Bloom Cosmetics

The problem

Bloom had six products, a loyal mailing list and no way of being recognised. Each product had been designed when it launched, by whoever was available, so the range read as six brands sharing a shelf. The founder’s own description of it was the brief: “people love it once they’ve tried it — nobody picks it up.”

The constraint that shaped everything: the range was about to double. Whatever we made had to absorb eight new products without anyone calling us back.

What we did

We started with the shelf, not the logo. Two weeks of looking at how the range sits next to what it competes with told us the category was uniformly soft — pale, rounded, apologetic. Bloom’s own product was the opposite: high concentrations, clinical formulation, results people noticed. The identity had been arguing against the product.

So the system leans the other way. A dark plinth for every product shot, one sweeping brush gesture in teal and coral to carry the warmth, and a typographic scale rigid enough that a new product is a colour decision rather than a design project.

• The mark — a wordmark cut from the same brush gesture, working from a signage board down to a sixteen-pixel favicon.
• The system — a colour per product family, fixed layout rules, and a photography direction anyone can brief.
• The hand-off — one page of rules, five templates, and every editable file.

What changed

The first print run went out two weeks after the final files, with no back and forth — the packaging templates did what they promised. Eight further products have since been added by their own team, without us in the room, which was the actual point of the exercise.