiming to give it more personality that moves it away from its clinical origins. 

The new logo lock-up seeks to express a sense of trust, heritage and expertise, with the inclusion of the blue gradient in the underline providing another nod to the healing process. 

“A secondary colour palette of bold orange, red, magenta and purple set against the brand’s blue and white helps solidify consumer perception of Bepanthen Derma as a daily skincare range and aids navigation across the different variants,” says Nick Vaus, creative director and partner at Free The Birds.