SKIN U Brand Visual Communication

SKIN UJul 01, 2024

Background

The goal of our latest project at SKIN U was to strengthen our identity through the Olive Young channel. Given the increasing importance communication platforms we aimed to enhance the brand’s identity and attractiveness. To achieve this, we developed a new visual that reflects the characteristics and needs of our key customers.

Brand history

SKIN U has established itself as a sincere and delicate body care brand, with soft beige as its primary communication color to reflect the brand’s gentle and refined image. To highlight the product’s most important benefit—its fragrance—we focused on visuals that emphasize key scent ingredients. Since the packaging shape and color remained consistent across the line, we implemented a strategy of assigning a unique communication color to each scent to better convey their individual characteristics.

This project aimed to align the brand’s visual communication with the preferences of Olive Young’s core customer base, while preserving SKIN U’s identity and product integrity. The goal was to explore an effective and efficient direction for visual storytelling within the channel.

Target Needs & Wants

SKIN U’s core customers, Generation Z, tend to prioritize the appearance of body care over concerns about the fundamental health of the skin. They also actively express their unique identities across various social media platforms. Based on in-depth research, we established the following direction for the brand’s visual communication to reflect the preferences and characteristics of this generation.

SKIN U is a body skincare brand that
reveals and enhances the skin’s
natural beauty.

Visual Concept

Prior to the visual communication revamp, SKIN U redefined its brand essence from “body care that leaves a lingering softness” to “Awakening Your Senses”. Alongside this shift, the brand persona evolved from a serious and feminine image to a more active and passionate character. With this repositioning, SKIN U was newly defined as a “body skincare brand that clearly awakens one’s natural charm.” While the previous visual communication focused heavily on fragrance, the new direction aims to highlight the vibrant energy of everyday body care, with an emphasis on its visible and experiential benefits. This vivid energy has been established as a new visual expression code for SKIN U—ensuring consistency across persona, product, benefit, and scent expression. The primary goal of SKIN U’s visual communication is to clearly convey the diverse benefits of each product while enhancing the brand’s appeal. As such, the visual concept was developed to showcase product benefits in a straightforward and unembellished manner—rooted in real-life usage contexts.

Brand Persona & Color

The renewed brand persona is defined as Confident, Honest, and Passionate. Our goal was to visually express a persona that reflects an authentic inner self and a confident allure that naturally emerges through the comfort of body skincare. For the brand’s communication color, we selected an orange-based hue that aligns with this new persona while maintaining continuity with the existing container color. This bold accent serves to clearly highlight the brand’s confident and charismatic identity. Additionally, we assigned individual accent colors to each fragrance—carefully chosen to complement the main orange tone while emphasizing the distinct character of each scent. These fragrance-specific hues were used as fragrance communication colors across all visual touchpoints.

Product & Benefit

To express the natural and comfortable experience of everyday body skincare, both the product and its contents were shown together to evoke a sense of dynamic energy. Products were placed organically within everyday spaces to create a warm and approachable mood. In terms of benefit expression, the product was photographed in a way that confidently highlights the healthy texture of real skin, reflecting actual usage. The visible benefits that emerge through continued use were intuitively captured, allowing viewers to directly connect with the product’s effects.

To express the vibrant energy of each fragrance, we created visuals that capture the reaction between key fragrance ingredients and natural elements, allowing the scent to be felt through imagery. Rather than simply arranging raw ingredients in a dynamic composition, we aimed to depict the process by which a scent is generated—visually expressing the moment of interaction between fragrance elements and nature.

Due to physical and time constraints during the shoot, three of the fragrance visuals were created using generative AI (Midjourney). The compositions were developed by generating initial ingredient arrangements and gradually evolving them into more refined images.