● BOOKING NEW PROJECTS
INDEPENDENT DESIGN & BUILD STUDIO
BHOPAL → WORLDWIDE
A US self-tan startup arrived with a finished formulation and nothing around it. No mark, no packaging, no store, no words. Here is what the fifteen days actually looked like.
Self-tan is a crowded aisle and it looks it. Almost every brand reaches for the same bronze gradient, the same beach, the same promise. Glo Hard needed to look expensive enough to sit beside the incumbents on a bathroom shelf, and unlike them enough to be worth picking up.
That gave the build one constraint everything else answered to: warm and premium, but never generic beauty beige.
The mark is a script, drawn heavy enough to hold at the size of a product listing and loose enough to read as beauty rather than supplement. It is gold because the product's entire promise is what light does to skin — the mark makes the claim before a single word does.
With a fifteen-day build there is no time for packaging and the store to drift apart and be reconciled later. The palette was locked on day five and everything downstream was built to it.
The three mousses had to read as one family from ten feet away and as three distinct products in the hand. Everything on the 200 ml bottle stays fixed — mark, layout, the PETA and vegan badges along the base — except the band. Its depth is the strength, so a customer reaching for a repeat purchase never has to read the label.
Builds over repeated use. The palest band, closest to the cream of the bottle.
The middle of the range and the default first purchase.
Deepest band, closest to charcoal, for customers who already know their shade.
Shopify, structured around the only choice a first-time visitor actually makes: which strength. Three mousses at $19.99 and the application mitt at $7.99, with the collection page doing the ranging so product pages could stay short.
Photography, listing copy and layout were all made to the same palette, which is why nothing on the page looks bought in.
Product descriptions, the benefit set, shipping and returns, the About page, the microcopy on the cart. Beauty is the category where competitor copy gets recycled hardest, and a formulation claim inherited from someone else's label is a liability as much as a cliché.
Writing it alongside the packaging meant the bottle and the product page make the same promise in the same voice — which is difficult to arrange when the words are ordered separately after the design is done.
Golden hour, real skin, the bottle held rather than staged. The point of writing the direction down was that it outlives the launch: every shot the client takes next lands in the same place without anyone needing to re-explain the brand.
A brand that did not exist two weeks earlier went live ready to sell, with identity, guidelines, packaging, film, store and copy all made by the same person. Nothing was handed between freelancers, so nothing had to be made to match after the fact.
