Advanced anti-aging skincare

Growing Sanex's skincare range

Sanex wanted to understand the needs of age defying consumers, and design a disruptive and holistic skincare range that enhances their lives. This was also a leading project that excited the wider agency about the pay-off of experimental inventing projects, led by designers.

Learning not proving. Using experimentation and in-market testing to ensure we learnt as fast as possible and maintained momentum, using learning cycles to prove or disprove the assumptions and design I made, and telling us how best to iterate and move forward as a result.

With the goal of launching this new range in 2020, we had to identify ideas with potential quickly and explore how they could show up in the world as a fully functioning product range that supported Sanex's product portfolio.

Identifying four design territories

Since the new range needed to support Sanex's current product portfolio, I began the project with some extension competitor analysis. Looking at where both; mass market and premium products, sit on the our design matrix. It is interesting to see what cues were showing up as base for our direction.

The brand and products at the time had been designed to sit in the functional/manufactured space because of their clean, pure and lab like aesthetic. 

Design principles

With scope to develop the Sanex brand in a respectful way, I worked closely with the client to land the design principles to work within.

Warmth - Currently, the Advanced range doesn’t communicate a pleasurable experience. There is also room to make the product feel more approachable, by softening the harsh feel.

Dynamic - Existing brand elements feel static, and we want to communicate the active ingredients that make the product efficacious by penetrating deeply into the skin to regenerate older skin.

Expertise - The Advanced range was a the most expert range Sanex had, the design to represent this. This could be achieved through the use of mathematical symbols use in formulas they were using.

You can see in the final designs across the packaging and materials two principles can be seen heavily. Warmth was one that is lacking in the final design if compared to the other two principles.

Developing the final range

With the end of the project in sight, the last major milestone was to design a pop-up brand experience to launch the new skincare range in Paris. Designing posters, leaflets, and iPad user experience and art working production-ready labels for real packaging prototypes.

The pop-up store was a great success, with all the designed elements being approved and used over the period it was open. However, the product range was never produced or manufactured for the public.